Google’s I/O developer conference is over, and we’ve learned quite a bit: Devs just can’t get enough of Google Glass, design is a bigger focus for the company than ever before, and Larry Page is kind of sad about a lot of things. It’s been a whirlwind ride, but honestly we’re just glad to be out of San Francisco’s Moscone Center.

Check out our highlights from I/O below:

• Google I/O 2013 keynote live blog
• Larry Page is sad, hopeful, and frustrated in his heartfelt Google I/O speech
• Google Glass apps are easy to develop, but brutally difficult to design well
• What hardware is Google making after Glass? Mary Lou Jepsen knows
• What’s next for Google Glass: More units, more apps, more colors
• How cognitive science and user empathy powered Google’s design breakthrough
• OK, Google, your conversational search is awesome as hell
• Maps rebuilt from the ‘ground up,’ iPad version coming this fall
• Google Play for Education could kill the iPad in schools
• Major design overhaul makes Google+ look a whole lot like Pinterest
• Google announces its Spotify competitor, Google Play Music ‘All Access’ — ‘radio without rules’
• Hangouts, the best part of Google+, gets standalone iOS, Android, and Chro

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Big Data and Predictive/Real-time Analytics startups: Are you looking to jumpstart development & accelerate market traction? Sign up for the SAP Startup Focus program to receive technology, support, resources and community to help you develop new applications on SAP HANA, a cutting edge database platform. Get started here, and enter promo code “VB2013″ on the form.

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Can’t make it to Google I/O? You can still watch the festivities from Google’s massive developer conference via livestream.

Check out our Google I/O keynote liveblog here.

Google will stream the biggest sessions — including today’s 3-hour long keynote — for the world to see. Today’s stream will start at 9 a.m. Pacific, starting with the keynote.

News announced so far:

• Larry Page is sad, hopeful, and frustrated in his heartfelt Google I/O speech
• Check out Google’s new Star Trek-like voice search (video)
• OK, Google, your conversational search is awesome as hell
• Maps rebuilt from the ‘ground up,’ iPad version coming this fall
• Google Play for Education could kill the iPad in schools
• Major design overhaul makes Google+ look a whole lot like Pinterest
• Hangouts, the best part of Google+, gets standalone iOS, Android, and Chrome apps
• Google Glass is for dorks — and for doctors
• Google Glass gets first news app for the ‘connected generation’
• Google gives mobile developers some massive love with 5 new money-making features
• Google’s latest Nexus phone is an unlocked Samsung Galaxy S4 with pure Android
• Google Chrome reaches milestone of 750M montly active users
• Google announces its Spotify competitor, Google Play Music ‘All Access’ — ‘radio without rules’
• Google releases location APIs that may hugely help fitness apps
• Google Play game services is a Xbox Live-like mobile network — and offers cross-platform gaming
• Google Play has 48B app installs, 2.5B in the last month alone
• 900M Android activations to date, Google says

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Big Data and Predictive/Real-time Analytics startups: Are you looking to jumpstart development & accelerate market traction? Sign up for the SAP Startup Focus program to receive technology, support, resources and community to help you develop new applications on SAP HANA, a cutting edge database platform. Get started here, and enter promo code “VB2013″ on the form.

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Amped for this year’s Google I/O conference? Google just announced that registration for its annual developer conference will open on March 13 at 7 a.m. Pacific (10 a.m. Eastern).

Google I/O 2013 is May 15-17 at San Francisco’s Moscone Center. Ticket prices remain the same as last year: $900 for general attendees and $300 for academic attendees.

You need Google+ and Google Wallet accounts ready to register for the event. Last year’s I/O tickets sold out within 20 minutes, so get your magic fingers ready if you’re eager to attend.

At last year’s I/O event, Google announced the Nexus 7, Nexus Q (RIP), and its powerful Compute Engine. The company also showed off the power of Project Glass by livestreaming people jumping out of an airplane.

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Big Data and Predictive/Real-time Analytics startups: Are you looking to jumpstart development & accelerate market traction? Sign up for the SAP Startup Focus program to receive technology, support, resources and community to help you develop new applications on SAP HANA, a cutting edge database platform. Get started here, and enter promo code “VB2013″ on the form.

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Last year, Courtney Stanton organized a conference for game developers whose 12-person speaker roster was half women, and half men.

And she did it without considering the gender of applicants.

In the world of tech conferences, that gender ratio is almost unheard of — let alone getting there without actively saying yes to certain applicants just because you know they’re female.

Stanton is a product manager for a video game publisher. She wanted to put together a conference for game developers, make it accessible — and get onstage speakers more diverse than, as she put it, “the same four straight white men agree(ing) with each other on some panel.”

How did she do it? By actively recruiting women through every possible channel. She attended events and spoke to women. She encouraged women she knew to submit speaking proposals. She recruited online. She met people for coffee and promised to mentor them, review their slide decks, help them brainstorm — whatever it took to get women to apply.

That’s because, as she points out, women tend to be less assertive than men in promoting themselves. In other words, if you ask a room equally full of women and men to submit proposals to speak at a conference, the men are going to respond in far greater numbers than the women.

To balance the submissions, you need to work harder to recruit women.

Once she had proposals in hand, the balance of submissions was roughly evenly split between women and men. Stanton was able to pick what she thought were outstanding choices for each session. Result: A 50-50 split, without compromising on the quality.

Since she published her post before her event, the No Show Conference, actually took place, I contacted Stanton this week to ask her how the conference had been received.

“The actual conference went really well — the quality of the content was stellar and, across the board, very highly rated by attendees,” she told me in an email.

“I think the biggest thing the event has led to is other conferences using my approach,” Stanton added, mentioning JSConf, a programming conference in Berlin last fall, which credited her example for helping it get 25 percent female speakers.

“I’m starting to see more people talking about this idea of recruiting for submissions instead of holding spaces open for specific minority representation,” she said.

It’s an approach I’ve used when recruiting employees, whether at VentureBeat or elsewhere. If you don’t make an active effort to widen the circle of candidates, you’re just going to draw from the same pools you always draw from.

VentureBeat also produces a lot of conferences, usually with lots of dudes onstage — the photo above, from the last DEMO conference we produced, is an exception I’m especially proud of. We’re actively working on increasing the representation of women onstage, starting with our upcoming Mobile Summit. Stanton’s approach will help.

If you value diversity, you need to make an effort to recruit from groups that you aren’t part of or which aren’t usually represented in your company or your event.

But once you’ve done the outreach, consider the applicants on their merits alone. That’s the only way to ensure excellence in your outcome, whether that’s your startup team or your speaker roster.

