The Progress Bar

Yahoo! Messenger for Mac 3.0 Beta 2 is out. Go get it.

I read about Salil Deshpande Bay Partners AppFactory  fund in a recent Business 2.0 (RIP).

When I asked Salil for more details, he pointed me at the AppFactory page, which explains the program.

The AppFactory provides funding, technical and business resources to help entrepreneurs identify, build, and monetize the next generation of applications. Since AppFactory investments are really bets on people and concepts, Bay will use an aggressive timeline and fast-track approach to awarding AppFactory funding. An entrepreneur’s time is best spent developing the application and experimenting with variables that affect adoption, virality, and usage, while exploring reasonable theories about monetization.

Bay Partners is targeting tens of investments from $25,000 to $250,000 using a flexible, fast-track approval process. In addition to the dollars, Bay commits technical and business resources, and a community of “Factory Entrepreneurs,” all part of a program designed to ensure the business success of these application entrepreneurs.

Worth checking out if you have an app that is insanely viral and can be monetized.

I came across a Facebook development shop in Boston called Facebook Factory that says they can create simple Facebook applications in five days. They were nice enough to create an application thats displays the RSS feed for my blog, thanks guys! Go ahead, add TheProgressBar as a Facebook Application.

Last night I attended the latest (14th) Web Innovators Group meeting. It was the best one I’ve been to yet. The presentations were solid except for some Facebook glitches, the crowd large enough to warrant expanding the room size to accommodate all the new folks. For the first time, I talked to so many people that I didn’t get to see all the side dishes.

I ran into people I haven’t seen in years, (Hi Karen!) clients showed up and I met some very smart/connected/successful people I hope to do business with in the near future.

Afterwards a few of us went over to the Muddy Charles pub at MIT where there was some sort of Brazilian/Columbian networking party. Transitioning from talking with VC’s to watching cute 20-year-old Brazilians dance around wearing flags while we talked about  mobile phone design made for an interesting evening.

It was fun to go downstairs from the Muddy to walk by WMBR. In 1993 I had a radio show there called ElectricSpace. We interviewed lots of amazing people that went on to become Internet legends, had a lot of fascinating late-night conversations and my roomate Michael proved that dance music can be Intelligent.

GregPC does his usual WebInno scorecard. Definitely worth a read if you want to lowdown on the presenters and side-dishes.

See you in November at Webinno 15.

Crashing into my apartment in Google Earth Flight Simulator
Google Working on Social Network Aggregator
WPP Buys LA Interactive Agency Schematic; Latest Digital Acquisition

Dyebag touchscreen

10 Future Web Trends

See you at Webinno tonight. The usual suspects will be downstairs at Dante afterwards.