LIVEdigitally

Last night, I got a small group of geek friends together to grab a bite at a good San Francisco Thai restaurant (Koh Samui and the Monkey) in the city’s SOMA district.  The agenda?  Well, no real agenda, just a bunch of folks who could talk and debate about gadgets, products, Web 2.0, and the ever-important question of “what exactly does it take to become United Global Services anyway?”

Our gang (it’s a gang because one of our guys, who shall remain anonymous for his own safety and, well, credibility, can easily do the “blood” thing with his fingers, but he’s not really a gang member, so nobody come stab him with some prison shiv, ok?  thanks.), from left-to-right:

• Ron Hirson (runs product management at Ingenio, the company behind Ether)
• Noah Wintroub (VP of digital media for JP Morgan)
• Brad Dietrich (CTO and cofounder of Mediabolic)
• Isao Yagi (Lead Engineer at Adteractive)
• Jason Whitt (Vice President at VantagePoint Venture Partners)
• Ben Walter (Director - Relationship Marketing at Banana Republic) - Ben is the litmus test for good/bad ideas if you want to reach out to real consumers
• Jeremy Toeman (VP of market development for Sling Media, and writer of this blog, in case you missed that little detail)
• Nicholas Menaker (consumer technology expert and consultant)
• Dave Mathews (”Forward Thinker” for Sling Media, also known as Dave Mathews Gadget Guy)

Was a great time, we had excellent food and talked about an interesting variety of topics.  We had a great debate about Zoom Shop (which I still just don’t get - who needs an empty iPod for a flight?) and how many doritos they sell per month.  We talked about Facebook, and whether or not they could get into more of a lifestyle brand, as opposed to 4 years of drunken commenting (assuming all the recent troubles don’t cause a massive desertion).

Long chats about traveling, as we had a couple of frequent fliers at the table.  Good discussion on why Boeing’s in-flight service is a failure (my two reasons: 1- way too expensive precluded non-business travelers, and 2- much of the primary market was asleep when they’d be using the service.  Nicholas also pointed out that at $500K per plane, there was quite the uphill battle).

Thanks for coming everyone, feel free to chime in on things I forgot to write about.

Oh, and in 364 days Dave Mathews will owe a few people $100 each.

This entry was posted on Friday, September 8th, 2006 at 10:06 am by Jeremy Toeman and is filed under General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.