Final note: Stanton said her conference actually opened doors for several women, who went on to speak at other conferences after making their first public-speaking appearance at hers. Talk about a ripple effect.

Hat tip: Hacker News and Attendly

Photo credit: Stephen Brashear/Flickr

Summit Series is sort of TED for younger innovators, bringing entrepreneurs, artists, and musicians together in a often invite-only conference setting to meet top-flight speakers and global personalities such as Richard Branson, Mark Cuban, former President Bill Clinton, and Ted Turner.

Source: Summit Series

The bird’s nest

The first structure the group has built on the mountain? A bird’s nest for humans,

Summit’s mission is “to create business opportunity, address global issues, support artistic achievement, and build community in an effort to make our world a more joyful place.” I’m cynically tempted to say they probably like apple pie and motherhood, too, but the group isn’t just good intentions: Summit has raised more than $2 million for charity over the past four years.

The mountain will be home to Summit Eden, which the organization aims to develop as a residential community and an “epicenter of innovation in the heart of the Wasatch Mountains.” Its 10,000 acres include a lake, skiing slopes, and hiking and horseback riding trails.

“It’s a once-in-a-lifetime project,” Summit’s managing partner Greg Mauro says in a promo video. “I think with this project if we can stay true to our mission … we can create one of the most incredible places in the world.”

Summit will be building roads and homes — a small residential community — and perhaps more. ”We’d love to see incredible businesses get started here,” the company said.

According to Business Insider, the mountain cost Summit $40 million.

Arie is the CEO of WisePricer, a real-time repricing engine for online retailers. He has extensive experience business development with a focus on eCommerce (eBay and Amazon), as well as social media optimization, marketing strategy and multi-channel platforms.

Like most startups, WisePricer is nimble, fast, and flexible. Also like most, we’ll do almost anything to meet and find new clients.

Even attend a conference with just four hours of notice …

Since moving to San Francisco a month ago, we’ve encountered many challenges, such as finding coworking space, cheap food, a place to stay, and the best networking events. And we’ve executed many things on the go, from our website redesign, to presentations, to finishing last-minute code.

Sometimes, meeting those challenges brings out the best in our team and test our ability to get stuff done quickly — just like Founder Showcase, which was an amazing event for our team … even though it was completely unplanned.

Here’s how we made it happen it with just four hours and $500.

11:43 AM
Izzy, our newly hired biz dev guy gets an email mentioning a great pitching event called Founder Showcase. Organized by Founder Institute, this event was brimming with investors, angels, startups and high-powered content sites like VentureBeat, TechCrunch, The Next Web and Pando Daily.

We knew we had to jump on it, ASAP.

The car we rented

12:03 PM: The clock starts ticking
We reached out to Jonathan, the event organizer from Founders Institute. To our amazement and luck, one last demo table is available, but there are only 35 minutes to register, and only four hours until the start of the event.

12:07 PM
Within one minute after finishing our conversation, we were on it. Next step, registering a demo table. There is only one problem, there are 4 of us and only 3 tickets are available. After one phone call, some positivity and a little luck, we got the fourth ticket for free. Tickets, check. Demo table, check. From this point on, it’s all hustle.

12:18 PM
Now it was time for us to get some wheels. Zipcar is probably the fastest and easiest method, so within 2 minutes we booked a jazzy red Mazda. It was big enough to carry the whole team plus all of the things we now needed to procure. Total cost: $76.

12:40 PM
Next was getting some swag.We had no giveaways for our demo table or networking efforts, but we needed a solution, quick. All we had was our WiseGuy t-shirts that we ordered a week ago. (Sidenote: The shirts were free in exchange for some website coding.) Although we were planning to use them for new client/partner giveaways, we decided to repurpose for great conference swag.

1:34 PM: No promotional materials, no problem
We had no time to print paper flyers, but then realized that no one uses paper flyers, so we scratched that idea. However, we couldn’t convince ourselves that stickers and biz cards were unneeded. Within minutes, we had our UX Director on the phone via Google Voice (at 11PM in Tel Aviv) to have him send us updated sticker files.

Then we called every printing shop in the Bay area to find out who could get the job done in under four hours. We begged, pleaded, and bargained.

1:45 PM
Finally, the guys at Arc Shop agreed to try. But of course not before the guy on the phone said, “He’s not sure if they will be able to make it on time.” We took that as a yes, sending the file and heading out for the printing shop.

2:15 PM
We only hired our biz bev guy 3 days ago, and he had no business cards. Just our luck.

So, we called our UX Director again, waking him up for the second time. For some reason, he was expecting us to call again (he knows us too well). He sends over new graphics for the business cards. At this point, we invaded the printing shop, convincing them to add business cards to our order on the fly.

2:25 PM: On to the demo equipment
Where are we going to get two LCD monitors, HDMI cables, a wireless mouse and keyboard for nothing?

Now, we were feeling lucky. We decided to test the return policy of a large electronic retailer, the day after we told them that the founder’s wife didn’t give him permission to buy various items.

(Lie #1: none of us are married).

However, we did keep the HDMI cable (that would be the last time we hustle that hard for an HDMI cable, I mean, those things are consistently useful).

With 30 min left on the clock, we’re all set. Except for picking up the cards in 2 hours, when I find my fifth-grade cousin could have done a better job cutting, but the stickers are great.

3:02 PM
We wanted our table to look professional, so we stopped by HengeDocks to grab one of those sexy air docks (and a macbook, we were short one. Big thanks to HengeDocks.com. Total cost: Zilch.

At this point, we are getting things done so quickly it seems surreal. Murphy is nowhere in sight.

That site is down!

3:48 PM: Then our site goes down
With a few minutes to spare, we took a call from a potential client while driving back to our place to assemble the goods. Then it happens — our site goes down.

Our CTO finds himself calling Rackspace support and trying to figure out what the hell is going wrong. A small panic starts to rise … Finally we figure out that we didn’t renew our domain name on time. Oops, my bad. So I immediately called NetFirms Domain Support and managed to renew the domain before some guy in Pakistan stole our domain.

In 30 minutes, we’re finally back live.

4:25 PM: Now it’s down to the wire
We quickly get ready, throw on a company t-shirt, getting the business cards and stickers, charging our laptops, borrowed a screwdriver from the maintenance man, and finally left for the event.

5: 07 PM
I don’t know how, but we made it. Fashionably late, but we made it!

Somehow, we made it on time (sort of) to the event and managed to showcase our product to some amazing people. We connected with the top people in the San Francisco startup scene, and looked like we had it together.

Above all, it wasn’t about getting to the event and meeting those people — it was about proving our ability to work together as a team and adapt quickly to unplanned events. Being agile, lean, fast and decisive is the very essence of startup genome. We proved to ourselves that we can be part of this execution culture and also experience teamwork outside of the daily dev environment.

