Entries Tagged 'business' ↓

In May, several of us put together SocialDevCamp East at University of Baltimore.  It was an incredible day, filled with deep technical content as well as excellent discussions of business strategy and the very real challenges that east coast companies face breaking into the consumer-facing Internet space.

The day was universally hailed as a success, and maybe even a little bit of a breakthrough: for the first time, the “Amtrak corridor” tech communities had come together to face the challenges of the future together as a unified ecosystem, not just as individuals.  The result was a phenomenal mixing of technical, business, and artistic topics and in my mind, was a glimpse of the future.

So, we’re back at it on November 1st, 2008.  You can sign up on the barcamp wiki or on Facebook.

We’re looking forward to another great event, and another awesome afterparty at Brewer’s Art.  Go ahead and start your juices flowing for what sessions you would like to see, and post them to the Wiki.

We’re also looking for sponsors for both the event and the after party.  To find out more, please contact us.

See you in November in Baltimore!

Yesterday I met up with Jeff Pulver to discuss some business ideas, and one of the topics we touched on was, “If you could build any iPhone app, what would it be?”

The new iPhone 3G and the imminent release of the App Store have created an amazing amount of buzz and speculation about what the next generation of mobile apps might be.

While I am unable to comment on any of my iPhone development efforts or the details of the iPhone SDK, I thought it might be interesting to ask here as well, “If you could build any iPhone app, what would it be?”

So, simple as that. What is your ideal “killer app” for iPhone? Write your idea here, and maybe we’ll build it!

I just want to say thank you to everyone that showed up to make SocialDevCamp yesterday such a huge success. I say it was a success not as an organizer, but as a participant. I learned a ton of practical information yesterday and made contact with dozens of talented people, most of whom are either nearby or a short train ride away.

I can rant and rave about how great yesterday was, but here’s what others are saying:

• “Dude – we were surrounded by talented folks – I think I talked myself out – so many interesting things happening.” — Bear
• “I think its official #socialdevcamp is the best event Baltimore has seen in a LONG time.” — Greg Cangialosi
• “Thanks for setting up #socialdevcamp yesterday. I thought the discussion was quite insightful & well-organized.” — kyeung808
• “@chrisbrogan Morning chris, you missed an awesome SocialDevCamp yesterday” — Jimmy Gardner
• “Good day at socialdevcamp (always a good day when you make friends with an MIT post doc)… also, I’m Bill Pardy.” — James Lombardi
• “Socialdevcamp was perfect. Met so many great people. Totally worth the sore vocal chords.” — Amy Hoy
• “What a day! socialdevcamp was seriously a lot of fun, the after party even a little more so.” — vees
• “After working with the highly esteemed @cyberhorse for 5 years, I met him for the first time today at #socialdevcamp” — Keith Casey

Honestly it all makes me a little emotional.  This is our community.  These people are the future of innovation, and we’re committed to making a go of it here along the silicon rails of the Amtrak east-coast corridor. I am so incredibly proud to be associated with this community, and the notion that we all have a stake in making the east coast a better place to start and run businesses.  More on that later.

I also want to especially thank all of the people who helped make the event possible on the unimaginably short time schedule of 25 days notice: our sponsors (listed here) as well as Melanie Kelleher of Kelleher Consulting for her invaluable assistance with the venue, the catering and at the registration table, Jen Gunner with the Greater Baltimore Technology Council for their support and encouragement, my wife Jennifer Troy for her help with a thousand details and the afterparty, and of course the event co-chairs Ann Bernard and Keith Casey who enlisted the support of their networks and helped shape and promote the event.  People wondered how we could do this so quickly, and it was because everybody involved is a superstar in one way or another; you couldn’t ask for a better event team!

We also need to make special mention of one person who was indispensable in making the event the success that it was: Jim Kucher at the University of Baltimore deserves huge kudos for securing the terrific space at the Thumel Business Center at a deeply discounted price.  Without the University’s support yesterday, as we all experienced it, would not have been possible.  Lots of folks mentioned that the space was really exemplary as a Barcamp-compatible space:  a large common area for mixing and meals, a great auditorium with theater style seating, and four, easy-to-find and easy-to-use breakout rooms.  We really could not have asked for a better space.

Also thanks to Brewer’s Art for putting up with the flash mob that colonized their Saturday happy hour.  We warned them that we were coming, but they might not have expected the sheer numbers and zeal that the SocialDevCamp crowd exhibited yesterday!

• Take a look at the Flickr photos that were generated.
• Jimmy Gardner (@jjgardner3) made a an awesome Animoto photo collage video. Check it out!
• Shashi Bellamkonda created a thorough recap of the day and of the coverage
• Greg Cangialosi has an awesome post that echoes my sentiments perfectly!
• Ann Bernard has a great summary of the content of the day’s events
• Kenneth Yeung made videos of many of the sessions
• We recorded several videos yesterday using Qik: shashi, davetroy
• If you have media to share, please post a comment here!

One thing is certain:  yesterday was a big success and it affirmed our belief that there is a need for exactly this kind of event and community in our region.  We will be planning a second event, SocialDevCamp East Fall 2008, for September.  Date TBD soon!

I will be writing more about my reflections on yesterday in the coming days.  Right now, I need to finish a presentation for the O’Reilly Where 2.0 conference on the openlocation.org initiative I am working on, and get on a plane to San Francisco at 6:00.

As we gear up for SocialDevCamp East in Baltimore on May 10, one of the things that we’d like to highlight is the diversity of Web 2.0 talent available here on the east coast.

The conventional wisdom today says that to make it as a social startup, you should a) move to San Francisco (preferably East Bay or SOMA), b) meet a bunch of cool people (natch), c) get funded (cake!), d) get featured in TechCrunch, e) build your startup to 500,000 users, f) get snapped up in an early acquisition by Google for $90M, g) repeat.

For lots of reasons, the odds of this working are low and getting lower. Why? For one, this is the conventional wisdom; everybody’s doing it, why shouldn’t you? Loads of ditto-heads are creating a glut of ideas. They all can’t win.

Second, VC investments are often a trailing indicator of successful business sectors. VCs follow what has worked previously, which leads to persistent failures at the end of a business cycle. Why else do you think they need to rely on outrageous 100x returns? To make up for their last round of losses.

Why do you live where you do? Family, a partner, school, friends, or do you simply love where you live? There are countless talented people who have made the same choice as you, and they’ve made this choice not as a runner-up to a life of glory in the Bay area. They’ve made the choice as a matter of personal identity and conviction.

As I meet members of the tech business community along the east coast, I hear two things consistently. One, that the Bay area is getting weird these days, and that they are “all smoking the same air.” Second, that the “VC community doesn’t get it here,” and that it’s hard to get funding and launch a web-based startup on the east coast.

Sorry, but we can’t have it both ways. We must choose: do you want to live in the Bay Area and sustain the vagaries of that echo-chamber culture, or do you want to grow where you’re planted and build viable businesses here?

The fact is that we can’t expect to improve the tech startup climate on the east coast if we don’t come together and make it what we want it to be. And that means we need to stop looking over our shoulder at the west coast and start building businesses here and now, using telework, co-work, or traditional workspaces.

The 37signals blog covered this topic today, and reflected many of my opinions on the subject.

This is part of what we want to address at SocialDevCamp East. If we want to have a thriving startup culture here, we need to build it — one relationship at a time.