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Gary Takes on DC Tech Events, Who Will Win?

Posted: 18 Jul 2008 03:25 PM CDT

This week a new company released their event announcement service to the D.C. technology scene. A little bit of buzz began circulating about this new service (DC Gary’s Guide) that Gary Sharma announced to a few people early on in the week. The site is GarysGuide.org (named after the founder) and it attempts to track all of the technology and new media events going on.

It started off with New York and then Boston but has since expanded to D.C. Among those that are active in the new media crowd here in D.C. there is another site that many of us turn to for event information: DC Tech Events. Ross Karchner has been running the site as a hobby for the past couple years and has kept it extremely simple. Every time he posts out an event, the information is distributed via Twitter and via email thanks to Feedburner.

That’s as far as it goes. Gary is taking it one step further by providing daily and weekly newsletters that highlight events as well as new job postings on the site. The only problem as of now is that Gary doesn’t have much of a reach in D.C. That may soon change as people become familiar with the site. It’s well designed and constantly maintained making it equally reliable to DC Tech Events with the addition of job postings.

When it comes to design and usability, Gary may have the upper hand but Ross Karchner currently has the reach. Across all of DC, I would argue that there is nobody that has completely dominated the event directory when it comes to leveraging all the distribution channels possible. Did Gary just bust open the door for competition? Who will win? Who do you support?

MySpace Doubling China Staff

Posted: 18 Jul 2008 09:39 AM CDT

Reuters has posted that MySpace will be doubling their Chinese work force over the coming year. Considering they currently have 70 employees in China, doubling shouldn’t be too difficult. This news in conjunction with yesterday’s news about the MySpace gaming competition (which is limited to China, Japan, India and Korea), highlights the shifting battle for user attention.

While the U.S. may be close to social network market saturation, there remains to be massive growth opportunities abroad, especially in Asia. Facebook recently launched the Chinese version of their site (along with over 15 other languages). The launch of these languages are most definitely contributing to Facebook’s continued rapid global growth.

MySpace has experienced a substantial slowing of growth domestically and their shift to Asia highlights the new social network battleground. Both MySpace and Facebook face significant competition in China with companies like 51.com and Xiaonei both attracting millions of users and both with substantial war chests. Xiaonei recently raised $430 million and 51.com raised over $50 million as well.

Asian social networking will definitely be a hot area for people to keep their eyes on over the coming months as the battle heats up!