Washington DC

I am currently in DC for the Inauguration...spent this morning driving around the Mall and various sites before they start restricting traffic this afternoon...security is everywhere and the crowds for Sunday morning were already starting to swell. The Mall from the Capitol to the Lincoln Memorial is lined with speaker and jumbotron installments. We were able to drive the parade route this morning which was very cool, the police and military police are starting to block off street around the Mall and White House. Most bridges crossing the Potomac into the District are already closed to vehicle traffic.

We are going to jump on the Metro to go back to the Mall for the concert this afternoon...hopefully we will get close enough to see/hear a fewof the acts which include; Springsteen, U2, Beyonce, and numerous others.

Here is a pic of the south side of the Capitol where the swearing in ceremony will take place.

App Store

Six months after opening, Apple has announced that they now have 15,000 applications in the store and over 500M have been downloaded. The Iphone and Itouch app's may out pace Itunes for revenue potential moving forward. It took two years for the Itunes music store to sell 500M songs. To those pundits who say the Iphone reaches less than 5% of the mobile subscribers in the US I say give me them over the masses for revenue potential.

Yard Barker

Last night I attended an event put on by The National Sports Marketing Network here in Chicago. The topic of the event was "Social Media in Sports" and the event was well attended by many in the Chicagoland sports community. After the event I invited three of the panelists to join me for dinner at a new restaurant in Chicago called Publican. One of the panelists who joined us was Peter Vlastelica who is the CEO of Yard Barker.

YB's business consists of a community of sports websites and blogs and a branded vertical ad network. They feature a number of athlete blogs in addition to hundreds of fan blogs on virtually every sport imaginable...sorry Joe it doesn't look like there are any Fencing blogs...maybe you can be the first! Peter warned us that Yard Barker would help develop the next big person in sports in 2009...can't wait to see who he was referring to.

Always fun to meet new people and learn a little bit more about someone's business.

Sling Media & The Iphone

Can't wait until the Sling Media Iphone App is released...the company is saying first quarter of 2009. Check out the demo and sign up to be notified via email when the app arrives at the link above.

Emily Wick's State Motto's