Now it’s time to keep up the momentum and execute the same way with with clients, partners and any biz opportunity.

photo credit: jdlasica via photopin cc

Def Con recently celebrated its 20th birthday, and to mark the occasion, the famed hacker conference welcomed something it had strictly policed in prior years: A film crew.

This year, Def Con creator Jeff Moss decided that someone needed to preserve the con’s history while it is still in its heyday. Def Con brings in tens of thousands of people to Las Vegas each summer to talk about hacker culture, new exploits, current security policy, and the computer underground. Indeed, Def Con is now a staple event for the most unlikely of groups: press, law enforcement, and hackers.

So Moss chose a film crew headed up by Jason Scott Sadofsky (pictured above), who is known in the industry for his documentary on the old bulletin board systems (the predecessor to today’s social networks) as well as his website Textfiles, which archives content from those systems.

“On the 20th anniversary, [Jeff Moss] wanted to do special things,” said Eli, who is otherwise known as “Dead Addict” in hacker circles and helped Moss create Def Con. “One of those special things was to try to capture the spirit of the event and the history of the event while it was still possible.”

A history worth preserving

Source: Meghan Kelly/VentureBeat

Jeff Moss, the founder of Def Con.

Def Con began in 1992 as a small get-together that Moss, otherwise known as The Dark Tangent, helped coordinate after an online friend suggested they create a real-life gathering for people in their “bulletin board.” His friend, however, disappeared from the network after his father moved their family for a new job before the event ever happened (yes, people were actually disconnected from their friends due to a move back then), leaving Moss to put on the whole party by himself.

“Back in the day, back when Def Con started, people learned everything they knew about hacking and the computer underground by … searching out all these documents — which were hard to find, hidden in places — and trying to distinguish between bullshit and truth,” said Dead Addict.

Moss set the event in Las Vegas and invited all types of people connected to the “computer underground,” such as hackers, phreakers, police, and government officials. Thus was born one of the most unique characteristics of Def Con: its openness toward all people in the security industry. It even accepts us lowly security reporters.

But because of this, it needed rules.

“There’s a lot at Def Con that’s on the record. Every speech is on the record, things people say are on the record, but there’s also a lot of private conversations and a lot of people hooking up with the people that they know,” Dead Addict said. “[But] there are tourists here, as it were.”

The tourists are the Feds and the media. Hackers don’t love it when someone identifies them. At Def Con, they obscure their identities, sometimes wearing masks to panels, hoping to not get caught by the undercover cops who show up each year. Moss and some of the co-creators of Def Con, such as Dead Addict, decided that cameras and videotaping should be outright banned. You’d get thrown out for snapping a quick picture of the crowd because it disrupted the flow, because it made people feel uncomfortable. But the photography rules are starting to relax.

“To pretend there’s actual anonymity here was always delusional,” Dead Addict said. “We invited the Feds from day one to just highlight that, you know, you’re being watched. Don’t do stupid shit while you’re here.”

He went on to say, “Don’t commit large felonies with witnesses you can’t trust, which should be an obvious thing.”

A director, a Segway, and a whole lot of hackers

Source: Dean Takahashi/VentureBeat

The documentary crew wore bright orange jackets to make their presence known.

Flash forward 20 years to the latest Def Con, which took place in July at the Rio in Las Vegas. Sadofsky was milling around on a Segway, wearing a bright orange construction vest that said “DOCUMENTARY” on the back and with a hoard of cameras running around him.

“We worked very hard to make it so the film crew was totally obvious. We would travel in packs. That was on purpose,” said Sadofsky in an interview with VentureBeat. “When we came into a room, people saw us.”

This is not Sadofsky’s first go around at Def Con either. He has attended Def Con for 10 years, and the attendees and organizers alike know of him.

“Jason’s one of us, so there’s a deep level of trust that the entire community has for Jason,” said Dead Addict. “People that didn’t know him know his work.”

Dead Addict is directly involved in changing the photography and film rules. He says it doesn’t make sense to keep up the practice. This is especially important now that phones, tablets, and laptops can snap a picture fairly stealthily. But it also means the media will have an easier time capturing the essence of Def Con, its busyness, and the action.

“It was starting to seem ridiculous to have a much more restrictive rule for press than we have for our attendees because the distinction between bloggers and people that use interactive media and the official sanctioned press is very, very blurred,” Dead Addict said.”It seems a little absurd to not let the good photographers take photographs and to let everyone else take photographs.”

Over the course of Def Con 20, Sadofsky and his film crew interviewed over 200 people, 15 to 30 of which were sit-down interviews with Moss himself. In total, they recorded around 280 hours of footage. The crew itself was made up of Sadofsky, a few trusted friends — including Eddit Codel of Boing Boing TV — and some of his Kickstarter backers. He referred to Codel as his “ringer” and said he was “comfortable in a chaotic environment.” Those are good qualities to have, as Def Con is an inescapable organized chaos, with up to 12,000 people pushing through hallways to hear the next revered speaker show off their latest exploit.

The documentary’s debut

When I caught up with Sadofsky last week, he said he was still “editing like crazy.”

“The plan is still to provide the documentary for free for Christmas, with a for-sale version with bonus material coming in the new year — early 2013, if I can make it happen,” he said.

Once the editing is complete, the feature film goes to Moss for the final cut. As Sadofsky mentioned, Moss plans to give it away for free, though Sadofsky hopes the con can make a buck off of its story. He sees no reason why Def Con’s organizers would “turn away from a TV network or film festival-type deal.”

Source: Meghan Kelly/VentureBeat

The non-human (e.g. press) registration line at Def Con.

The film itself is not meant to be a yearbook and has no narration. Instead, Sadofsky wants the people to speak for themselves. Some of his favorite moments thus far include a couple of attendees who brought their children, and the sweet moments (yes, hackers can have sweet moments) when long-time attendees looked back on all their Def Con memories. Part of his inspiration for the documentary was The Dark Tangent himself. He describes Moss as a “mysterious figure who [attendees] see for a few seconds in the hallway.” Indeed, Moss told Sadofsky that he doesn’t actually know what happens at Def Con. He’s busy in the back, making sure the gears are turning, and misses out on much of the core of his own event: the people.

“The fact is that people are not ashamed to be at Def Con. It’s not a crime to be at Def Con. It’s not a black mark on your record,” Sadofsky said. “I would have been fine walking without a camera.”

Missed Microsoft’s Build conference this year? Now you can watch all of the sessions online at Microsoft’s Channel 9 website.

