btrax blog

The non-profit world got a another boost this week as First Lady Michelle Obama spoke at the 2009 National Conference on Volunteering and Service.

The three day conference, co-organized by the Corporation for National and Community Service and Points of Light Institute, gathered more than 5,000 professionals and volunteers from non-profits, governmental agencies and other community organizations.

btrax staff attended the conference opener, where an All-Star team of speakers took the stage: actress Kerry Washington, Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, Obama, comedian Wali Collins, California First Lady Maria Shriver, rocker Bon Jovi and actor Matthew McConaughey.

Since many of our staff have worked for non-profits in the past and actively continue to support several (including Kiva, Fotovision and Mama Hope), we were excited to see volunteers and civil society professionals get their due.

A perfect storm of a highly skilled unemployed work force and influx of stimulus money from the Edward Kennedy Serve America Act has tripled the number of community organizers and advocates on the streets. This will have a substantial impact on communities – and long-term one as these people move on to other jobs in the future with their civic experience.

But the Obama administration hasn’t stopped at just putting the unemployed to work in a needed area. The president has also launched an ambitious call for all Americans to get involved – kicking it off with a “Summer of Service.”

Photo by Tim Wagner © 2009

Since an amazing 11% of people work for non-profits and “charity work” has become a fully recognized profession, it’s appropriate that university programs and training conferences have popped up.

The Craigslist Foundation Bootcamp is a rising example. This year’s intensive one-day conference brought together a record 1500 professionals working for non-profits, business and government at University of California Berkeley.

They gathered to learn more about building cause based movements and strengthening civil society, particularly through emerging technologies.

A wrap-up panel was stuffed with cutting edge voices such as Ethos Water founder Jonathan Greenblatt, Idealist.org founder Ami Dar, Shirley Sagawa, Craigslist founder Craig Newmark, and Huffington Post founder Arianna Huffington.

With all these high profile social good events swirling around our neighborhood, btrax is proud of our collobrative work for organizations such as the Keizai Society, SVJEN, Urasenke Foundation, Govit, and the Pacific Aviation Museum Pearl Harbor.

We’re always looking for focused and forward thinking groups, so drop us a line!

Photo by Tim Wagner © 2009

btrax’s CEO Brandon Hill had a chance to sit down with Biz Stone, co-Founder of Twitter

A few weeks ago my friend Tomihisa Fuon (@tomohisa), chief editor of Japanese web industry magazine Gihyo, asked me to setup a meeting with Biz.

Twitter has been the poster child for startups for more than a year – even making the front page of Time magazine. And the site now has over 7 million members and an astounding monthly growth of 1382%. So naturally Biz is a busy guy.

The three year old micro-blogging tool is especially popular in Japan – one of the company’s more substantial revenue sources. So I contacted a friend of mine who works at Digital Garage, Twitter’s partner company in Japan run by Joi Ito. And voila, a visit with Biz at Twitter’s San Francisco skunkworks.

The photo above is Tomihisa Fuon (@yukarim), Yukari Matsuzawa ( Japan country manager at Twitter) and Biz Stone at Twitter’s US office.

Although I cannot disclose everything we chatted about, Biz (@biz) was big on the idea that creativity should spring from limitations – even saying the Japanese poetry form haiku inspired Twitter’s 140 character limit.

He also has lived this firsthand – catapulting from designing everything on the site to being one of the three very public faces of Twitter. The two others are co-founder Evan Williams (@ev) and CEO Jack Dorsey (@jack).

Some other interesting tidbits:

• Just reached 50 employees
• Still built using the Ruby-on-Rails framework
• Twitter Japan is hosted independently from twitter.com
• Twitter gets their stickers printed in Japan
• Twitter staff don’t have business cards, just follow them (click the @ links throughout this article)

Brandon and the whole btrax crew is on Twitter @btraxinc. Read the full transcript (Japanese only) of Brandon and Tomihisa Fuon’s interview with Biz Stone.

Biz Stone Photo by Tim Wagner © 2009 | Group photo by Brandon Hill

Job-less Keynote
In stark contrast to Steve Job’s largely solo format, Apple’s marketing baron Phil Schiller farmed out much of the presentation to three other senior engineers.

They also paraded no less than seven different App developer teams to showcase how their apps will use the new capabilities of the iPhone 3GS and iPhone’s upgraded operating system.

While appealing to the 1,000+ developers present at Apple’s annual WWDC developer fete, the presentation seemed a bit long winded – with much of the time spent on only incremental changes.

Some of the more substantial themes running throughout Apple’s presentation:

Not Quite All About Apps
Apple’s game plan is both powerful and straight forward: provide raw ingredients (SDK and APIs) and a buffet table (App Store and iTunes) to developers. App downloads passed 1 billion in April 2009 and keeps growing with 40+ million iPhones and iPods on the streets.

