As many of you know, I’m in San Francisco for the summer pondering my next move. I came down to work on a TV program for the BBC and Discovery Channel about startups called Digital Revolutionaries. The show would follow Josh Davis, a journalist for Wired Magazine, as he started or involved himself with 6 startups simultaneously. My job was to find the startups and help him come up with ideas. I arrived in August, we worked on the show for a week, and then word came from the BBC that it had been canceled. I’d already arranged for a place down here until October, so I decided to spend the rest of the summer working remotely for a client in Portland and checking out the job market in SF.

Compared to Portland, there’s a much higher level of activity down here (obviously). I’ve been attending startup events with one of the people I met as I researched the show, a serial entrepreneur and product builder, Arte Merritt. We crashed the Techcrunch40 event at the Palace Hotel yesterday, an overblown event where startups paid big bucks to demo their services and compete for a $50,000 award. We got into everything but the large demo hall, and spent a lot of time in the demo pit, a vegas like atmosphere with booth babes and demos set up like slot machines. There was lots of free food. there was another event which was much more Portland scale, the SF New Tech Meetup, with companies demoing with Powerpoint slides and live demos. hecklers in the crowd tore the presenters to pieces, which was really lame. “so, what you’ve done is taken a Wiki, and Google Maps, and you haven’t even changed the Wiki CSS… so what excelty is new here at all?” It’s easy to judge, it’s much harder to put yourself out there and pitch something you believe in.

I’ve been a b a d blogger lately, I’ll be more up to date, and of course you’ll notice my twitter updates on the right, if you want a less detailed but more up to date info on what I’m doing.