Non-developers should stick to the two keynotes, which offer a glimpse at some interesting Windows 8 and Windows Phone 8 features. (Microsoft also kindly livestreamed those keynotes as they occurred earlier this week.) All of the other session videos are new to the wev, but will likely only interest devs.

I argued last week that Build was Microsoft’s most important event ever — primarily because the company desperately needs developers to build apps. Windows 8 will likely attract devs as more people install it, but Windows Phone still needs strong apps to compete with iOS and Android.

Unfortunately, Hurricane Sandy killed my plans to attend Build. Aside from initial excitement over developers receiving free Surface tablets and Lumia 920 smartphones, I didn’t see much else really causing them to cheer from my remote viewpoint. (If you were at Build and want to chat about it, drop me a line.)

Via Engaget; Photo: Sean Ludwig/VentureBeat

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Big Data and Predictive/Real-time Analytics startups: Are you looking to jumpstart development & accelerate market traction? Sign up for the SAP Startup Focus program to receive technology, support, resources and community to help you develop new applications on SAP HANA, a cutting edge database platform. Get started here, and enter promo code “VB2013″ on the form.

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Never before has Microsoft so desperately needed to prove itself — perhaps because it’s never been in such a precarious position.

Microsoft, a company that’s traditionally been the prime example of boring and conservative tech giants, is no longer afraid to try new things. Its new touch-centric Windows 8 interface will force consumers to relearn everything they know about Windows. Windows Phone 8 brings some distinctive features not found on any other mobile OS. And it’s also building up a cohesive experience across all of its platforms (some games will let you synchronize your progress across Windows 8, Windows Phone, and Xbox, for example).

But, as innovative as this new Microsoft may seem, it still needs support from developers to succeed. In fact, Microsoft needs developers now more than it ever has before (yes, even more than when Ballmer famously chanted “Developers!” over a dozen times like a sweat-soaked madman).

That’s where the Build conference comes in. Microsoft’s annual developer conference kicks off today in Redmond, after selling out in just under an hour. It’s so big that the company has built one of the largest tents in North America to house the conference (you can read some obvious symbolism into that).

Developer excitement is palpable — the real question now is, can Microsoft leverage that into killer apps for Windows Phone and Windows 8?

Apps! Apps! Apps!

Gathering new apps is important for Microsoft, because it’s clear that all of the Windows software we’ve grown used to won’t be around for much longer. Windows 8 offers a desktop interface that looks similar to Windows 7 and runs older software — something that’s nice for backwards compatibility but is absolutely jarring alongside Win 8’s touch-friendly interface.

Windows RT, the stripped-down version of Windows 8 for ARM processors, won’t even run older Windows apps. That limitation is evident with the RT-powered Surface tablet released last week, which is entirely dependent on new apps from the Windows Store.

Given that the Surface literally embodies Microsoft’s vision of the future of computing, the absence of old software seems particularly telling. (Microsoft will also release a Windows 8 Pro powered version of Surface that can run old software, but it’s thicker and will be more expensive than the current $499 Surface.)

Just as Apple offered emulation in OS X for OS 9 apps as a transition step, the desktop in Windows 8 and its compatibility with older software feels like a stopgap measure. The future clearly lies in Microsoft’s new Windows 8 apps. The big problem now is that there simply aren’t many of them. I expected Microsoft to announce some major Windows 8 apps during last week’s NYC launch event, but instead the company repeated a bunch of marketing rhetoric from the past year.

Fixing the Windows Phone dilemma

Apps are also Windows Phone’s biggest problem. Microsoft’s mobile platform offers some truly compelling features that the competition doesn’t, like fully customizable Live Tiles in the start screen, but it’s still failed to make a splash with consumers. Now Windows Phone finally seems to be catching up to the competition, with more than 120,000 apps available, and Windows Phone 8 will launch with 46 of the top 50 apps, according to Microsoft’s Windows Phone head Joe Belfiore.

Given Windows Phone’s low market share, it’s been tough to convince developers to create apps. But at Build, Microsoft can sell its unified computing vision. Windows Phone 8 is powered by the Windows NT kernel, which is also what lies at the core of Windows 8. That means developers will be able to easily create apps that run across both desktop and mobile platforms without much of a sweat.

In comparison, creating an iPhone or iPad app is a dramatically different process from developing an OS X app. It’s also something Microsoft can hold over Google — Android has proven itself a capable mobile platform, but it’s no match for Windows when it comes to powering laptops.

When it comes to wooing developers, Microsoft still has a long road ahead. But with Build, the company has a rare chance to win the hearts and minds of the developers it desperately needs. As VentureBeat’s executive editor Dylan Tweney notes, it’s do or die time for the software giant.

VentureBeat’s John Koetsier is on the ground at Build, and I’ll be following the conference remotely. (I blame Hurricane Sandy for ruining my trip to Redmond.) Check back here for updates from the Build conference throughout the week!

Photos: Devindra Hardawar/VentureBeat

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Big Data and Predictive/Real-time Analytics startups: Are you looking to jumpstart development & accelerate market traction? Sign up for the SAP Startup Focus program to receive technology, support, resources and community to help you develop new applications on SAP HANA, a cutting edge database platform. Get started here, and enter promo code “VB2013″ on the form.

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July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

It’s only been a few days since MobileBeat 2012 concluded, but I’m already missing the great energy and conversations from the show.

Thanks to everyone who joined us at the conference to discuss design and its implications for the mobile industry. And if you missed the show, check out our story highlights below, as well as a gallery of some choice moments. (For a different perspective on the show, check out these awesome 360-degree panoramas from MobileBeat 2012, our gallery of photos from GamesBeat 2012, and our full collection of MobileBeat 2012 stories.)

• Zynga’s Mark Pincus says focus more on content, less on investing in platforms
• Google’s Jason Spero: Tablets will lead to more innovative and valuable ads
• Box CEO Aaron Levie says these mobile startups are the ones to watch
• How Dropbox continues to win: Pre-loads on devices like the Samsung Galaxy S3
• Placed rises to the top at our MobileBeat startup competition
• The Good Ear wins our MobileBeat smartphone app competition
• Poshmark CEO: Great mobile design is simplicity
• Nukotoys wins our MobileBeat tablet startup competition

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

We’re a few weeks away from MobileBeat 2012, VentureBeat’s annual mobile conference, where we’ve lined up some of the biggest names in the industry to chat about this year’s theme, “Design is the new battleground.”

We’ve snagged Matt Murphy, partner at Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers;  Omar Green, director of strategic mobile initiatives at Intuit; Peter Relan, founder and chairman of YouWeb; and Rich Wong, partner at Accel along with a slew of other great speakers.

