Category: Conferences

Gnomedex

Pix from Gnomedex

Post author By Randy Stewart
Post date August 23, 2007

Not sure why I didn’t think of this before, but thanks Paul Stamatiou for reminding me of this lovely tool.

Here is a slideshow of my Flickr pictures from Gnomedex 2007.

Created with Admarket’s flickrSLiDR.

Gnomedex

Gnomedexmen ’07 comic book cover

Post author By Randy Stewart
Post date August 13, 2007
2 Comments on Gnomedexmen ’07 comic book cover

Ah Comic Life, how I’ve wanted to use you for some time. Gnomedex ’07 was full of comic book characters so it only seems appropriate to create a comic to summarize the experience.

I had a great time at the conference and met a lot of great people. Now, to go get some social network fatigue…

A larger image is on Flickr. Please share.

Conferences Gnomedex

Gnomedex 2007

Post author By Randy Stewart
Post date August 8, 2007

I’m a wee bit excited about this year’s Gnomedex. Not as excited as that man —> ,
but excited nevertheless.

Last year was my first and my good pal Jeremy Zawodny (who is mysteriously absent from this list) was kind enough to show me around and introduce me to folks. I met a lot of really great people and am still enjoying the benefits of new friendships and business relationships.

Anyway, I had a great time and am pleased to be going again this year. I hope to meet many of you there.

Who’s coming?

If you are going to the show and what to get a sense of who is going to be there, I’ve created a series of pages on Netvibes so that you can go peruse the works of the people that will be attending. I used the OPML file provided on the Eventbrite page and imported and sorted all the attendees by last name.

Now this was the best way I could figure out how to represent such a large number of people, if you’ve got a better solution, respond or fire me an email to randy@boxbe.com. If I don’t know you, you’ll have to add yourself to my buddy list for email, but it’s pretty easy.

Clicking on the buttons below will create a Netvibes page to view the blogs of the attendees whose last names are with those letters. Netvibes wisely would not let me add all the feeds onto one page.

Gnomedex site

Conferences

Wordcamp 2007

Post author By Randy Stewart
Post date July 22, 2007

Great meetup of the WordPress faithful this year in San Francisco.

More comments later, cause man am I tired.

Conferences

Down in SF this week

Post author By Randy Stewart
Post date April 18, 2007

Just a quick note to anyone and everyone… I’m down in SF this week for Boxbe, Web 2.0 expo and Podcast Hotel if you want to meet up. Give me a call or shoot me an email.

cell: 415.297.4215
email: randy@boxbe.com

Conferences

Austin bound – SXSW this weekend

Post author By Randy Stewart
Post date March 10, 2007

I’m beginning to think conferences are my job… I think SXSW will make my 4th conference this year…oy. Maybe I’m just fulfilling my dream to be a trucker being on the road again.

If you’re in Austin this week(end) give me a shout! Email me at randy@boxbe.com if you want to talk social media, Boxbe, Bay Area vs Seattle, or where to get good BBQ in Austin. Look forward to seeing you there.

Blogging Conferences Cool Tools Northern Voice 2007 Software

Mac blogger toolkit – Northern Voice 2007

Post author By Randy Stewart
Post date February 26, 2007
3 Comments on Mac blogger toolkit – Northern Voice 2007

CBC columnist and Mac geek, Tod Maffin ran another great session at Moosecamp around favorite productivity tools. Below are my favorites from the session.

ImageWell – Swiss Army knife for images (free)
Paparazzi – takes screenshots of full web pages.
TextExpander – condenses messages, phrases or code that you might reuse all the time into short keystrokes.
VoodooPad – wiki for your Mac. BEST NOTEPAD EVER!
Synergy – software for using one keyboard and mouse with two computers (and screens). Kind of like a KVM…
Hazel – best maid for cleaning up your Mac.
BrowserShots.org – test web designs on 31 different browser platforms.
QuickSilver – I’m hoping I’ll get this one day, but for now, I’ll point it out to all all of you

More tools

Audio of the session

image by Flickr user katiew

Conferences Digital Cameras

PhotoCamp at Northern Voice

Post author By Randy Stewart
Post date February 26, 2007

Kris Krug, photographer extraordinaire, organized a conference within a unconference within a conference at this year’s Northern Voice. He collected an exceptional panel of other photogs and tech geeks.

High end consumer cameras

Tim Bray did a talk on high end compact cameras. Made me think about using the G3 again. It does shoot in RAW and it has the intervolator. I wonder if the G6 has that? If you are looking for a new camera, Tim posted his talk at the here.

Tim’s talk brought up some points that I’m always thinking about: I love my Canon Rebel, but there are serious costs to bringing it with me all the time. It takes beautiful pictures, but it’s big and bulky. The vast majority of the photos that I take are on my Canon SD450. Maybe I could learn to use it a bit better…

Color Profile Love

A huge THANK YOU to Matt Trent at UBC for teaching me in 10 minutes everything I needed to know about color profiles in Photoshop. I sat through an hour at a Macworld session years ago from someone who worked at Adobe and I didn’t get it. Now, I think I’ve got all I need to know.

