Hey, Brady, what’s up with inviting anti-Microsoft folks into Search Champs? Folks like Ted Leung who is working on the open source Chandler calendaring application. Or Emily Chang?

Oh, I think Emily Chang covers it pretty well on her post (and she has a list of all the Search Champs, darn interesting blog reading there).

I love this new trend of listening to people who’ve fired us (or who are trying to compete with us). There’s more post-search-champs-meeting talk on Memorandum.

Oh, I like Ted and his family a lot. He’s one of the nicest guys I’ve met. Damn smart, too. I wish I could hire him.

Turns out in the past hour I’ve met strategists from eBay, Yahoo, Amazon. They are here to see the small ideas. Some of them are pretty cool.

Here’s my favorites of what I saw at the Entrepreneur 27 event that just concluded at Stanford University.

Flagr. Take a cell phone. With a camera preferably. Walk into a sushi restaurant. Take a picture of the front, of the menu. Of the food. Write a little review. Send it to Flagr. It puts it on top of a Google map. Very cool. Limited window to make money, though. This is too big an idea to be ignored by Google/Yahoo/Microsoft for long. In the meantime Flagr is it. Here’s a photo of the Flagr team with TechCrunch’s Michael Arrington.

Skobee. No, this isn’t named after me. Heh. But, let’s say you want to find something to do tonight. So you email your five friends asking what’s up. That all causes a flurry of email. But, while that flurry of email is going on Skobee is listening in and is keeping track of what you’re talking about and builds a site for you automatically (and, if you’re clueless, it helps you find something fun to do).

Billmonk. When Buzz and Doc and I shared a room Buzz picked up the hotel room and he said “you owe me some money when you get your expenses back.” Turns out Doc owes him money too. How do you keep track of situations like that? Billmonk. And you can do it from your cell phone. Text 60×3 to Billmonk and it’ll automatically create an entry that says your friends owe you $20 each.

LicketyShip. When Robert Pazornik, co-founder of LicketyShip was hanging out with his buddies in Yale they wondered why they couldn’t apply small-idea thinking to the shipping business. FedEx and UPS had done the big idea (moving boxes around by shipping through a hub). But they were at their local computer store one day wondering why they couldn’t move a box of toner down the street in a few hours. LicketyShip is their answer. They found that in certain areas they can use existing courier networks and a smart database of their locations to ship packages across town in less than two hours. The eBay and Amazon strategians were first to visit their table, they have an impressive small idea.

Box.net. Ever want to email a 200MB video file to someone? I have. Yeah, I’m an edge case but there are other reasons you’ll need online storage. Backup. Moving servers. And such. Box.net is the answer. They have a cool gadget for the Google online page (I’m trying to get them to build one for Live.com) too so you can play with your server-based files while you check the weather.

I met Michael Arrington of TechCrunch there too. He says he’ll have a review up shortly of the event (update, it’s up). I said “I’ll stay here and beat you.” 🙂

I love the valley!

So, I’m hanging out with Patrick this weekend. Just got done interviewing the MSNTV team who built the cool Media-Center controlling gadget that was shown earlier this week at the Search Champs meeting (got lots of kudos). How did I start the meeting? “I thought it was against Microsoft rules to work on weekends?” Another good channnel9 video in the bag.

Anyway, now we’re hanging out at Stanford University where a bunch of young entrepreneurs are showing off their small ideas at the Entrepreneur 27 tech symposium. Aaron Levie, CEO of Box.net (an online storage service) is up in front of the room (some pictures will be up shortly on my Flickr feed).

Want to be the first on the block to try a new technology or Web service? This is a great place to start.

I love little meetings like this. It’s why Silicon Valley continues to bring the world more than its fair share of new ideas and new businesses. Will one of these companies get big? We’ll see.

One of them already is. Noah Kagen of Facebook is here.

You can tell it’s Patrick and me. Patrick has a white computer. I have a black Tablet PC. 🙂