You can find the full speaker list at the MobileBeat 2012 website, and we’ve featured a few below as well.

MobileBeat 2012 will take place July 10-11 in San Francisco’s Palace Hotel. This year it’s taking place alongside our GamesBeat 2012 conference, which is focused on the “Crossover Era” of gaming. Register for MobileBeat 2012 here (you can also sign up for a combined GamesBeat pass at a discount).

Matt Murphy is a Partner at Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers; he joined in 1999. Matt manages the iFund at KPCB, a collaborative initiative with Apple focused on funding and building defining applications on the iOS platform and the mobile internet. His expertise is in both mobile solutions and cloud infrastructure technology.

Omar Green is director of strategic mobile initiatives at Intuit, where he is responsible for the company’s overall mobile strategy and for driving its execution across Intuit’s business units. Omar has been at the center of several recent mobile application launches at Intuit, including GoPayment (mobile credit card acceptance) in conjunction with Sprint/Nextel. Prior to his service at Intuit, he was director of personalization technologies at SavaJe Technologies, where he created one of the first user context-sensitive mobile operating systems.

Peter Relan is the Founder and Chairman of YouWeb, the groundbreaking technology incubator that incubated OpenFeint (acquired in May 2011 by Japanese gaming company GREE for $104 million), CrowdStar (one of the leading companies in mobile social gaming), iSwifter (The “Netflix” for Rich Interactive Flash, Java, PC Apps streamed from the cloud to any mobile device), and Spaceport.io (The mobile development and cross platform runtime engine for the Flash developer ecosystem, with Live Updates to support Games as a Service).

Rich Wong joined Accel in 2006, with a focus on mobile, software, and energy technologies. Rich currently serves on the board of Google’s AdMob, the mobile advertising player, Parature, a leader in SaaS based customer support, SunRun, the leading provider of residential solar power, and Getjar Networks, the largest mobile development community and open mobile app store. Prior to Accel, Rich was SVP/GM of Products at Openwave and previously GM of Messaging Products, and Chief Marketing Officer at Openwave.

We want to thank the industry leaders that are supporting MobileBeat 2012: W3i as Platinum Sponsor, Flurry, Tapjoy & YouWeb as Gold Sponsors, Greystripe, Nokia Developer, LifeStreet Media & Sequoia Capital as Silver Sponsors, and Game Insight, Apsalar, Kontagent, Gree, Nexage, Pontiflex, Swrve & Urban Airship as Event Sponsors.

If you’re lucky enough to be attending Apple’s Worldwide Developers Conference this year, which kicks off on June 11, you can now start planning which sessions to hit.

Apple released the full schedule for WWDC 2012 attendees this morning, as well as an official app for the iPhone and iPad.

This year’s WWDC sold out just a few hours after tickets went on sale. And while we don’t expect the company to show off the iPhone 5 at the event, we will hear more about iOS 6 and the upcoming OS X Mountain Lion. Apple says there will be more than 100 sessions and labs, as well as six technical tracks: Essentials; App Services; Developer Tools; Graphics, Media and Games; Safari and the Web; and Core OS.

In addition to letting you schedule your WWDC time, the official iOS app includes a map of the Moscone West conference center, photos and daily news. And of course, keep an eye on VentureBeat for all of the breaking news coming out of WWDC.

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

We’re delighted to announce the MobileBeat 2012 Innovation Competition, which will culminate with the winners being announced at the MobileBeat 2012 conference taking place July 10-11 in San Francisco.

In the proud tradition of the competition, we’re selecting the most disruptive mobile technologies to present on stage during the event — in front of at least 1,000 attendees. This year, however, our event focuses on beautiful design (and by this, we mean user interface, as well as experience), and so we’re using this aspect of UI-UX in our selection of candidates.

Read our post about how Design is the new battleground, and you’ll get the idea.

With design as our focus, our competition will have three different categories:

1) Tablet apps: With the emergence of tablets as such as powerful force in mobile, we’re holding our first-ever tablet oriented part of the competition. Show us how you’re taking advantage of larger touchscreens, as well as how you’re innovating beyond smartphone design. We’re looking for 10 tablet apps that will prove to the world why tablets are an exciting new computing platform, and not just a fad.

2) Smartphone apps:  Here we’re looking for smartphone apps — be it native or web app — that best demonstrate innovative and beautiful design, interface, or overall experience. We want to see design that will make us either instantly put your app on our device’s home screen, or scream “wow” about your service and advocate for colleagues to use it too. Show us something that could be mistaken for a work of art.

3) Mobile services: Design isn’t just skin deep — the services that power the mobile revolution can also be elegant in their architecture. You could be using a hot new programming language, or a little-used API, for example. Show us how you’re creatively solving problems in mobile, and how end-users benefit.

At the MobileBeat conference, an expert panel and the audience will choose the winners of the competition. Winners will receive our coveted Tesla award (named in honor of Nikola Tesla, the scientist who discovered early mobile communication) along with other prizes yet to be announced.

Submit your app for the MobileBeat 2012 Competition here. Deadline for submission is 5:00pm PST on June 14.

We want to thank the industry leaders that are supporting MobileBeat 2012: W3i as Platinum Sponsor, Flurry, Tapjoy & YouWeb as Gold Sponsors, Greystripe & Nokia Developer as Silver Sponsors, and Game Insight, Kontagent, Nexage, Pontiflex, Swrve, Urban Airship & Apsalar as Event Sponsors.

For my money, it’s the latter. The unconference, as it’s called, is replacing the stale, vendor-driven conference, for which those of us who regularly attend these events should be grateful.

Unconferences use wikis to gather suggestions for sessions prior to the event. At the beginning of the event, they let attendees weigh in on what they want to hear. And at the end of each conference day, participants can review the highlights communally and decide if they want to keep talking about hot topics or add in fresh ideas.

The unconference has its roots in events created by the pioneers of open source – their user-driven approach to creating software was a good match for reinventing conferences. Events like ApacheCon, OSCON, and EclipseCon first started tossing out the conventional structure along with the static lineup of PowerPoint-driven lectures, instead encouraging participants to debate, discuss, and share what they know.

The governing idea is that the sum knowledge of the participants is greater than that of the people running the event. You just have to provide a structure that lets the ideas blossom. It’s the opposite from top-down conferences like Dreamforce and Oracle OpenWorld – no surprise since the sponsoring companies are still focused on proprietary software models.

On the other hand, events like Google I/O share their parent company’s open ideals, while mixing in what we’ve learned from social. Now that social tools make it easy to draw a far wider audience into discussions, unconferences can really tap into the collective intelligence within the event community.

