Benjamin Kuo’s Blog

Dan Lyons, aka “Fake Steve Jobs”, spoke at lunch at Forbes MEET today. He’s as hilarious in person as he is in his blog. For those who aren’t familiar with Fake Steve Jobs, Lyons runs a blog which “channels” Apple CEO Steve Jobs, and is a witty and usually hilarious commentator on Silicon Valley (recent entries: Oh snap! Faceberg raises another $500 million, and You can’t make this stuff up).

I’m spending some more time today at the Forbes Meet conference, up next is an interview with Randall Stephenson of AT&T. I think the more interesting session is probably “Winning the War On Search” later this afternoon. (Last night’s gadget session was pretty interesting…).

The current Forbes MEET session is “Silicon Valley Meets Hollywood”. Youtube’s Chad Hurley, David Siminoff of Venrock, and Dan Scheinman, SVP and General Manager of Cisco are talking with Quentin Hardy of Forbes.

The discussion briefly touched on the venture capital industry, with Siminoff saying: “…It feels like June of ‘99″ at the peak of the Internet bubble. Siminoff and Hardy talk about lots of VCs “looking for an exit”. I think the $15B valuation of Facebook and Microsoft investment has some folks here shaking their heads. Earlier in the day, Barry Diller commented on Facebook and said “Paying $10 to $15 billion for anything, much less something without any revenues, is somewhat suspect.”

I’m spending the day at the Forbes MEET conference in Beverly Hills, and I’ve noticed an interesting shift this year in the speakers and conversations here. Last year, there was a huge focus on user generated content (YouTube had just been purchased by Google). This year, there’s a continuing theme of focus on the business models behind the content.

I’m sitting in a session on “Trolling the Web for New Talent”, with Luke Barats and Joe Bereta of Youtube hit makers Barats & Bereta, Jason Nadler, head of the United Talent Agency’s UTAOnline, Ben Relles, creator and founder of BarelyPolitical.com (the site behind Obama Girl), and Brent Weinstein, CEO of 60Frames, and the underlying current seems to be a focus on “sustainability” and an overwhelming amount of content.

Some tidbits:

Nadler: “It’s not about viral success, it’s about consistent success. It’s not about the one video. It’s sustainability of the hits.”

Bereta: “You can’t bank on viral. The internet audience is very fickle.”

The mix of companies here is slightly different, too, the earlier session was heavy on the infrastructure providers: John Edwards at Move Networks (CDN/video delivery), Ashwin Navin of BitTorrent (doing lots of plugging of their back end P2P delivery service for content providers), and Brendan Traw (Intel’s Digital Home Group CTO).

I spent the morning over at the E For All conference, the new computer gaming show which is attempting to step in where the former E3 Expo—now downsized, and refocused on just insiders–used to stand. E For All, however, seems like a ghost of the former E3 Expo. Despite lines crawling out the door to get in to the early “VIP” sessions today, the exhibitors there barely filled the South Hall of the LA Convention Center. The biggest exhibitors here were Nintendo, INTEL, and HP; whereas last year’s E3 Expo was dominated by enormous booths from Microsoft, Sony, and others.

On the upside (well, for socalTECH at least), there are lots of exhibitors from local So-Cal companies. And, as some others have mentioned, there are no lines for computers in the press room and registration.

More pictures, below:

Opening lines at E For All (before the lobby emptied completely).

Artist Melanie Stimmell working a mural.

The biggest booth - Nintendo’s - At E For All.

We’re full swing into conference season, and I just wanted to mention a few upcoming ones in the area: The Technology Council has VentureNet (we’re a sponsor) coming up Friday, this one is a great opportunity to watch some companies pitch and rub elbows with VCs; we’re giving away some tickets tomorrow. Also, Forbes MEET is coming up towards the end of the month in Beverly Hills on October 24th–this has a great mix of movers and shakers who attend–last year, I was sitting next to Chad Hurley a few days after Google acquired YouTube, and mixed with Michael Eisner and Barry Diller, among a bunch of other notables. We’ve got a discounted rate for our premium subscribers, if you’re interested (more than worth a year’s subscription to socalTECH, btw…)