Conferences Archive

Here are some upcoming Austin tech events worth checking out. For a regular listing of Austin tech events, Joshua Baer from OtherInbox has a weekly events newsletter that you can subscribe to here. Sadly it seems again most events are on Tuesday – so you are forced to select only one – a real shame considering that there are 4 other days in the week and the events would see more traffic if they spread out.

• Austin PHP – Tuesday – scaling PHP applications using Redis
• Your Internet Marketing Party – Tuesday – How to Use Human Psychology to Get Web Visitors and Cash (with Derek Halpern)
• Co-Founders Austin – Tuesday – held at the Microsoft office, this event is a matching event where new startups pitch to those looking to join a startup. Here’s an overview of how the meetup works. The event costs $10 to attend and free for the presenting startups. If you are interested in presenting, get in touch with the organizer (Ricardo Sanchez) asap.
• Austin Lean Startup Circle – Tuesday -October Meetup – Continuous Deployment Mechanics at IMVU – currently full
• Friday Night Hacks – Friday – “…is an opportunity to connect, share ideas, build cool stuff and launch projects into the community. We typically do this into the wee hours of the morning while indulging in delicious snacks, brewskies and copious amounts of caffeine.”
• Social Media Strategy Saturday Night @ American Bingo w/ Rachel Greenfield – Saturday – looks cool, you play bingo for an hour, meetup for an hour and then beer and bingo for another hour.

If you are in the Austin area, there are two networking events coming up that are worth checking out.

First up is the Austin Tech Fair which will be held next Monday, September 26 from 9am-4pm at the AT&T Conference Center near downtown. Last year over 1,100 people attended the tech fair which combines an expo hall with a number of talks on a variety of tech topics including Ruby on Rails, community building strategies and project management. The tech fair is free to attend.

I will be at the tech fair in the expo hall demoing CloudContacts – if you attend, please stop by and say hi. I have some goodies to give away and we can chat.

On October 5, the ProductCamp group will hold a networking event they call ProductParty. This event will also be held at the AT&T Conference Center in the evening and is a great way to meet other locals in the tech, product and marketing space. They are going to have a karaoke competition – I will enter – the only thing I have to decide is whether I go with Kris Kross – Jump, House of Pain – Jump Around or Snow – Informer.

You should bring a big stack of business cards and a smile to both events.

The big news in the startup world is that Israeli startup Shaker won the big prize at the Techcrunch conference this week. Many, including AOL employees, wonder what it is that Shaker is “disrupting” while others are talking about the conflicts regarding the finalists and AOL/CrunchFund’s funding of 2 of the top 3 and an upcoming investment in the winner. Of course questions are nothing new with Techcrunch (now aol) conferences – heck, I wrote about MC Hammer investment questions with regards to DanceJam at the first TC40.

When I saw Shaker, the first thing that popped into my head was, “oh it’s the new version of that game!” But I couldn’t remember the name of the game until Dean Collins replied to my message on the NYTM messageboard noting that Shaker is Leisure Suit Larry! And yep that’s exactly what it looks like.

TC writer Leena Rao describes Shaker as, “…a mixture of Second Life, The Sims, and Turntable.fm all mixed together using your Facebook data and connections. Your Facebook profile becomes a walking avatar, your pictures are placed on an virtual wall, you can choose what music is playing in the room for everyone to hear and you can even buy people drinks.”

Shaker looks like a fun game but what frustrated me in the Shaker demos is that the founders kept suggesting that this virtual world was, ” just like real life”. It is absolutely nothing like real life.

Rackspace startup blogger Robert Scoble seems to love Shaker – I just don’t see it here. I mean seriously – maybe I am missing something – but it’s a virtual world where you walk around and chat – AOL 1996 called. Sure you can click on a person and get their info but otherwise what, you dance on a bar? And just wait – the minute a woman “walks in” to the virtual chatroom, you will watch all the males run over. Something tells me these “bars” will be all male. Maybe it will work for the concert concept but even that will be a stretch.

As I watched the two demos of Shaker, I could only think of one thing (which applies to more than just Shaker)…

HOW ABOUT CALLING UP A COUPLE OF YOUR REAL FUCKING FRIENDS AND GOING OUT TO A REAL FUCKING BAR AND HAVING A DRINK OR DINNER AND SOME FUCKING CONVERSATION INSTEAD OF SITTING IN SOME FUCKING VIRTUAL WORLD.

And if you don’t have local friends or are new to your town, go to Meetup.com or Plancast, find a freaking meetup and get the gosh damn fuck out of your house. Walk up to a person, shake a hand, exchange a business card (heh), and smile. Learn something in your conversation.