If you’re a frequent conference attendee, you should be cheering about the influence of unconferences on all industry events, since even the traditionalists are adopting unconference tactics like BOF (birds of a feather) sessions that bring together attendees with shared interests for moderated, open discussions.

If you’re a vendor, you might be somewhat terrified by the unstructured nature of unconferences. And it’s normal to have a few nail-biting moments when planning and staging events with an unconference feel – at my own company’s annual SugarCon event, we let attendees nominate and then vote on the sessions they want to participate in, which certainly adds some unpredictability to our planning process.

However, the payoffs for taking the leap into the unconference model are lucrative. Attendees are much more passionate about these events and will give them good word of mouth. You get the chance to participate in your customers’ conversations – and as you’ve no doubt discovered from social media, they’ll have these conversations whether you participate or not, so you might as well be one of the voices. As the provider of this conversational framework, you will earn greater respect for creating an open, interactive community – a reputation that reflects favorably on your brand.

Nick Halsey is chief marketing officer and executive vice president of corporate development at customer relationship management software provider SugarCRM. Previously, he served as vice president of marketing and product management at Jaspersoft Corporation, was a co-founder of Biz360, served as the founding vice president of sales and marketing for Brio Software, and was CMO and executive vice president of corporate development at Alphablox.

[Top image credit: Clara/Shutterstock]

Google will being registration for its important developers conference, Google I/O, at 7 a.m. PT on March 27, with the event taking place June 27 through 29 at the Moscone Center in San Francisco.

Last year at I/O, Google introduced Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich, which took the Android OS in a smart new direction. It also used the conference to talk up Chrome browser advancement, to introduce Angry Birds on Chrome, and to show off its Chromebook laptops.

Last year’s tickets for I/O sold out in less than an hour, so demand for the event this year will no doubt be similar or even higher. Set your alarms developers because we know how you like to stay up late and work.

To promote this year’s event, Google developers have created a fun, interactive game called Input/Output where you can build your own elaborate ball-tossing machine. (Hit the arrow button in the bottom right corner to dig into the source code.) Google will be picking the best machines created with the tool and show them at the conference

Google I/O art: Google

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Big Data and Predictive/Real-time Analytics startups: Are you looking to jumpstart development & accelerate market traction? Sign up for the SAP Startup Focus program to receive technology, support, resources and community to help you develop new applications on SAP HANA, a cutting edge database platform. Get started here, and enter promo code “VB2013″ on the form.

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Here are a few tips for pitching. Because many of the presenters were first timers and early stage companies, I’m not going to name names of companies that I thought did poorly. My goal is to help companies improve.

Booth

• Have a sign! You’re competing with dozens of other startups for attention. People aren’t going to stop and talk to everyone. You’ve already invested money for the booth space and the people to be on site. Spend the money to get a decent sign that talks about what your company does in a few bullet points. See the example at right for a good sign. That’s the right amount of text.
• Do your elevator pitch and then ask the person you’re talking to what his or her role is. You want to be able to meet their needs. It helps if you know that they’re press, investors, general user or competitor. Then adjust the rest of the pitch from there.
• Make sure everyone working your booth is familiar with the basics of your company. Things like expected launch, funding, investors. If the answer is that you’re not disclosing something, that’s what you should say. I talked with one company I was interested in and the guy just responded to my questions with, “I don’t know. I’m just an engineer.”
• Direct people to the right person. If there are others on the team who know the answer, make the connections. The same engineer just motioned at other people who were gabbing among themselves and said they might know the answer, without making any effort to introduce us.
• Don’t lie. I asked one company if they had an Android app. They said they did. I pulled out my phone to download it. All of a sudden, they didn’t have an Android app. “It’s in development.”
• Be prepared to answer questions about where you fit relative to the competition. The people most interested in talking to you likely know your competitors. (Saying you have “none” is a bad move.) One of the most frequent questions I ask is “How are you different from…”
• Pay attention to badges. Many conferences have different types of badges for attendees. If there are a lot of green badges and only a few purple badges, you might want to pay special attention to people with purple badges.
• Know who the players are in your space. If there are specific press, analysts, or investors your company is targeting, the people at your booth should know about them.
• Don’t waste money on pens, T-shirts, and other giveaways. Investors and press don’t care about these things. Put your money into product. (Though you may want to get shirts for your own team to make it easier for people to find you.)

Presentations

• Grab attention from the get go. Many people are multitasking during these things and if you don’t grab them immediately, you might never grab them. Even if you have a 5 minute slot, that doesn’t mean people are paying attention the whole time. I was sitting next to a VC yesterday. We both would pay attention to the start of each pitch and if it didn’t resonate, start working on email, Twitter or other things. (We were also refreshing our screens to see if the Apple Store was back up; both of us bought the new iPad before the show was over.) Every once in a while we’d tune in or ask each other if the pitch was worth paying attention to.
• Show your product. We don’t want to see a video of how great your theoretical product might be. Show us what is today, warts and all. Smart people will be able to fill in the blanks and see your vision. Dumb people — well, you don’t want them as investors.
• Tell us why you are the right person or team to do this. What makes you better than most? What in your background inspired this idea or concept?
• Be prepared to back up claims you make about traction. If your engagement is through the roof, show us with graphs. Everyone has heard the “we’re in discussions with major retailers” line. No one believes it. If you don’t have traction, don’t claim you do.
• Have a back up plan if you run into technical difficulties.

Follow up

• Pay attention to who is tweeting about you during and after the event. I tweeted that a company was interesting last night and because they followed up right away, I was able to meet with them this morning before the founder returned to New York. If you have a larger team, you may want to have someone who isn’t attending the conference monitoring Twitter and filtering leads.

Rocky Agrawal is an analyst focused on the intersection of local, social, and mobile. He is a principal analyst at reDesign mobile. Previously, he launched local and mobile products for Microsoft and AOL. He blogs at http://blog.agrawals.org and tweets at @rakeshlobster.

[Top image: Launch Festival judges table]

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Big Data and Predictive/Real-time Analytics startups: Are you looking to jumpstart development & accelerate market traction? Sign up for the SAP Startup Focus program to receive technology, support, resources and community to help you develop new applications on SAP HANA, a cutting edge database platform. Get started here, and enter promo code “VB2013″ on the form.

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SXSW is a monster. Some 20,000 attendees run around downtown, creating a bunch of noise. But amid the cacophony, there’s some really cool stuff, and it’s our job to unearth it for you.

Here’s what else we’ve got planned:

We can never accuse Google of thinking small. The search giant today unveiled a website for “Solve for X,” a conference for big thinkers to discuss “radical technology ideas for solving global problems.”

