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Scoble's Link Blog

Exploring the 2010 Web

How the SF Giants saved a million bucks with telecommunications upgradesYesterday

A few weeks ago I attended a press event that the San Francisco Giants and Shoretel put on. The audio isn’t that great because we’re in the server room for the San Francisco Giants baseball team. Here SF Giants’ CIO, Bill Schlough, is showing off how the Giants saved a million bucks by upgrading its telecommunications equipment.

Remember that the ballpark that the Giants is in was originally named for PacBell, the local phone company. Interesting look at how phone systems have changed in just the past 10 years.

This is a nice win for Shoretel. How often do you get a customer to sing your praises like this? Especially one that so many people in the community like and appreciate?

The system will save the SF Giants about $1,000 a day. Not bad. Plus they got a ton of new features, which lets the Giants serve their customers better.

Behind the scenes with @garyvee at one of the best wine stores in the worldJuly 2

Gary Vaynerchuk’s dad came to the United States with nothing in his pocket. He worked for less than minimum wage and built up a business, Wine Library, that today sells $50 million a year in wine in a sizeable store in New Jersey.

Today Gary is building on top of his dad’s work and is taking the store global with a video show, Wine Library TV, that gets about 100,000 views a show. I remember when I first saw the impact he was having when I walked into a meeting at Revision 3 and the team was sitting around watching his show and drinking the wine he was talking about.

Here we visited Gary’s store and got more of how he’s using the 2010 web to bash in the skulls of his competitors. He calls it “bringing the thunder.” I call it the most innovative marketing I’ve seen on the web to date. We talked about a range of things from his dad to how he would compete with his show, if someone else had done Wine Library TV and he wanted in on the action.

This is part of our Building43 series of videos. Come over and join the community there, we’re looking for people who are fanatical about the 2010 web and who are looking to help other people and businesses get into this new world.

By the way, I’m a huge fan becau

Really Secret ScobleJuly 2

After we had our Building43 launch party I wanted to explore more why small groups of people are so much better for actually learning something. By the way, Michael Sean Wright put together a neat little video of our launch party. He’s the one who produces Peter Himmelman’s awesome show on Tuesday nights.

Anyway, we’ve found that if you are throwing a party, somewhere around 200 people is the right number (or fewer). I’ve been to quite a few TechCrunch parties with 800 or so, and they just aren’t as satisfying. This holds true for weddings, too. I’ve been to weddings with 100 people and they are really fun. 300? Not so fun, they seem impersonal and more like a conference event.

Why are large numbers not conducive to learning and having a great experience? One reason is sheer noise. I remember meeting Del.icio.us’s founder, Joshua Schachter, at one of the large TechCrunch events with 700 or so and I was literally inches away from him and we both were yelling at each other but I still couldn’t hear him.

Another is distraction.

How @loumongello turned vacation at Disney World into richesJuly 2

I love hearing stories about how people turned their passions into a career. Lou Mongello used to be a lawyer, but he kept going back to a childhood memory: his family kept taking the family to Walt Disney World in Orlando. He turned taking his own family there into a hobby and later quit his job as a lawyer and now has a media company that publishes books, CDs, magazines, and does a weekly radio show, er, podcast, about Walt Disney World. Very popular stuff and he is hitting a monetizable audience: traveling families who will spend lots of money.

Some things I learned in my interview with him: social networks are changing how he’s marketing and interacting with his customers. He uses real time services like Ustream to keep in touch and, of course, he has a Twitter account, where he publicizes meetups at the park.

You can find him at WDW Radio.

Oh, by the way, in the video, we talk about trademark concerns. He says that he worked to find a way to tie his brand to Walt Disney World’s brand without infringing on Walt Disney’s trademarks. That’s very smart and something that a lot of the folks who are using Twitter and Leo Laporte’s trademarks should consider because they are putting their business at significant risk of a trademark lawsuit if they don’t stay clear. Over on Facebook Jesse Stay reports that anyone who uses the word “face” in their Fa

Calling my mob: #realtimecrunchup is next week @techcrunchJuly 2

Steve Gillmor has been hard at work putting together an interesting day for those of us who are interested in the real time web.

The speakers lineup includes founders and executives from Twitter, Facebook, Google, Microsoft, Salesforce, FriendFeed, TweetDeck, Meebo, WordPress, Seesmic, Virgin America, Tweetmeme, Qik, and more.

But that’s not what will make this interesting. In between all the interesting panels about APIs and search and Twitter, Twitter, Twitter, Mike Arrington and I will pit our mobs against each other.

Or, more realistically, have a discussion about what he sees as a frightening trend: that mobs are being formed faster and with more “real” participants now thanks to real time technologies, in particular FriendFeed.

Me? I see that there’s a good part in crowd behavior. I’ve seen charities raise tons of money because of crowds very quickly. News distribution is changing pretty radically thanks to crowd behavior. I noticed that I started watching more TV because the crowd would talk about interesting shows (this weekend, for instance, I saw tons of people talking about the BET Awards).

But there is a downside to mobs. People do get hurt and