Were you there?

Thanks to Fred's tweet this AM, I spent some time over at Songkick today.

At Songkick, you can create your own personal "gigography", import your last.fm profile, add concerts, update information / provide commentary about concerts, set a tracker to see when artists you like are coming to your area

- basically it's a way to broadcast your concert going history by claiming "I was there"

My own personal concert-going history is now being memorialized at my Songkick profile page. Yes, Boston, Poco and the Doobie Brothers was the first show I ever went to.

Not sure how useful it will be going forward, but it is interesting to see what concerts they already have in their database. Even shows at Lupo's in Providence I had long forgotten about were in there. Interesting.

According to Dogster....

and their "what dog breed are you?" quiz, I'm a Golden Retriever!

Are we ready for vertical social networks?

I've been doing some thinking about vertical social networks (VSNs).

Generally, VSNs are the cable channels of the social networks. Rather than going wide (facebook, linkedin) across people's interests, they go narrow and deep. In retrospect, we created one such network with Upto11.net back in 2004 (though we certainly didn't think of it that way then).

You could make an argument that P2P networks are inherently a VSN (around music discovery) and a rather unique demonstration that VSNs can succeed even when everyone chooses to remain anonymous.

The questions I'm focused on at the moment are:

1. What are the drivers that cause a person to take the leap and join a VSN?
2. What's base level of value/utility have to be in place to cause someone to join one?
3. How many people already have to be there to make it worth becoming a member?
4. Do people need their "real" friends to be there already to join (especially later adopters)? or are VSNs the means for folks to make new friends who share a particular interest?
5. What's the right blend of "passer by" features vs. "member" features to encourage adoption in order to get the network effect going?

More later, off to check out dogster.

Dog is our co-pilot

The number of redheads in our house grew by one this week (from 5-6 for those keeping track)

Welcome Simon! He's a 28 month old Golden Retriever and he's quickly established himself as the "go to" guy whenever anyone comes home.

We got him from the Silicon Valley Animal Control Authority, an amazing facility that houses animals in rooms, rather than cages. We got a tip that Simon was available for adoption from our contact at the Northern California Golden Retriever Rescue organization. She had a hunch that Simon was the dog for us.

Boy was she right. Thanks Nancy!

Upto11 goes up to 19!

Swiss blooger Arjun Muralidharan mentions Upto11.net as one of 19 Great Music Recommendations sites. We're in there with great company like last.fm, Pandora, iTunes and Amazon.

Apparrently we are "amazing" and "brilliantly simple."

Thanks for the mention!.

Matchpoint's Public Debut: ad:tech NY

Matchpoint got its first public industry exposure in a BIG way at ad:tech in NY this week.

Over the two days of the expo, our team of 8 barely had time for a break as our booth was constantly a buzz with folks coming by to learn about Matchpoint. Our booth was in a prime traffic flow area - and, it didn't hurt that the guys across the way were giving out free beer each afternoon.

Here are some photos from the show

adtech

The folks that came by our booth represented a cross-section of the industry - advertisers small and larger, publishers representing a wide cross section of content, investment bankers, agencies both domestic and foreign, classic lead aggregators, potential technology partners, bloggers and yes, even a few competitors.

The response was overwhelmingly positive. What seemed to resonate most in general was the way Matchpoint protects a user's privacy. Everyone could relate to that benefit on a personal level. No more "run and hide" from unwanted communication.

I was pleasantly surprised by how many unsolicited, really positive comments I heard from the folks we spent time talking with:

"this is really unique"
"smart, very smart"
"I think your design is great. Nice and clean."
"you're right, this is different from what else is out there"
"the process is really easy to understand"
"are you the guys doing that matching game? that is a great idea."

We also met with a few folks from the industry press during the show (Larry Chase from Web Digest for Marketers, Sarah Novotny from adotas.com and Mike Shields from Mediaweek). The goal was to build awareness of Matchpoint by providing them with background info and to talk about where we feel we fit in and where we're seeking to deliver improvements over what is out there today. Hopefully we'll start to see some publicity in the coming weeks once the AOL/Quigo, Facebook frenzy dies down a bit.

Matchpoint launches

After months of hard work, we've recently launched the Matchpoint Ad Center!

Matchpoint enables business of all sizes to introduce their products and services to the exact prospects that are best for their business, just at the moment that those prospects are searching for the product or service that those businesses offer.

For consumers, Matchpoint represents an advance in speed and privacy control when searching for businesses vs. current methods that are out there today - like clicking on search listings and entering private information on several websites.

Check us out at Matchpoint.com

We are just beginning to get some press coverage. Here's an article on Lead Gen that ran in ClickZ today that mentions Matchpoint's relationship with Forbes.com.

Stay tuned...

Sonific

Here's a neat way to promote artists - embed the Sonific player on a web page you manage. The player uses Flash and the streaming is provided by Sonific. What can you stream? so far they have partnered with CD Baby so feature their catalogue of artists - they plan to add more labels/artists over time.

Check out Carlos Mena's tune using the Sonific player below.