East Coast Blogging

Recap: Social Media Club DC - Chris Dorobek

jimmy — Sat, 17 May 2008 00:57:12 +0000

Last night I battled the traffic to head down to see Chris Dorobek, editor of Federal Computer Week, speak about government and technology. Chris gave a great talk, I totally enjoyed hearing his take on government and technology. It was a really good time and as usual the conversation was terrific between all involved. Below is the full video of his talk. It was my first use of my new Flip Cam which I thought worked great. The quality suffered a bit in converting to flash as the original file was HUGE.

And make sure everyone goes and follow Chris on twitter at @cdorobek, he needs more followers from our area !

Enjoy his talk.

Event: Powerful Solutions for Small Businesses

jimmy — Thu, 15 May 2008 01:36:19 +0000

Got tipped off on this one from the host himself, the Social Media Swami himself, Shashib . Network Solutions in partnership with DC Media Makers is holding a pretty cool little event coming up in early June, the 4th to be exact at Busboys and Poets.

The evening will be hosted by our very own Par-Tay host Jonny Goldstein and the speaker is going to be Rohit Bhargava, author of the recently released “Personality Not Included”

Rohit is a marketer, blogger, speaker and author of the anticipated
new book, Personality Not Included — a guide for companies on
understanding and using their personality to better connect with
customers in the social media era. A founding member of the pioneering
360 Digital Influence team at Ogilvy, he writes the Influential
Marketing blog (now ranked among the top 50 marketing blogs in the
world) and is often featured as an expert in media including The Wall
Street Journal, BusinessWeek, and Fast Company. His new book,
published internationally by McGraw-Hill, has received significant
early praise and features a forward by bestselling author and
entrepreneur, Guy Kawasaki.

It is at an awesome venue and I am sure the guest list will not disappoint. Here are the details

Location:

Busboys and Poets

2021 14th St. NW
Washington DC 20009
Ph: 202-387-7638

RSVP - http://www.solutionsarepower-dc.eventbrite.com/

Hope to see many of you there !

SocialDevCamp East: Community Power

jimmy — Tue, 13 May 2008 00:34:32 +0000

As great as the event was this past weekend in Baltimore, what was even better was how it came together.

There was a very short lead time and David, Ann, and Keith did an awesome job pulling together such an organized event in such a short time. But who knows, it may not have happened ?? During the week before the event I saw Keith post a message on Twitter saying that they were like $900 short of breaking even on all of the expenses. Right away I jumped in and pledged $100 to help sponsor the event. More people soon followed and in no time the shortage was made up. (You can see Keith talk about it here)

What an awesome feeling, knowing how supportive the community is ! And how cool that we now have the tools like Twitter that made it possible to reach out to us in an instant fashion to start the ball rolling.

I am honored to have been able to help, especially after seeing how great the day was. And I am sure they rest of the the sponsors feel the same way.

New Twittervision Adds Local Capability

jimmy — Tue, 13 May 2008 00:14:56 +0000

Our friend David Troy, creater of Twittervision, and host of the recently awesome SocialDevCamp East, has gone and added a cool little nugget to the Twittervision. Whereas previouosly Twittervision showed us the tweets on a full map, we now have the ability to look a little more local. He released Twittervision Local, for lask of a better description. This link opens up a map of the local DC area and shows the tweets happening in the local DC area.

In my opinion, this is awesome. The big map was cool, but I could gain no real value out of it, like the Twitter public timeline. I dont think Twitter is good until you find that niche, which many times are people that are in the community around you. This is where you get the most value out of Twitter. Now the visual aid of the local Twittervision makes me aware of more people I would not have otherwise known about. Sure I see some people I am following, but many more I am not. I can click on their tweet and see what their all about and maybe meet them further enriching my experience.

David is a pioneer in the field. At SocialDevCamp, he lead a great session about Location Based Services. I was totally impressed by his depth of knowledge and how hard he is working to make the space better with initiatives like openlocation.org.

If you are not in the DC area, check out http://twittervision.com/local for a comprehensive list of other areas.

Recap: SocialDevCamp East

jimmy — Sun, 11 May 2008 21:11:33 +0000

Much has already been said and written about the event in Baltimore yesterday.

