Graeme Thickins on Tech

Reflections & analysis about innovation, technology, startups, investing, healthcare, and more .... with a focus on Minnesota, Land of 10,000 Lakes. Blogging continuously since 2005.

Category: Conferences/Events (Page 45 of 80)

Tim O’Reilly Asks Jonathan Schwartz the ‘Missed Questions’

April 27, 2008 / / 0 Comments

In case you didn’t catch this, a couple of days ago Tim O’Reilly asked the Twittersphere if they’d like to put any questions to the CEO of Sun, about an hour before he was to interview him on-stage at the Web 2.0 Expo in SF this week. 2441268833_fee85854a1
(Photo by James Duncan Davidson.) Well, Tim was wondering why he wasn’t seeing any questions coming through on Twitter, till he realized (too late) that he had his Twitter app settings wrong on his smart phone! (Unfortunately, he was only getting replies from those he was following.)  Well, I wasn’t on Tim’s follow list, so my question, which I submitted within minutes of when he Twittered about this, was missed … along with a whole bunch of other people’s questions.

A few hours after the session ended, I saw a tweet from Tim where he graciously had decided he would do a blog post to ask those Twittered questions of Schwartz via email, after the fact. That exchange took a day or so, but Tim just posted the resulting Q&A yesterday, here: Missed Twitter Questions from Jonathan Schwartz Interview at Web 2.0 Expo.

So, as you’ll see on Tim’s post, my question (about blogging and Twittering, of course) did get asked, and answered — and, thanks to Twitter, I didn’t even have to go the conference! 🙂  There were several other good questions that Schwartz answered as well. The hint about what’s to come regarding Sun’s "network.com" offering is especially interesting. Thanks, Tim, for the great recovery — you’re forgiven!

Some of the Great People I Met at GSP and ETech

March 9, 2008 / / 0 Comments

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). Timoreillyonstage

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) Etechcrowdstage

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….

Getcodingopensocial

[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

March 7, 2008 / / 0 Comments

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… 🙂 Gspwest08banner

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. Etechlobby

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.

ETech 08: Strangest Session Title Goes to…”How to Kick Ass”

March 5, 2008 / / 0 Comments

Kathy Sierra was one of the speakers in the morning session of this second day of ETech. She’s a perennial at this event, though missed last year. One of the few women in this largely man’s world of developers (esp on stage), but she’s very popular. Kathysierraetech
Her thing is "creating passionate users," and who can’t like that?  Her talk today was titled to arouse curiosity, I suppose. What it was about, as I Twittered during her talk, is that it’s healthy to get involved in something that isn’t the main thing you excel at. She cited a guy taking pix of her in the aisle with a big camera on a tripod, and how he was a leading open-source guy, but has become a kick-ass photographer. Kickingassthreshold
She said it’s not about natural talent, but just the ability to put in time….and not about making money at something [oh, like maybe blogging, perhaps? 🙂 ].

Fast forward to the punchline: we finally got to what she was trying to tell all the hard-working, no-outside-life developers, hackers, and assorted geeks in the audience. It was to "get unplugged," get away from all the distractions ("partial attentions") we all have in our lives, and "focus on the things you care about." 

Ah, surfing…it won’t be long now. (Sorry, couldn’t resist.)

GSP West 08: Hot and Cold

March 4, 2008 / / 0 Comments

It’s a hot conference, and what do I get?  A damn cold!  And I just had a doozer back in January, too.  Is this the worst, hellish year for colds and flu that you can remember, or what?  It sure is for a lot of people I know….

Anyway, I’m sucking it up (oh, god, that’s bad), tryin’ to keep up…. I did my live-Twittering thing yesterday, after getting well practiced at DEMO. Gspopeningscene
See my 40 or 50 something tweets (I lost count) here.  Then chatted over wine with Aaron Fulkerson (MindTouch), Dan Carroll (Somr.org, former Twin Citian, now Mountain View), Chris Messina (DISO guy), Maria Sipka (Linquia, a fellow Aussie and surfer), Chris Gammill (a buddy from LA), and others — all while uploading my pix on Flickr. Gspplatformwars

Afterwards, attended part of AppNite (couple of cool ones!), then managed to hear most of Tim O’Reilly’s keynote at 8:00 — it was good, very inspired. Tim is amazing. Took a lot of notes, but was all out of Twitter juice by that time. So, dragged myself back to my hotel (a very cool little boutique place called the Sophia). Now it’s Tuesday morning, and I’m seriously looking for a Walgreens so I can load up on cold medicine…  🙁

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