Save the date and let the frenzy begin. Our 4th annual summer meet-up at August Capital will be Friday, July 10 this year.
We can’t thank David Hornik and his partners at August Capital enough for having us back, yet again. Each year the party gets a little more lively, the deck gets a little more crowded, and yet David welcomes us back with unflinching enthusiasm. Thank you. We promise not to trash the place too much.
As our meet-ups have grown in popularity, we’ve expanded the format from simple mixers to timely editorial roundtables. Last year, the topic was the Mobile Web Wars just then brewing. This year, we’re taking on the real-time stream and dedicating a full day to exploring all the rivulets coming together to make it the trending topic on the Web.
What do we mean by the real-time stream? It’s popping up nearly everywhere you care to look. Information on the Web is coming to us increasingly in streams. Twitter kicked off the shift, but everyone from Facebook to FriendFeed to Google to AOL is quickly adopting the information stream as a dominant mechanism for distributing data to people exactly when it is produced. As I’ve written before: “The stream is winding its way throughout the Web and organizing it by nowness.” RSS is dead. Long live the stream.
A whole new set of products is cropping up around these information streams to help consumers filter them and manage their flow, such as Tweetmeme and Seesmic Desktop. It seems as though a new one is launching every day. And the real-time stream is beginning to impact other parts of the Web as well, such as search and corporate reputations.
It is time to figure out where all of this is going, to bring together the smartest people we can find and map out the different paths the stream can take. We’ve just begun to organize this mini-conference, but already the reaction has been overwhelmingly positive. We are calling it a CrunchUp because it will be highly participatory and real-time in every sense of the word. TechCrunchIT editor Steve Gillmor and I will be hosting the event.
Speakers and panelists from Facebook, FriendFeed, Microsoft, Salesforce, Seesmic, and Tweetmeme will be there, and we are just getting started (stay tuned for full lineup). Companies pushing real-time streams to new levels will also be demoing their products, some which haven’t yet launched publicly, such as Andrew Baron’s Magma. (If you have an eye-opening demo or want to launch a product at the CrunchUp, please contact our conference producer, Asad Akbar).
Additional participants will be announced in the coming weeks. If you’ve got some real-time hotness to share, contact us. You will be able to find the speakers, agenda and details as they evolve here.
The CrunchUp will take place on Friday, July 10, between 9:00 am and 4:30 PM at the historic Fox Theatre in Redwood City. Tickets are $295 and are on sale now through Eventbrite. Admission to the August Capital party is automatically included in your CrunchUp ticket (with expedited check-in to August Capital.)
The CrunchUp also gives us a great sponsorship platform for start-ups and brands to reach both conference and networking attendees. Please contact Jeanne Logozzo or Heather Harde to learn more about sponsorship packages and custom opportunities. Additional details here.
We’ll plan to release the first batch of August Capital meet-up tickets the week of June 15, but we’d really love to spend the whole day with you real time. Hope you can join us.
Photo credit: Flickr/Justin Lowery)
Real-time is exciting, but our existing web protocols weren’t designed with real-time in mind. If you’re interested in this stuff, you might enjoy a post I wrote about the protocols that will power the real-time web:
http://www.onli...-real-time-web/
I hope the outcome of this meet-up gives us something fresh for the next few years.
Real-time is reshaping the web and your point about protocols is spot on. Much starting to happen on standards and are there are a host of technologies/approaches to draw from. It’s a universal problem that’s only going to grow. In that, I see an early opportunity to come together and do a real-time version of what Visa did when they had similar problems in the credit-card industry.
Posted some more thoughts here for those that are interested. http://igniter.com/post428. Might be a good convo to kick up at this CrunchUp.
I think that real-time stream analytic is a hot topic at the moment.
Erik, why don’t you invite Prof. John Kleinberg to give a talk on data-stream analytics?
I’d love to go if it was much cheaper and on the east coast. Any good conferences/meetups that fit that criteria?
thanks for inviting me to speak! see you there
I enjoyed the party last year. Maybe I can make it to come down again.
Oh how I would love to be there (and at the TechCrunch 50) but those ticket prices, for a college student working a part time internship are high.
Maybe you could consider doing a live stream of the event or something so us poor folks can observe with envy?
i agree with this statement….it should not be about the money….
lance
That look logo looks great. I wonder who designed it? :p
I will be in London for this event, but we’re trying to get some sort of link going between the two cities. Real time, world wide. What a concept!
I would go just to finally try and understand the big hype around this real-time stream. So far, my experience with these streams is too much information items with too little information in each.
Awesome… ill try getting there! And nice logo there… =D
Real time streams flow out real excitement. With a little bit more of semantics, it brings web intelligence to the public. I’ve been studying twitter steam with my real time semantic analysis system at http://web2express.org. It identifies new topics from realtime tweets. These topics tells a lot about what’s going on around us at any given moment. Sometimes, it picks up breaking news before traditional news media. Love to see that techcrunch conference will focus on this emerging trend.
aj chen
Have you guys finished deciding which companies will be launching things on the day of the CrunchUp?
I think now fresh idea – it google wave.
real time searching or search engine and based on that communication with unknown i.e. twitter is patented by someone else.