Last Night Brian and I attended Vator Splash in San Francisco, the format was focused on Startups.  The attendees were mostly Founders and Venture Capitalists.  The format was two 1/2 hour bookend presentations by recent successes, Jeff Smith CEO of Smule (Ocarina App) and Mark Pincus CEO of Zynga (Farmville)  both were doing exciting things with the social aspects of new platforms like Facebook and the iPhone.  The middle of the night was filled up with 10 demo from fledgling startups.

It was a quick format with 3 minutes given to each startup, with one AND ONLY ONE, Robert Scoble, follow up question.  You can find out a lot about a startup in 3 minutes.  I was very impressed with the winner Tim Hyer Founder of RentCycle, who has the potential of capitalizing on economics and a growing desire to adapt our consumerism to more sustainable practices.  It's a great tie in with Tuesday's NY Tech Meetup, what will technology do for us in the next 10 years, while being a great business model at the same time.

Dana Settle, a principle in Greycroft, one of Crowd Fusion's investors, was on the splash panel to give feedback to the Event Cycle.  It's always good to see Dana's smile when I get to the left coast.  Mark Pincus was a surprisingly motivating speaker, he's dedicated to his craft and clearly perfection is not only strived for but demanded.  To be clear I despise every one of his apps that I have to block from my Facebook stream, it was good to hear he's looking to raise the bar and be more than the 'pet rock' of 2009.

In the demo pit I found a very exciting future tech.  Beam Energy from Power Beam Energy definitely check that out.  Thanks Bambi Francisco, Vator.tv, and all of the sponsors for a fun event.  Landing back in JFK in the middle of a snow storm signing off now.  

What is the future of NYC Technology companies?  Are we here to service the old gatekeepers?  Or are we going to build new companies that empower people to do great things?  Scott Heiferman put that question to an audience of 700 tonight in an FIT auditorium.  A number of do-gooders (Scott's label) proceded to challenge us technologists to do more than just produce another shopping app.  It's been awhile since I attended a NY Tech Meetup and I definitely need to make myself a regular.  

Majora Carter wants city planning tools that better show the value to citizens lives of green spaces.   She was particularly harsh on Sports Teams and public funding of stadiums.  It added a little perspective.  Clay Shirky left me thinking about why their is value in evaluating the profiles and dataset of friends of my friends.  I've alway been skeptical of Social Networks broadening your scope to larger connections as being self serving.  He left me wondering if I'm missing an important component of how my online neighborhoods can have value to me.  Clay repeated referenced a  study by Christakis and Fowler about influences in your larger circles.

Tony Bacigalupo (New Work City) predicted that the ways we work, and where we work will continue to evolve away from cubicles.  Look for Tony starting an impromptu BarCamp in a laundromat near you.  Ben Berkowitz showed new tools in ClickSeeFix to allow municipalities to customize Mobile Apps.  Jacqueline Novogratz showed how basic infrastructure changes lives.  

Congratulations to Andrew Rasiej, now chairman of the board for the NY Tech Meetup.  His anecdote of how NYC became the great city it is because of great infrastructure decisions (particularly clean fresh water) left me thinking about how important it is RIGHT NOW to wrench our public data out of the hands of the current gatekeepers. Andrew also criticized our local officials for not being transparent. Representatives from the MTA had to follow him with a feeble attempt to show how they were changing and attempting to embrace the mashup community.  

Rachel Sterne from GroundReport exposed a number of issues that need to be solved to make citizen journalism effective.   

1)  Writers get little to no revenue.  Technology can help them to produce more, higher quality content.

2)  Vetting Process has to evolve, I think reputation systems can help.

3)  Local news is decentralized and hard to find.  Better searching and sorting algorithms are needed.

4)  Advertorial content is everywhere.  The firehose has to be easier to filter.

5) .. Flash Headlines, Contrived Controversy ..  hmm -- not sure about this one.

The meeting on a whole was uplifting, to see people going against the cynicism and trying to make a difference does make you question what your contribution can be.  My takeaway is that Crowd Fusion has to focus on the ways that our platform empowers people to do more with less time and financial resources.  Specifically helping answer Rachel's issues (or at least 4 of them).

There seems to be a flurry of inquiries in my various email lists looking for top level web developers.  Every time I read the requirements (particularly LAMP) for top applicants I can quickly piece together what their infrastructure must look like.  All too frequently I cringe! 

Here's one: PHP5+, MySQL 5.1+, Smarty, HTML, XML/Feeds, TCP/IP communications, Socket connections, Shared Memory management, Linux, Apache, Perl, JavaScript.  

What we have here is a mix of common concepts every web developer should be familiar with, specific development architecture, and a host of coding languages, some of which need to be cutting edge.  I wonder what do the (+) signs mean?  Are these more important?  Are you looking for varients of MySQL 5.1? Or 5.2, would 6.0 count as 5.1+?

It is obvious to me that this organization got a ways into the development process and hit a wall, could be scalability, could be 'memory management'.   All too often startups get locked into believing that their prototype architecture has anything to do with their final product.  Find a good developer, consult with a GREAT architect and rebuild from scratch if you believe you've got an application that the world needs.

For the last three months we have been preparing Crowd Fusion in anticipation of an announcement that will put our framework in the hands of hundreds and hopefully thousands of developers and media companies. The timing was right, so we applied for TechCrunch 50 and were honored by the opportunity to present on stage and give this announcement.  Our framework, codename sprung, and Crowd Fusion CMS are now open source licensing.  For the next 6 to 8 weeks we'll be taking beta signups and working with developers who apply in preparation for a full public release.

Our core framework now uses Inversion of Control (IoC) and an event model to allow developers full access to the framework and easily extend it using plugins.  Layered on top of the framework is Crowd Fusion CMS, a set of plugins that give access to some core features we believe any web publishing venture needs.   News, Profiles, Media, Members and Comments are plugins in the Crowd Fusion CMS that give great examples of working with the framework and are easily extendable to accomplish unique implementations and applications.

There are many features we'll be writing about and exposing with our documentation, including a unique rendering engine, graph database implementation, robust tagging model, and much more.  There are many people to thank that helped us get to this milestone, specifically Ryan Scheuermann who was instrumental in the architectural design of our technology migration.