CloudFlare made a big bang at Techcrunch Disrupt this past week. I had an opportunity to chat with the team on-site. Says their founder, "you can lose up to 2% of visitors of their site if they have to wait to get to your site. A second concern is that you have to ensure your site is secure – in other words, you need tools to keep anything that can harm your own site or visitors of your site at bay."
He adds, “we brought a solution and tools to consumers and small businesses that were previously reserved only for giants with large budgets. We’ve made it so easy to deploy, that you can get it set up in 5 minutes, i.e., a change to your name server settings and you can get all the benefits of CloudFare."
Their average performance boost is 30% and it keeps spam and bots away. They say that they can also help a site run faster by 26%. CloudFlare has had over 6 million unique visitors in the first four months of their private beta.
Since launching at Techcrunch Disrupt, they’re seeing 2.1 new websites sign up a minute, which means at current sign up rates, that they expect, 13,700,000 in October, 5 times traffic increase in just a day. He adds, “we have shown that we can cover our costs and this is something that speaks to a large audience.” Below is community evangelist Damon Billian on more benefits and how CloudFlare works.
Julian Treasure has an interesting talk to get to sound health in 8 steps. He says our increasingly noisy world is gnawing away at our mental health — even costing lives. His 8-step plan includes advice on softening sonic assault (starting with those cheap earbuds) to restore our relationship with sound.
He notes that women listen expansively compared to men and jokes that if men could take one thing away from his talk, it’s to listen more expansively and you’ll transform your relationship.
Noise is killing 200,000 people a year in Europe. He says that there’s a price we pay from music compression; we have to work harder to get the sound and using bad headsets are part of the problem or using them incorrectly. 61% of students have hearing issues related to poor headphones. Quality ‘listening’ means you don’t have to turn the music up so loud.
The last two things I took from his talk and my favorites: Silence is beautiful. He says the Elizabethans described language as Decorated Silence – how great is that? And secondly: Sound Design is the Future. Julian encourages us to design everything around us with sound in mind.
The Acumen Fellowship is a one year program that immerses Fellows in world-class leadership training, field work with social enterprises on the front lines, and a community of change makers and thought leaders.
For 2011, they received over 550 applications from over 65 different countries for 10 positions. While each Fellow comes from a diverse background and brings a unique skill set to the Fellowship, below are some key indicators of a successful Fellow:
* Proven track record of leadership and management responsibilities
* Experience working in emerging markets
* Unrelenting perseverance, personal integrity, and critical thinking skills
* Strong passion and commitment
* 3-7 years of work experience
* Graduate degree preferred
Below is a synopsis of some of the fellows and what they have done and where.
One forgets just how often an email is fired to the wrong person, the wrong team or from the wrong address. One also forgets important things like webcams which remain on, conference call lines that don’t quite hang up entirely, Outlook auto-completes and speaker phones that are not on mute when you think they are. A bunch of industry people were interviewed for the video including myself. It’s quite amusing.
Qwiki wins this year’s Techcrunch Disrupt Award. There’s a great shot of the team on-stage at announcement time; have you ever seen so much joy in tech? Jumping and screaming, they accept the $50,000 check in front of a large audience of technology entrepreneurs, press, venture capitalists and other presenting companies.
They climbed above the rest by offering a new way to consume information: text, audio, video, and images melded together in a seamless interface, generating a dynamic movie of whatever you search for.
Bubbalon is demonstrating their latest at the TechCrunch Disrupt Event this week in San Francisco. Touted as a location-based sentiment sharing application, Bubbalon allows people to express their opinions about people, places or things. Their sentiment can be distributed out to their own communities and the world at large, directly from their PC or through a mobile device.
Using Bubbalon, not only can you share and vote on your experiences in-the-moment as they happen, but you can also get trusted opinions from your friends and experts on a wide range of places, people, interests and things, including restaurants, hotels or a politician.
Users can share online, from their mobile device through their browser, or via Foursquare. The Foursquare connection allows users to add sentiment value to places at the same time they’re checking into a venue, making that check-in more valuable to friends in your Foursquare community as well as to the venue owner you’re rating.
You can sign up for free at www.bubbalon.com and follow them on Twitter to learn what they’re up, including trends on how people rate specific things, including products. Below is a short video clip that simplifies “why do this” and where it adds value, on top of being fun and incredibly addictive.
Mike Arrington talks to super angels and super VCs at today’s TechCrunch Disrupt in San Francisco. On the panel included: Ron Conway (SV Angel), Chris Sacca (Lowercase Capital), Dave McClure (500 Startups), Roelof Botha (Sequoia), Chris Dixon (Founder Collective), Mark Suster (GRP Partners) and Israel-based Yossi Vardi, who provided an international perspective.
Drum roll, and the winners from more than 70 companies are: Veebeam, VoiceBase, Particle Code, Delphix, and Alpha company winner Ether 2. Dynamics (CEO Jeff Mullen pictured with check) won the $1 million People’s Choice DEMO prize. Some great shots of the event can be found here.
DEMOfall Late Night…..a little music, a little social media, a little Pearltrees, a little Ice Cream Man, a little round of martinis and a little networking.
Microsoft’s GM, Developer and Platform Evangelism Matt Thompson was on the DEMO stage talking about their vision for cloud computing and beyond. He refers to ‘mobile’ as the perfect platform for cloud and for them. (i.e, Microsoft.
Says Thompson, “we are embracing the cloud. Cloud is the BIG bet for the company. Everyone from our CEO down has embraced this. Cloud IS a PLATFORM, we’re all in on the cloud,” he goes on. Okay, got it Matt. CLOUD IS IMPORTANT!!!
Matt Marshall asks, “if you listen to what Google says, ‘private clouds don’t matter. Can you talk about that?” Thompson responds, “there are a couple of cloud conferences in the Valley, some say everything is going public. If you talk to anyone in the defense industry, public really isn’t a solution there. The other key one is healthcare. Microsoft has embraced this model where there will be private data centers just as there will be public clouds.”
He continues, “there’s this notion where you will be able to run our application across public and private, a hybrid solution. The world that we see is where both exist; clearly there will be private clouds (and you’re going to see thousands of them) and you’re going to see very large public clouds too, some of which will be run by corporations and some will be run by governments. We see the linking of these two pieces is what we can offer that is unique.” Video of his talk below:
