I've been staying at the Palomar, at the corner of 4th and Market. It's a Kimpton Hotel and it's kind of a nice mix of boutique and service. The room has wi-fi (which i now find I basically can't live without) and the staff is chill. I like it here. I also like that priceline found it for 80$ a night. For some reason San Francisco always seems to be able to deliver a 4 star hotel for $80 if you use priceline. It's a bit of a crap shoot - but heck, it saves a ton of money if you're willing to be flexible.

After breakfast with Scott at "The 5th Floor" - which was very nice, it's off to the Valley. The morning was up and down a stretch of road that is familiar to all entrepreneurs in the tech world. Hmm... i wonder where in the world steve is going next? Here's a hint:

ok, that's not much of a hint.



But i can't say a whole lot more.

By the time we were done, we had to hightail it back to the city for the New Tech Meetup. Myles Weissleder runs the meetup, and he put together an all star cast of presenters.

Kyte, TurnHere, Scoble & Podtech, Justin.TV ... and Magnify.net. (nice!)

The Venue is the Sony Metreon in downtown San Francisco... just a half a block from my hotel.

I'll review the evening -

Robert Scoble for Podtech and the ScobleShow presented first. Scoble knows how to work a room. You know he's got more in his brain that almost anyone about whats happening in tech and podcasting. And Scoble is pushing sharing - hard. All of his widgets on PodTech are embeddable - and this trend toward sharing is increasing every day. He turned some heads for sure.

I went on second an pretty much fell on my nose. For some reason the projector didn't want to see my mac - so we got a bit of a false start. But the crowd was generous - and from the volume of sign ups the next day - folks at least went home and tried out the service. Lesson learned. No live demos - with out a slide backup. But in anycase, it was great to be with the SF tech crowd and folks seemed genuinely excited about Magnify.net.



The best thing about my presentation was i got to give a shout-out to DC Smitty (yousurftubes) and Tony Haung (babies.magnify.net). After the presentation Damon La Rose (youtreadtubes.magnify.net) came up to say hi as well.

Next was Justin.TV - Justin Kan live from LA w/ Kyle Vogt, CTO. Kyle was impressive. The platform is impressive - and the decision to be in the 'lifecasting' business rather than the Justin business is pretty mature for a young team. These guys have a really cool mix of tech and showmanship. I can't wait to see who puts money in them.

Then came John McWeeny from TurnHere. He had the same Mac Disaster that i had- and handled it better. Still, TurnHere is a video company and not having video made it hard to tell the story. Basically their a rep firm for VJ's - and seem to be making it work. Having been in the VJ business a while back, i know better than most what a tough gig that can be. But it was fun to hear about their progress.

And last but not least - Kyte.tv - Daniel Graf, CEO & Founder presented, and though the room was tired and it was late - they've got a cool set of tools and people definitely got into seeing it work. It's a live sharing and broadcasting platform based on 3g cell phones. They got a ton of press early in the week from the NY Times - and its pretty clear to me that live sharing of video and stills within social groups is going to be a business.

After the Meetup was over - a bunch of us headed out for beers at The View at the Marriot. DC and Damon and I went over with Robert Scoble and Ken Berger (who is going to be part of our NY biz dev team).