Yes, it sounds ridiculously geeky, but it’s the sort of project from Google that could end up creating some truly next-generation technology and solutions. (Let’s not forget this is the company that is already pioneering self-driving car technology.) Google seems to be aiming directly at the people who get hot and bothered over the much-hyped TED conference (this reporter included).

This conference may have something to do with Google’s poaching of senior Apple director Simon Prakash for a “secret project,” though right now it’s unclear if he’s working on Solve for X.

The Solve for X conference seems to go hand-in-hand with Google X, the company’s secret lab for fantastical endeavors. The Solve for X site isn’t yet open to the public, but you can sign up to be alerted when it does. Google has released a short promo video (above), and other clues have popped up over the weekend as well, like instructions for presenters hidden within the CSS code of the site.

Richard DeVaul, a “Rapid Evaluator” at Google, also divulged some details about the conference on his Google+ page. It seems Google already held an inaugural conference over the weekend, with talks on “transforming education, 5x improvements in agriculture through better decision support, synthetic biology and carbon-negative biofuels.” DeVaul says that Google will have videos of the presentations on a YouTube channel up later today.

Via Android Police

The rule of thumb is that a few crucial conferences are a must, and that it’s better to go all-in for the best events, like CES, then to spread yourself thin at a lot of lackluster ones. And CES, which begins this week in Las Vegas, is definitely one of the events for tech startups to attend.

It’s hard enough to make a splash with a six-figure budget, so how do you make an impression as a startup at an event like CES? What can you do with a small budget and limited human resources? Luckily, you don’t need a booth to make an impact, you need a plan.

What’s most important about CES is that it’s the one place where everyone in the industry gathers for a few days each year. That means a wealth of opportunities for new business meet-and-greets, a forum to connect with people you’ve only communicated with via email, and a chance to pitch your story to the media.

If you’re spending the majority of your time looking at other people’s products at CES, then you’re not pushing your own. The name of the game is booking 50 meetings in one day instead of 50 days of meetings. If your goal is business development then your focus is building relationships, and there’s nothing quite like meeting face-to-face to do that. When you meet someone the second or third time, and feel like you know each other, that’s when the big integrations happen.

Here are a few other helpful hints to consider for CES, and for any other big conferences on your schedule this year. They aren’t earth-shattering revelations, but they’re often things that busy entrepreneurs forget time after time:

Early bird specials: Show up a places early because there’s a good chance others will too. Hotel lobbies and bars will be packed with people killing time before the show or events start — a perfect opportunity to meet them before things get too hectic.

Be visible: Be your product, your platform and your brand. Wear that company t-shirt, it’s a sure-fire way to strike up a conversation quickly and create a presence (so bring a few extras to give out!).

Be frugal: You have neither time nor money to waste. Book the low cost flight, share an Airbnb with other start-up folks. Don’t have a booth? Tap into your partners to see if you can also share their space.

It’s not a holiday: Focus. Stick to a schedule. Let people know what parties you’ll be attending and forward them invites. You need to go where the people you want to meet are. Ask around. Ask potential partners and journalists where they will be. Ask VCs. Read blog posts about conferences in your field. Organize.

What happens in Vegas stays in Vegas … but it shouldn’t: There’s no point in treating this as a one-off. Be sure to follow-up with the connections you’ve made and work those relationships for when you meet them again.

When the show’s over, you need to come away with more than a stack of business cards, you need to have built some solid relationships. Maybe there’s a deal or two in the bag. That’s when you’ll know that CES was a winner.

Henrik Lenberg is the Vice President of Platform at SoundCloud, the leading social sound platform that lets anyone create, record, promote and share their sounds on the Web. In this role, Henrik is responsible for SoundCloud’s partnership integrations and business development. Henrik joined SoundCloud in 2009. You can follow him on Twitter at: @lenberg.

Sept. 9 - 10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

The first time I met Box.net chief executive Aaron Levie, he showed me a magic trick with a deck of cards.

A year later, the 26-year-old was standing on stage (in his typical electric orange sneakers) in front of 350 customers and press at his company’s first annual conference, BoxWorks, held yesterday in San Francisco. He had just turned down a buyout offer worth more than $500 million. That evening, Box.net hosted a party where the entertainment was one of his favorite bands from middle school, Third Eye Blind.

Levie has come a long way since middle school. In fact, he and his company have emerged as iconic figures for the new wave of enterprise technology.

Like Steve Jobs, Marc Benioff and Mark Zuckerberg, Levie is part inspirational leader and part visionary. More to the point, Box.net is part of a new wave of startups that are bringing new ways of thinking into the enterprise, borrowing from Apple’s consumer playbook. For instance: make something simple, easy to use and insanely useful, something that you would have never realized you needed, but can’t live without today. It’s a totally different way of working than most enterprise technology companies.

“In the last 10 years, it feels like something fundamental is changing, consumer computing is leading the industry,” Andreessen Horowitz co-founder Marc Andreessen told VentureBeat. (Andreessen Horowitz is one of Box.net’s investors.) “Consumers get the hottest mobile devices years ahead in advance before adoption in the enterprise.”

Box.net was started in 2005 in a garage by a bunch of University of Southern California students. It has since gone on to capture the attention of investors and massive companies. The enterprise-focused cloud storage provider went from five-figure revenues in its first year to millions by the time it closed its first round of funding from Draper Fisher Jurvetson in 2006 and more than $10 million by its fourth round in February, 2011, Meritech Capital managing director George Bischof said.

Today, the company has more than 7 million users and 77 percent of the largest companies in the world on the Fortune 500 list have deployed its service in some form. Box.net just closed an extension to its most recent funding round worth $50 million that includes its existing investors — including Draper Fisher Jurveston, Andreessen Horowitz and Meritech Capital, all Facebook investors — and also a new investment from Salesforce.com. In total, the company has raised more than $130 million in funding.

“We were kind of kicking ourselves for not getting in earlier, but they were below our revenue threshold,” Bischof told VentureBeat. “We met a year before, and we saw it had the potential to be one of those mega-spaces that affects everyone.”

And half of the $130 million is still in the bank, Draper Fisher Jurveston partner Josh Stein told VentureBeat. The most recent round is an extension to its fourth round of funding, which had already brought in $48 million. Box.net is gearing that funding toward infrastructure costs and opening a third data center to run alongside its existing two centers to manage the load from its new customers.

Now, using all those new enterprise applications is basically a prerequisite for an investment by Andreessen Horowitz, Andreessen said. Every company funded by Andreessen Horowitz in the past year has used Box.net to some extent, along with a mishmash of the other enterprise 2.0 applications like Google Docs and Workday, he said. Most of the time they are either free to try out — in the case of freemium apps like Yammer and Box.net — or are dirt cheap.