Apple’s gamble on entering the cutthroat mobile industry and prescient view of your phone as a pocket computer is paying off – the iPhone represents 65% of all mobile web browsing.

More importantly, Apple has created a seamless system were it maximizes profits while outsourcing risk:
• AT&T and other carriers foot the wireless infrastructure costs
• Content piped in by major movie studios, music labels and individuals
• App developers code and market software for both mainstream and niche audiences

Apple Everywhere?
Apple is tipping its global hat, accelerating release schedules abroad for its core products. Also iPhone OS 3.0 is built on a truly universal base – no differences in the code on every new iPhone despite the 30+ supported languages.

This doesn’t mean just translation of UI text, but full localization with different layouts for email input, etc. The new OS adds several new languages, most notably Arabic and Indonesian.

As Apple keeps reducing product prices, their potential market reach expands exponentially beyond the semi-luxury category.

Feeling the Economic Squeeze
The most evident theme throughout the WWDC keynote was price – every product covered had a price drop. The largest ones were for the MacBook Air (top end dropped by $700) and the iPhone 3G, which now will be $99 and sold alongside the newer iPhone 3GS.

Putting the iPhone 3G under $100 is a key move, coming the same week as the launch of the most sophisticated challenge to the iPhone yet – the Palm Pre, which we covered last week.

Photo by Tim Wagner © 2009

Making Apple Play Catchup
Palm is planning perhaps the biggest spoiler to whatever Apple announces at the annual WWDC developers conference in San Francisco next week.

Many supposed “IPhone Killers” have come and gone, such as Verizon Wireless’ BlackBerry Storm, T-Mobile’s Android G1, Nokia’s N97 or even Dell’s ill-advised foray.

Palm’s Pre makes a strong argument that there is room for both iPhone and Pre (without killing either) – while adding innovations that should make Apple finally play a little catchup.

btrax staff were on hand to witness the unveiling of the Pre at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in January and can say it deserves the big spotlight attention:
• NPR: Palm Pre is pretty impressive
• Mobile Times: Expectations for Palm Rise as Pre Smartphone Nears
• Gizmodo: Palm Pre is simply amazing
• Readwriteweb: Palm Pre: Like the iPhone, But Also Not

Un-Retiring an Apple Icon
Serially survivor Palm has pulled out all the stops for the Pre, bringing Jon Rubinstein out of semi-retirement (the brains behind the original iMac and IPod) and hinting it might repeat its reinvention from ailing PDA maker to successful phone manufacturer with the Treo.

Besides matching the major innovations of Apple, the Pre addresses iPhone owner’s major complaints:
• Choice of carrier network (launches on Sprint, but should be available on others shortly)
• Universal search
• Integrated contacts (one spot for Phone, SMS, Chat, Email, Facebook status, etc.)
• Flash support in the web browser
• Running multiple applications at the same time
• Text copy/paste
• Virtual keyboard vs. QWERTY slideout keyboard
• Removable battery

For dropped calls and slow browsing, however, only time will tell.

Photo by Tim Wagner © 2009

Special events at AT & T Park

Home of the  San Francisco Giants, AT & T Park is located right on the water and is a one of a kind, beautiful ball park with a spectacular view of the Bay. Each season the Giants put on specially themed promotions for various groups, everything from “Irish Heritage Night” to nights for knitters, firefighters, you name it.

This year’s Japanese event featured the only San Francisco appearance this season of the New York Mets, who are actually pretty hot this year. btrax’s office is located only one block away from the park, so we decided to go cheer the Giants on after work and bring home some cool sake sets, courtesy of Kikkoman.

A Promising Start
Things looked good for the Giants, with pitching prodigy and 2008 Cy Young winner Tim Lincecum on the mound against the big Mets righthander Livan Hernandez. We enjoyed some pre-game sake tasting and a taiko drum performance and headed up to our seats.

Surrounded by Japanese fans munching on delicious looking onigiri, we contented ourselves with our garlic fries and burgers (if only the ball park sold DELICA fr-1 bento boxes!) and watched the Giants put on what looked like a comfortable early 5-1 lead.

Too Good to be True
The game looked well in hand for the Giants, but by the seventh inning, the Mets had managed to tie it up. Giants manager Bruce Bochy succeeded in getting tossed in the seventh inning for challenging a swinging strike call with the umpire, but to keep things even the Mets manager managed to get ejected ten minutes later for more or less the same reason!

“Kanpai  Giants!”
The sold-out ball park was nearly filled with Giants fan until very end of the game, hoping for a miracle to happen. After a couple of unearned runs in the ninth the Mets walked away with their tenth win in their last twelve games. It was “Zannen” that the result didn’t favor us this time, but regardless, it was a memorable game and always fun to go to the Giants game. “Kanpai  Giants !”

The Giants mobile site

Tickets Information