I can only say that Dave, Ann, and Keith did an increible job of bring this together in such a short time. I was proud to be able to help sponsor and even more proud to be involved and have such great discussions with all the great people.

It is great to see all the local talent come together, and like Greg said in his post above, there really was an awesome vibe.

I attended the following sessions:

EC2 and other AWS cloud computing
Location Based Services
Twitter/Microblogging
Washington area startup scene

There was not a bad apple in teh bunch. Great discussions and interaction, I learned a lot.

I met some great people who are working on some really cool things. Mike Subelsky, a Baltimore programmer, is working with an Austin based startup who is in semi stealth mode. Amy Hoy showed us here totally cool “app” called Twistori, giving us a different glimpse into the Twiiter stream.

Also ran into Patti, of 600block

We’re building a new website to help you and your friends find Baltimore’s top restaurants, bars, music, shops, events and more. It’s Baltimore’s best according to the people who live here. Personalize your own page and get cool city picks just for you. Baltimore never looked better.

I am totally looking forward to learning more about them and writing more in depth about what they are doing soon.

Overall, hands down, the best event of my year so far. I cannot wait till the fall and the next iteration.

A Great Startup Business Resource

jimmy — Sun, 11 May 2008 20:45:42 +0000

Many of us have some to be a “startup” purely from an idea that we had and have acted to make it come to fruition. But along the way, we are bombarded with so many intricacies of being a business, much less a startup business.
I know personally I often have many question about everything from finances, to legal issues, to patents and trademarks. The list seems endless.

I cam across a great resource today that I wanted to pass along to anyone who is interested and is also in need of much of this info.

It is an aggregate of some Y Combinator posts and looks to be a pretty extensive list.

You can check it out HERE.

SocialDevCamp East Video Collage

jimmy — Sun, 11 May 2008 06:11:40 +0000

I will have a more complete wrapup of a really great event, but wanted to put up this video collage of the pics I snapped during the day.

Photos in the collage courtesy of:
Jeff Kubina
Shashi Bellamkonda
Jared Goralnick
Jimmy Gardner

SocialDevCamp East

jimmy — Sat, 10 May 2008 13:59:25 +0000

Made it to Baltimore for the SocialDevCamp East. We are getting into the voting on the sessions and about to break out into the sessions.

Make sure to follow the hashtag #socialdevcamp, or look to flickr for the socialdevcamp tag.

Also we will try to get up some Utterz for your listening pleasures.

Technosailor Birthday Bash !

jimmy — Fri, 09 May 2008 13:16:52 +0000

I wanted to take a moment to give a “shout out” to our good friend Aaron Brazell, the Lead Editor of Technosailor, whose blog is about to turn 4 years old.

In theses days where blogs come and go, it is a true testament of Aaron’s staying power and his continued growth and influence in our space. I have come to know Aaron more and more recently as we both mingle around the local DC tech scene and it has been a pleasure to come to know him and learn from him at the same time.

So in honor of his blog’s b’day Aaron is having a little bash at Austin Grill downtown. All the details can be found here at the eventbrite page.

The event is limited to the first 50 peep’s so make sure you get over there to sign up as soon as you can, it is sure to be a sell out !

Congrats Aaron, looking forward to celebrating with you.

Twitter Use #298: Interview Questions

jimmy — Fri, 09 May 2008 12:33:14 +0000

No I don’t really know of 297 twitter uses, but it seems like there is a lot. At SXSW, we saw Twitter used by the crowd to start a mini-twitter riot during the Zuckerberg interview. Well at the Web 2.0 Expo the other day, Tim O’Reilly used it in another fashion during an interview with Sun CEO Jonathan Schwartz , well at least he tried.

Apparently at the last minute they found that they were not set up to take questions from the audience via a microphone. So Tim had a great idea, have the audience Twitter in their questions to his twitter account. Genious. As it turns out, he had his Twitter account set only to view @ replies from his followers, but nonetheless it was a great idea.

It was later through Tweescan that Tim actually saw the questions that were twitter’d in. He compiled them and sent them over via email to Jonathon who then took the time to answer them, which is pretty cool in and of itself.

These social media tools make everyone so relevant. They allow many of us unprecedented access to others we would have otherwise never had the opportunity to contact in the not so distant past. The playing field has evened out for everyone. Take full advantage of it.