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“We have platforms and portals for almost anything in the world, from indie music to pictures of cats. Yet with conferences, which is a trillion dollar global industry, no one has succeeded in creating that one point of entry,” Martin Ferro-Thomsen, chief executive and founder of Conferize told VentureBeat. “I thought that was crazy, considering the immense impact conferences can have on peoples’ personal and professional lives, and decided I couldn’t wait for anyone else to solve it.”

Conferize is a completely web-based aggregator of conferences. Through the free web portal, users can review conference agendas, organizer emails, original websites, social media feeds, photos, videos, available presentations and more. The website is currently in alpha, or its first round of testing.

Ask any person in public relations, and they’ll tell you finding conferences without knowing exactly what you want is a tough charge. Google searches are often noisy, and while many conference websites do give a lot of information, the ease of having it all in one place is Conferize’s strength. The website has a search of its own conference directory, where you can look for events, venues and users as well as tags on each conference so you can search by topic. Conferize also lets you friend other members to watch where they are headed.

Once you’ve found the conference you want, you can choose to show you are attending it, as well as follow the conference to watch for updates to the agenda and see any social media chatter about the event.

Other websites such as Lanyrd.com and Allconferences.com do offer conference discovery and a healthy listing of conferences happening in different countries. These websites, however, are a little more static. Lanyrd.com is the most active, but still points visitors away from its own website, toward the outlying websites created by conference organizers.

Conferize was founded in 2010 and is currently located in Copenhagen, Denmark with plans to move its headquarters to San Francisco, Calif. The company currently has four employees and is self-funded. So far it has raised $150,000.

Conferize is one of 80 companies chosen by VentureBeat to launch at the DEMO Fall 2011 event taking place this week in Silicon Valley. After our selection, the companies pay a fee to present. Our coverage of them remains objective.

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Preparations for our fourth annual MobileBeat conference are speeding along. Today, we’re announcing our second round of speakers for the event: Jeremy Stopppelman, CEO and co-founder of Yelp; Stephanie Tilenius, VP of payments and commerce at Google; David Temkin, head of mobile at AOL; and Aaron Levie, CEO and co-founder of Box.net. You can find all of our current speakers here.

MobileBeat 2011 is taking place on July 12 – 13 at the Palace Hotel in San Francisco. We’re convening the brightest minds from across all sectors of the industry to explore who will win in what we’re calling “the 4G Nirvana.”

4G mobile networks have been talked about for some time, but this year they’re finally becoming readily available in the US. Verizon launched its LTE 4G network last December, AT&T is planning to get its LTE network up over the summer, and T-Mobile is steadily pushing up the speeds of its network into 4G territory. And let’s not forget that Sprint has had its 4G network up and running for years.

We’re betting that the plethora of 4G offerings will drive the mobile industry through an even more radical transformation: Joined with faster mobile chips, new operating systems and tablets, the promise of full mobile computing is now a reality.

Stoppelman co-founded Yelp in July 2004 with former colleague and friend Russel Simmons. Prior to Yelp, Jeremy was the VP of engineering at PayPal. He left PayPal in the summer of 2003 to attend the Harvard Business School. Upon completing his first year at HBS, Jeremy joined an incubator started by Max Levchin (co-founder of PayPal) for a summer internship. It was there that he was reunited with his old colleague Russel Simmons and the two teamed up to create a vibrant community around local information. Jeremy holds a B.S. in computer engineering from the University of Illinois.

Tilenius heads up commerce at Google, including digital content and commerce in the cloud, product search and payments. Prior to joining Google, she was at eBay for nine years, most recently as senior vice president of eBay North America and Global Product. As general manager and vice president of PayPal Merchant Services, Stephanie built PayPal’s platform and business on the web from the ground up to be used on 45 percent of websites today. She also ran eBay Motors and eBay Asia Pacific and Latin America. Previously, Stephanie was a co-founder of PlanetRx.com and worked at Intel, AOL, Firefly and Alex Brown.

Temkin has been Head of Mobile at AOL since June 2010. He has extensive experience in software development and management, particularly in the field of user interface engineering. Temkin served as Vice President of Developer Platform at Palm until June 24, 2010. At Palm, he was responsible for setting the strategy and shipping the software to support Palm webOS. Mr. Temkin co-founded Laszlo Systems, Inc. in 2000 and served as its Chief Technology Officer, President and Chief Executive Officer. He served as the Vice President of Engineering at Laszlo. He previously served at Excite@Home and Apple Computer.

Levie originally created Box.net as a college business project with the goal of helping people easily access their information from any location. Box.net was launched from Aaron’s dorm room in 2005 with the help of CFO Dylan Smith. He is the visionary behind Box’s product and platform strategy, which is focused on incorporating the best of traditional content management with the most effective elements of social business software. He has spoken about content and collaboration tools at events such as Accenture Global Summit, South by Southwest, and Svase.

MobileBeat 2011 (co-located with GamesBeat 2011) is sponsored by Flurry, Qualcomm, TapJoy, Zong, Greystripe, Papaya Mobile, and AT&T. Sponsors can message us at sponsors@venturebeat.com.

We’ll be exploring the most disruptive mobile trends at our fourth annual MobileBeat 2011 conference, on July 12-13 at the Palace Hotel in San Francisco. It will focus on the rise of 4G and how it delivers the promise of true mobile computing. We’re also accepting entries for our mobile startup competition at the show. MobileBeat is co-located with our GamesBeat 2011 conference this year. To register, click on this link.

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

It’s that time of the year again: VentureBeat’s MobileBeat 2011 conference is coming up on July 12 – 13 at the Palace Hotel in San Francisco. This year our theme is “Who wins in the 4G nirvana?” We’ll be focusing on the rise of 4G and what it means for every aspect of the mobile industry.

This year we’re looking to showcase the top 20 companies with the coolest mobile ideas. You can sign up for the MobileBeat 2011 competition here.

We’ll have two categories: 1) applications, and 2) infrastructure/services. We’re selecting the top 18 companies, and we’re letting readers nominate the other two.

At the MobileBeat event on July 12-13, the 20 finalists will demonstrate their product for five minutes on stage. Then an expert panel and the audience will choose the winners of the competition. Winners will receive our coveted Tesla award (named in honor of Nikola Tesla, the scientist who discovered early mobile communication) along with other prizes yet to be announced.

On June 21, we’ll cut off the nomination process, and notify the winners by June 28. (If you want to remain in stealth until the competition, just let us know in the sign-up form). We’ll give special consideration to startups that are launching new products.

We’ll also have a contest for GamesBeat 2011. For sponsorships, send a message to sponsors@venturebeat.com.