Sorry about the lack of posts lately. I've been busy with a couple side projects, and this trip out to San Jose, CA to check out the Larta Venture Forum. Highlights included:

1) Cleantech panel discussion: The Cleantech Imperative: Promise or Pandora's Box?

2) A cool solar concentrator product by Practical Instruments called the Heliotube. Its the same size as a standard solar cell, significantly thinner than most concentrators, and costs less than the standard solar cell. Good Luck to these guys!

3) Keynote speaker: Tony Perkins , CEO of Always On/ Going on.

He spoke about the IM Generation, social networking, and majorly plugged his new service Going ON. Interesting Stuff, though I dont think Going On is about to de-seat MySpace as king. It could become Myspace for the west coast tech and VC scenes, though that might never reach the number of users on Myspace!

Major Points of his talk:

• Some fairly shockingly high percentage of what people read these days is content generated by someone they know.
• People are looking for a more personal media consumption experience.
• Big Media, who we though was on the rise and rapidly going to merge into very few humungous entities, will now be picked apart by millions of media publishers
• Kids these days spend lots of time maintaining their personal networks, its called a Myspace page.
• MySpace pages, blogs, etc are all forms of personal branding.
• When designing web applications, THING OPEN, think interoperability.
• Paul Otellini, the Intel CEO and a person whose time is worth more than just about anyone else out there, said the single best use of his time is blogging on the internal blog for his employees.

Overall it was an interesting experience and fun introduction to the tech/VC world. Oh yeah, and I'm writing this post from the Caltrain (boy do I love EVDO) as I head to San Francisco to get a change of scenery.

Cheers