Recently in Tech Policy Summit Category
Posted to Capitol Valley Media | Tech Policy Summit
Back safely ensconced in the Eastern Time Zone, I can finally say a few things and "exhale."
- Do not Red-Eye if you can help it. If you must, follow Andrew Noyes' lead and take VirginAmerica. I know I'm going to check it out.
- Conferences are much more fun to cover when they are focused. I enjoyed the networking and atmosphere at SXSW in general, but in terms of things to write about, the guys at Tech Policy Summit put on a great event. Pretty much every issue that I care about and I try to bring to you, the loyal and stalwart readers, was touched on in some way. I can't wait for next year's. Not only is it in the Bay Area and closer to many of the players, it means I can crash on Alex's floor.
- So far the great wireless experiment has been great. All those photos you can see on Flickr have been uploaded without the use of a single cable, in almost real time. The Eye-Fi isn't without problems, but my set-up has allowed for some cool things. I'll do a better write-up on it this weekend since several people asked about it.
A few shout-outs. Natalie Fonseca and Marc Licciardi at TPS arranged my getting there and helped me out while I was covering their great event, along with Cathy Rought from Dittus Communications, who was invaluable in putting me in touch with some great people to talk to. Mozelle Thompson and Alec Ross were great sports about getting back-to-back questioning in panels, and Jon Taplin was his usual fantastic self.
Special thanks go to my interview subjects, including Jim Williams, Brian Knapp, Prith Banerjee and Gary Fazzino, as well as the incredible Craig Newmark.
Andrew Noyes gave some good placement to our photo coverage at Tech Daily Dose, and Adam Theirer was so impressed with our coverage he didn't even bother to do any blogging himself. Plus, he had possibly the best, brightest green sport jacket I've ever seen yesterday. We have proof!
If I missed you, yell at me appropriately. Back to work.
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Talking with Declan McCullough, Ashwin Navin scored a few cool points.



I arrived late to this talk because I was finishing out an interview, but as I walked in Mr. Lynch is noting (correctly) that Verizon's mission is to be "at the forefront of customer demand." This, he says, is the reason behind Verizon's Open Access initiative.

Bonus Round! Craig was nice enough to talk to me for a few minutes, and here he is...


Coverage of the Future of Wide-Area Public Broadband panle and CongressDaily's Andrew Noyes interviewing Congressman Howard Berman (D-CA). Also, the "Best of" of Andrew' sphoto coverage of the Tech Policy Summit, Day One.
As is the norm with our podcasts we had a wonderful road map of where we were going to take it and then went wildly off course. The most notable and, I think, interesting topic that we talked about was the ability of blogs to target niche audiences as opposed to old media outlets like newspapers and magazines who need to appeal to a lowest common denominator. I mean, when's the last time you picked up a magazine or newspaper and read every article? While most blogs won't attain the sheer number of visitors that a major media outlet site might they tend to generate a higher quality of visitor. They type of visitor who visits the site multiple times per day. The type of visitor who has to has to has to take in all of your content. That also got us talking about how good content is the key.
Another topic we talked about was focus. How, for instance, ads on web sites aren't really as targeted as they'd have you believe. Sure, an ad on Facebook will shove products that you should like because your friends bought them, but if you were really interested in that product you'd seek it out on your own. How often have you seen an ad on a website and actually bought a product that, until seeing that ad, you weren't really aware of. Another focus issue is the direction your site or company takes. Look at Twitter vs Facebook - Twitter does one thing and does it really, really well. Facebook seems to have something new going on every 10 minutes, most of which have an update or a fix coming out the next day.
Tonight's podcast is here.
For all of the Capitol Valley podcasts check out blogtalkradio.com/Capitol-Valley.

Host Steve Wildstrom is introducing them, and I'm going to take pictures, but I will liveblog as I can. Here we go:


This is a straight-up keynote speech. He's going to talk about what the threats to both IP and Innovation are.