I know it’s not easy to go outside and it’s way easier to stay home/office and chat on a social network or, now, play some 2.0 version of Leisure Suit Larry. But trust me, the more we sit at home and live online, the less we will be able to live offline.

Ok I am done. Now get out there and do something.

Today at the Capital Factory Demo Day, ethernet creator Bob Metcalfe provided the morning keynote. If you get a chance to hear him speak, you should go – he was a great speaker.

Bob shared 5 tips for startup success…

Tip #1 – Health

You don’t need to kill yourself to run a startup. Instead you have to take care of yourself and make sure your health is in order. You should sleep 8 hours every night.

Tip #2 – Writing

Bob suggests that you write as much as possible – what’s great is that today this is very easy to do with the available tools.

Tip #3 – Speaking

Bob talked about how great Steve Jobs is as a speaker. He suggests (which I agree with) that you speak as much as you can about your product or service.

Tip #4 – Selling

You should spend time selling – he notes people consider salespeople lower than pond scum but they are critical to a company. Even if you are a developer/engineer, you should still learn how to and sell. At a minimum you need to sell your team on why they should follow your direction.

Tip #5 – Planning

Bob explained how important it is that you have a plan. His company (3com) used the acronym MOST – mission, objectives, strategies, tactics. He noted that each year at 3com they would adjust MOST as needed.

I like Bob’s suggestions and I can confirm that health is the most important thing when it comes to the early days of a company.

The first Austin Startup Week is here! Beginning tomorrow and continuing for the balance of the week, a number of startup-related events will take place around the city. I will be at most of the events representing CloudContacts and will have my camcorder so hit me up for an interview for your startup.

You can find a full list of the Austin Startup Week events on the calendar and below are some of the events to check out:

• ATX Startup Crawl – Wednesday – check out the offices of a bunch of downtown Austin startups
• Capital Factory Demo Day – Wednesday – event is sold out but you can watch a livestream, several keynotes plus launch demos from the Capital Factory incubator and a number of Austin startup demos in the afternoon
• OpenCoffee – Thursday – casual gathering of folks discussing tech topics
• StartupBazaar – Thursday – at City Hall – startups will demo their services (I am trying to get CloudContacts in to demo) and free startup coaching offered
• Austin Tech Happy Hour – Thursday evening – I attended this once before (the one day that it flurried!) and it was a great event – very casual, bar atmosphere, no demos just conversation
• I Can Haz Mobile and Gaming – Friday – half-day mini-conference with speakers on the topics of gaming and mobile
• API Hackday ATX – Saturday – all day hackathon with some groovy prizes

It looks like it’s not just the weather which has heated up to record levels – the Austin tech events circuit has some good looking events throughout the next couple of months. Here are some of my picks for events around the Austin, Texas area. Please leave others in the comments and I will append the post. It seems like Austin suffers from the same issue that NYC does – too many events scheduled on the same day each month – hey organizers, there’s plenty of days in the month to spread out and maximize attendance!

• August 6 – ProductCamp Unconference – free
• August 9 – Austin PHP Frameworks Series – free – covering Syfony framework
• August 9 – Austin Lean Startup Circle – free – “Customers Don’t Always Have All the Answers – Case Study”
• August 9 – Austin Internet Marketing Party – $20 – “How You Can Get FREE Web Traffic & Make Over $10k a Month! (By EX-Truck Driver)”
• August 9 – Refresh Austin – free – “Tax Tips for a New (or Growing) Business & Tool Roundup”
• August 11-13 – Lone Star Ruby Conference – starts at $400
• August 20/27 – Girl Develop It – $80 – Intro to Javascript and Jquery (I am not sure if they allow men into this event)
• September 6-10 – Austin Startup Week – variety of events around the city and it looks like the events are all free
• October 1-2 – BigAndroidBBQ – $25 – claims to be the biggest community gathering of Android users. I am hearing there will be an Apple iPhone bonfire but that’s just a rumor.

The ProductCamp “unconference” is coming back to Austin on August 6, 2011. The event will be held at the AT&T Conference Center on the University of Texas campus (the center is very well laid out for events!). ProductCamp is free to attend and registration is limited.

Unlike some unconferences where the agenda is decided on the day of the event with sticky notes, ProductCamp has a list of proposed sessions and you can suggest a session as well. Some of the proposed suggestions include: Business Dangers and Delights of Daily Deals, Let’s Play Buy a Feature, The Product Manager Pathfinder, To Be or Not Be Free and Creating Value through Product Innovation.

There will be a “Recruiting Roundup” which provides, “a dedicated time and location during ProductCamp for hiring companies to connect with the exceptional Product Management & Marketing professionals.” There is a $350 registration fee for companies that want to participate – the fee is used to support the overall event.