SF New Tech Meetup for July

I was thrilled to see Guy Kawasaki speak and get him to sign an old copy of his first book "Rules for Revolutionaries" at the New Tech Meetup in San Francisco last week. Guy was touting his new website Truemors, which he apparently built just for fun. The theme of his spiel was how to build a website for $12,000. The rather tough audience was full of web 2.0 entrepreneurs from the Bay area. I’m not dissing the site as others might. I think Truemors could potentially contain highly valuable information, especially if certain among those rumors are true information involving publicly traded companies.

Guy did say something that was obvious yet insightful as I figure out just how to market enerwiki.com. That is, have a product that has a market of a few customers who will pay a ton of money for it, or have a product that everyone wants, and it doesn't matter the price - it can be free. I've tried to sell the in-between, and he's absolutely right.

Another takeaway from this event - Web 2.0 is all about distributing information in the smallest possible chunks. Gone are the days of complex apps that try to be everything to everyone that no one can use. For example, a very simple iPhone application that simply changed from a green plus sign to a red minus sign, depending on orientation, was very well received. The simplicity and utility made perfect sense to the crowd who were judging ideas in rapid fire.

Back on the topic of energy - I wasn't quite ready to talk about enerwiki at the meetup, but it did get me fired up to shift strategy slightly.

I also met Alex Ho of Generation exe, a green blog, check it out!