Tech~Surf~Blog

Geeks, Entrepreneurs, Designers, Angels, VCs, and Marketeers ..... Let's Mix It Up!

Minnebar is Saturday, May 10!  MInnesota's all-day annual Barcamp event is not to be missed.  New venue this year (bigger and better): the gloriously redone Coffman Union at the U of MN (cool place if you haven't checked it out yet). To sign up, just go the event site (a wiki page), hit Edit Page, and add your name and links. (Minnebar is held once a year, while evening "Minnedemo" sessions are held in each of the other three quarters.) Already, almost 300 of your compatriots have signed up for this year's edition of Minnebar, and many more will be as the week progresses. It's free! That's right -- the whole damn thing! (thanks to the sponsors) ... including breakfast, lunch, reception and beers following. You even get a free event t-shirt! And you can come and go as you please, choosing just the sessions that interest you -- though I would highly recommend hanging out all day for the networking, which is really the biggest benefit. You can do your own session if you and/or some colleagues have something to say (and if there's still room). Hit the link that says MinneBarSessions, click Edit Page, and add your title and session description while you still can. In the coming days, the organizers will be cutting off new entries and publishing a full schedule with all the breakout sessions. That should then be available at the event site, or you can pick up a hard copy on your arrival. Come early -- the event kicks off at 8:30 am.

Attention Startups and Angels: Note the "Lightning Talks" Session
On the MInneBarSessions page, scroll down and look for a link to apply to give a five-minute pitch.  Ideal if you're a startup, whether just forming or further along. An entire hour is being devoted to these rapid-fire presentations. This is a great way to see what's going on out there in our state, hear the latest business concepts and startup ideas, or get updates on the progress of local startups you may have already heard about. [This will be like the DEMO conferences I know so well. My advice: hone the message hard, and practice well!]

This event is gonna be killer, I promise you. If you want to know what's really goin' on in tech in Minnesota, you have to be here. Bring lots of business cards, a camera, your laptop (we'll have mondo wi-fi!), wear your favorite tee, and get ready to learn, share, network, gab, blog and Twitter your brains out, and meet tons of fun, like-minded people.

Hey, in my book, it definitely beats sittin' on some cold lake fishing!  :-)

Some of the Great People I Met at GSP and ETech

As a followup to my previous blog posts and innumerable Twitters (starting on March3) about the Graphing Social Patterns and ETech conferences this past week, I just wanted to say-hey to all those I met or ran into -- at least those I got cards from. It was fun chatting with all of you, and I look forward to staying in touch! After all, we're supposed to be "social" at these things, right?  In fact, please Facebook me and/or hook up with me on LinkedIn (see links just to the right in my sidebar), if we aren't already connected (or I will do that from my end).

Hello again to the following folks I already knew and ran into at GSP or ETech (listed alphabetically):
•Sean Ammirati, VP at mSpoke and ReadWriteWeb contributor (PA)
•Dan Carroll, CEO, Intelligent Media Platform and Somr.org (formerly Minneapolis, now Mountain View)
•Rick Enrico, CEO, JuiceMedia (San Diego)
•Aaron Fulkerson, Cofounder, Mindtouch (San Diego)
•Chris Gammill, Web Product Marketing Consultant (LA)
•Dan Grigsby, uber-developer, Unpossible.com (MN)
•Alex Iskold, CEO of AdaptiveBlue and ReadWriteWeb contributor (NJ)
•Jeremiah Owyang, new Forrester Research analyst rockstar (SF)

And it was great meeting all these new people (listed alphabetically); apologies to those I may have missed because I didn't get a card:
•Bill Binning, CMO, Jaduka (TX)
•Ben Benner, CTO, Jaduka (TX)
•Derek Dukes, Founder, Dipity (SF)
•Pete Forde, Partner, Unspace (Toronto)
•Chris Hendricks, VP Bus Dev, Travature (San Diego)
•Kristofer Layon, Web Project Coord, U of MN (Go, Gophers!)
•Ian Kennedy, Product Mgr, MyBlogLog/Yahoo (SF)
•Sanyu Kirulata, Queen's School of Business MBA candidate (Canada)
•Vince Kohli, CEO, BizInnovativ (NJ)
•Chris Messina, Citizen Agency/DISO-project.org (SF)
•David Recordon, Open Platforms Technical Lead, SixApart (SF)
•Jodee Rich, CEO, PeopleBrowsr.com (Sydney)
•Jeff Roberto, Marketing/PR Director, Friendster (SF)
•Jason Rubenstein, Cofounder, Just Three Words (LA)
•Todd Sampson, Cofounder and Dir-Tech Mktg, MyBlogLog/Yahoo (SF)
•Maria Sipka, CEO, Linqia (Spain via Sydney)...and she surfs, too!

I hope those of you who read this will let me know what you thought of the events (just email me at graeme at thickins dot com). Best of luck to all of you in your current endeavors! And I certainly hope our respective social graphs continue to intersect in good ways....

[By the way, if you'd like to get access to any speaker presentation files from either event, they're being posted on the following pages, which the O'Reilly people said are being updated as speakers choose to add their slides:
- GSP speaker presentations (this is the specific page at Slideshare.net where speakers were asked to post their slides)
- ETech speaker presentations (a page on the O'Reilly site that has several postings already, and I assume more will be added ongoing).
Keep checking these links if you don't see what you want.]

UPDATE 3/10/08: To update link for GSP speaker presentations.

UPDATE 3/17/08: To give you yet another link to the GSP presentations, this one the official O'Reilly page, which recently went live: Graphing Social Patterns West 2008 - Presentation Files.

GSP+ETech=A Damn Good Week in San Diego

Despite the fact that I lost my voice halfway through my three days in San Diego (some weird cold thing I picked up), the two O'Reilly events this week were definitely worth attending. I say that even though I wasn't able to participate as much as I would have liked. Certainly, the networking suffered. I haven't figured out how to do that without talking yet... :-)

I did live-Twitter the sessions I sat in on, capturing all the nuggets you can likely handle. If you'd like to see those, just go to my Twitter page. For Graphing Social Patterns, scroll back to March 3 and 4. For ETech, scroll to the March 5 tweets.  I must have written 150 or more total for both events. And there were some darn good speakers and panels, which I captured as best I could (in the requisite sound-bite form).

GSP was Monday and Tuesday, while ETech was Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday. But I only covered ETech on Wednesday, which I had previously determined was the most interesting day from my perspective.  I definitely wanted to be at GSP on Tuesday, and I skipped ETech on Thursday for a couple of reasons: to go back home to San Clemente so my voice could recover, and to avoid another expensive hotel night.

I also posted some 118 photos to Flickr in two sets: GSP pix here and ETech pix here. Note that I mostly shot what I thought would be interesting to you: speaker slides, as well as shots of the speakers and panelists themselves, plus other general scenes -- as opposed to posed/cutsie shots of my friends, etc... :-)

Anyway, I found the programming at both events to be very good, and I learned a lot. Plus, I made a bunch of great contacts. (Look for that list in my next post.)  I hope you found my live-Twittering and Flickr pix interesting, at least, and (even better) useful.