What’s hot in Silicon Valley – Robert Scoble

A quick romp through some of the categories and companies that the Godfather of technology blogging sees as being particularly hot, disruptive, interesting, useful and trend setting today.

Social

  • Quora
  • Angry Birds

Photos & Photo sharing

  • Path
  • PicPlz
  • Instagram

SMS

  • GroupMe

Buying

  • Groupon
  • Shopkick – rewarding people for walking into a store

Funding – New ways of funding companies.

  • Kickstarter does crowd sourced funding
  • Square – iPhone attachment – could be the next PayPal

Rewards & Engagement

  • OneTrueFan – rewards for showing love to web sites.
  • Badgeville – Foursquare type system to reward people

Business Support

  • Adstruc – auction site for outdoor advertising
  • InDinero – real time financial dashboard for businesses

New Media Experiences

  • Flipboard – personalised social mazagines
  • PostPost – online newspaper based on your Facebook links
  • The History of Jazz – 3 people reinventing the book. iPad App
  • Datasift – Letting you screen streams of information * This is a UK based company run by Nick Halstead.

Travel Services

  • Hipmunk – Flight search engine listing flights in order of personal agony!

Event Services

  • Plancast
  • Lanyrd – tracks event sites around the world and adds speakers to it automatically

Services

  • Uber – cashless cab via twitter.

Curation Tools

  • Storify $ 2 million funding today
  • Curated.by
  • PearlTrees (Flash based currently so no Apple users but this is changing). * This is a Parisien company.

Last one – Prezi kicks Powerpoint’s butt.

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Key takeaway from Q&A, Silicon Valley as a name is a nonsense – it doesn’t do silicon (Intel’s fabs are not there anymore for example, and the valley does not contain all of the most interesting companies by a long chalk.

“Silicon Valley is a state of mind, not a place.”

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The Prezi presentation is here: https://liftconference.com/lift11/program/talk/robert-scoble-trends-and-projects-silicon-valley

4 responses to “What’s hot in Silicon Valley – Robert Scoble”

  1. DataSift says:

    Thank you for including http://datasift.net in your list of applications! We are currently in alpha and are taking on signups for more alpha testers at the moment.

    Also you’ll find a few DataSift Social Media Week Applications popping up next week! Keep an eye on our blog for more details: http://blog.datasift.com

  2. Mark Bakker says:

    Have you guys heard of Kashoo for Business Support? It’s worth a look. Thanks!

  3. Oscar says:

    …………………Search silicon.com…………………………. Silicon Valley Bank will offer finance to tech companies while Barclays will set up… …..Development Department EDD estimate the number of technology workers in Silicon Valley Santa Clara county at 175 100 as of July 2004.

  4. yawn.

    looks like Scoble scraped this list from Mashable? No TechCrunch.

    thought perhaps the godfather was capable of something new?

    Missed Categories:

    Gaming, gaming and uh gaming?

    Missed companies:

    About.me (AOL purchased before the end of their beta)

    Paper.li (just opened SFO offices)

    Shufflebrain

    Slideshare

    docstoc

    RockMelt

    to name a few…