Ignite Baltimore to Light Up the Tech Scene

For those of you who dont know, the Ignite series of events were created by Oreilly in thr Seattle area.  So what is Ignite ?

If you had five minutes on stage what would you say? What if you only got 20 slides and they rotated automatically after 15 seconds? Around the world geeks have been putting together Ignite nights to show their answers.

These events have taken off and have developed a huge following and in cities like Boston and Philly, they have held several.  So I was extremely happy when I got an email from Mike Subelsky that he was setting up an Ignite in Baltimore.  I was even more honored when he asked if I would be one of the speakers !

Here are the details for the event

So we are in full swing, all the speakers have been set up, here is a quick list

• Aaron Henkin - 20 Favorite Baltimore Stories
• Clarence Wooten - 12 Hard-Won Lessons of Entrenepeurship
• Rev. Amy Sens - (Interesting) Stuff You (Probably) Didn’t Know about the Bible
• Mario Armstrong
• Elizabeth Evitts Dickinson - How to Start a Revolution: Urban Interactions in the New American City
• Dave Troy - The Emerging Hive-Mind
• Bill Mill - Overcoming Cognitive Bias
• Brent Halliburton - 100 mistakes I will try not to make again
• Bryan Liles - From Waterfall to Agile. A Journey to Productivity
• Yair Flicker - Optimizing the Speed and Performance of Web Applications
• Michael Jovel - Let’s get Physical
• Prescott Gaylord - Stop making green building and construction so hard
• Jimmy Gardner - Have a great idea? What are you gonna do about it?
• Lionel Foster - “If I had more time, I would have written a shorter letter”
• Janna Howley - Safe, healthy, nutritious food for everyone
• Eileen Wold - Exploring the energy industry landscape

I am so excited to be a part of this.  The event is also going to be recorded and webcast by RADAR.

I really hope to see many of you there.  Make sure to grab me and say hello.

And of course this event would not be possible without some great local sponsors !

Intridea, Greater Baltimore Technology Council, Smart Logic Solutions, Round House Technologies, and Advertising.com.

Startups: A Little Techhelp form StartupCTO

I always try to pass on the little tidbits I find form around the Interewebs, especilly for all you budding startups out there.  Form time to time I come across a great web sites with some good info that I think is worth your while.

Today I stumbled upon a new site put together by David Ordal called StartupCTO.  This is a great site that aims to help you and your startup with technical questions that you may in many of the stages you go through while building your ideas.

StartupCTO is dedicated to helping technology startups and other small development teams create better software, faster.  ..

What is cool is that David is looking for content and help from the crowd to realy round out the content to be able to help others.

I do know that I don’t have all the answers, and I’d like to encourage you to post comments on the content, or, if you’re interested, even consider editing the content yourself (email me to get a login). The more voices, the better.

Some of the catagories they offer are

• Front end tech
• Backend Tech
• Server tech
• Marketing tech
• People
• Process
• Doc templates
• Application how to’s

It looks to be a great resource that I am sure will be helpful at some stage for many of you.

Startups: Technology Planning

Following up on a couple of posts from last week, I wanted to share another one of Allen Stern’s videos he recently took at the monthly meeting of the New York Software Industry Association.  They had a quasi startup bootcamp.  This next video that he shot is all about technology planning for your startup.  As we have talked about before here, the technology landscape has changed, lowering the barriers to entry to an extent that it is allowing almost anyone with an idea and a few dollars to build a product that can theoretically compete on a global level.  Products like Amazon EC2, GoGrid, Google App Engine, and other cloud resources allow small firms to scale up and down to meet demand and needs.

That being said, it does not preclude proper planning for technology and the video Allen provides gives a few pointers.  As he states, the topics include

SaaS as a business model, the realization that you may need to do things again in the beginning to find the perfect model, the importance of staying focused, and a number of pitfalls to avoid. The pitfalls slide is a must-read for any new startup (about 13 minutes in). The pitfalls include: not documenting your work, doing it the second/third time before finishing the first time, staying away from consultants, deadend architecture and finding the right balance of equity for employees. Also discussed is management and when/how to split out all of the tasks when you are a founder.

Are the 40 Hour Workweek and Workplace Still Relevant?

I don’t know about you all but I am all about a non standard workweek, as well as a non standard workplace.  Times have changed, yet companies have yet to catch up.  Some companies that is.  I was reading an interesting post the other day over on the 37 Signals blog referencing an article written recently in the AZCentral.com all about the new rules that we should be applying to our traditional workplace.

I think many of you would agree times, as well as the upcoming workforce, has undergone a pretty big shift.  Technology has afforded us great flexibility and opportunity to expand our thinking a bit.  So here are a few of my thoughts on the subject.  Honestly, I am lucky in a way, in that I have a little bit of flexibility to be able to work outside the confines of my office.  Tools like Remote Desktop, place me virtually in front of the computer in my office from anywhere in the world that I can grab an internet connection.  And you want to know what, I get a lot more work done when I am away from my office versus when I am physically there.  But that is only because my immediate leadership supports this, not the organization as a whole.

The organization, as many others that I see, are stuck on “core hours”, no jeans, outdated equipment.  If they only knew how nice it would be for us to have a computer that actually allowed us to do our work properly, how nice it would be if they gave us the benefit of the doubt in knowing when we are most productive, and that we are mature enough to realize that we can decipher when it is not a good time to wear more casual clothes.  I am not naive enough to not understand that in some customer facing workplaces this would all be different, but in a development environment where many of us spend hours in front of servers on cold computer labs it may be nice to be comfortable.  And I also understand that there are obviously times when we need to interface with others and our hours need to mesh, but there are other times when it should not matter “when” I work, rather just the fact that I get my work done.  There has been a recent shift at some companies, like Best Buy Corporate HQ’s, utilizing a results-oriented work environment (ROWE).

Best Buy, relatively new to campus recruiting, has hired between 50 and 60 MBAs for corporate roles in the last two years. As work/life balance becomes increasingly important in the workplace, Wesley and his colleagues are trying to offer more flexibility. The company is experimenting with the results-oriented work environment, or ROWE, which allows employees to work when and where they like, just so long as long as they get their assignments done.

It is awesome to watch companies like 37Signals utilizing 4 day work weeks and other tools to make there workplace a much better environment.  And look, even and old brick and mortar like Best Buy can try it out with great results.

So when is the shift going ot occur when the traditional companies start to shift to meet the needs of the new workforce?  Is it going to take an entire shift in the workforceas the oder generation retires and the the new younger workforce starts to be the majority ?

Clearspring to buy AddThis a Web Sharing Firm

According to this Washington Post article, local widget and widget platform  development firm Clearspring is buying a AddThis, a content and web sharing service out of Princeton, NJ.

AddThis offers a one buttong solution to share your content and bookmark and share other items you find of interest.  They also have some great anlaytics that allow you to see how your shared content is shared and spread by users.

It will be very interesting to see how Clearspring will work to integrate the new service.  I defeinitely can see some good “synergy” (hate this word but its early and cant hink of another :)) between the two products.  Clearspring obviously works hard to get their widgets the widest possible spread around the interwebs.  Maybe they can use some of the analytics from AddThis to help see the scope and breadth of just how viral or popluar it has become.  Add in the possibility to save items directly from a widget could be interesting as well.  As Clearspring Chairman Ted Leonsis states in the Post article

“What we are building is the next-generation universal-sharing platform,”

We will be watching closely to track the progress.  Congrats Clearspring and good luck.

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