The secret – if you work on a Mac and are posting photos online work with Adobe SRGB. Why? Safari reads numerous color profiles, but almost no other browser does. The color profile is smaller than Adobe RGB, but it is the lowest common denominator, thus will look the same on most browsers.

Hopefully, next year I’ll get to see your lab and work in HDR.

Matt Trent’s Moosecamp Presentation

Adobe Lightroom

Roland Tanglao led a session about Adobe Lightroom, which looks a lot like if iPhoto and Adobe Bridge had a kid. Oh, and apparently, in the photo world, black is the new white.

Lots of good features here, but not enough to pull me into another app. One interesting thing, though, it looked like Roland was running an older G4 laptop, but Lightroom really seemed to fly. If you’re looking for something a little more robust than iPhoto, Lightroom might be for you.

Thanks everyone for such an informative session! Look forward to seeing you next year.

Conferences Northern Voice 2007

Pix from Northern Voice

Chris Heuer, Social Media Club founder and all-around nice guy, has a great set of pictures up on Flickr from the conference so far.

Check them out here.

All Northern Voice photos on Flickr are here.

Photo by (or at least in his feed) Chris Heuer

Building Community Conferences Links

10 tips for meeting people at industry events

Post author By Randy Stewart
Post date February 8, 2007
2 Comments on 10 tips for meeting people at industry events

My friend Andrew Chen has posted his thoughts on meeting people at conferences. Great list if you are in the mood to meet folks in your industry. Here are a few of the points:

Use pre-conference time wisely
Arrive early for some 1:1 time
Sit next to interesting people, and introduce yourself
Bring business cards, and ask for business cards

Some of these things might appear dead obvious, but you would be surprised how many people don’t follow them. Fact is, even if you are shy about meeting folks, other people are as well. Keep in mind, the main reason why people attend these events is to meet people.

Andrew, btw, just moved to Silicon Valley from Seattle. He’s an Entrepreneur in Residence at the VC firm, Mohr Davidow Ventures on Sand Hill Road. Sounds like a dream job to me! If you’re looking to get a company off the ground or join a startup, he might just be the guy to talk to.

As I’ve mentioned, I’ll be in Palo Alto this weekend and spending a little time in San Francisco on Monday and Tuesday.

Read

Apple Conferences Home Entertainment HTPCs Macintosh Macworld

Macworld 2007

Post author By Randy Stewart
Post date January 10, 2007

Just a few quick general impressions from the show today.

iPhone and AppleTV

First, iPhone and AppleTV are two huge new platforms for Apple to develop and deserved the spotlight today. That said, not really being able to touch or to truly get a “live” demo of the iPhone was a bit of a bummer. I guess this is why Apple usually doesn’t release products that aren’t done.

[Jan 10, 2007 – David Pogue gets a hands on with the iPhone – “Typing is difficult”

The AppleTV seems to be on the surface of things a great platform for Apple to develop. That said, I think they may need to do some convincing to those of use with HDTVs. While photos look great on this device, video was …lacking. Maybe it’s the fact that I was looking at a 42″ HD set from less than 3 feet away, but video looked kind of horrible. I’m not sure if it is the device or the video, but man, it didn’t look good.

Fanboy Whining

No Macworld would be complete without a little complaining. I know we’ll see it soon, but I really, really wanna see what Leopard looks like. I get that two big products were introduced today, but what’s shipping from today? Typically, we get a little software to play with before the hardware ships, so I’m bummed that we didn’t get iLife ’07 today. I suspect that it is tied to the features in Leopard we haven’t seen yet.

Finally

From a visit to Macworld perspective, Macworld is pretty boring. Folks at home are getting as much of a hands on experience as we are at the show. However, the AppleTV and iPhone launch are the most significant new directions we have seen from Apple in years. Exciting times, indeed.

More pictures from the show

Conferences

MindCamp 3.0

Image by chadum

I’ve got a crazy week this week, but I wanted to say a few things about MindCamp 3.0 this weekend.

First off, Andru, Stuart and the rest of the gang – Thanks for putting on such a fine unconference. This was my first unconference and to quickly organize chaos so well was really impressive. The high level of interactivity of the conference and the quality and caliber of the folks that I met made the conference stand out from any I’ve been to in the past.

A few specific mentions

Coffee hacks by Jack Bell (pictured) was spectacular. I can’t wait to roast my own beans. Now, to figure out what the heck that single serve coffee device was… anyone, anyone?

The guys from Menuism are looking for ways to build their community and lots of good suggestions came their way.

My session on using gaming mechanics to make sites fun brought a bigger crowd than I expected. Got lots of great feedback on what folks considered fun. Thanks everyone for making my first time talking about this to a group enjoyable.

I met some fun, young Microsofties, whose business cards I didn’t get. If you’re reading this, gimme a shout some time. Sorry to slag Vista so much…

Elizabeth Grigg has a nice summary of various sessions.
Karen Anderson has a great post about general impressions of MindCamp.

More later

[thanks for the pointer/embed code, Scott Beale]

Who’s coming?

image by Flickr user katiew

High end consumer cameras

Color Profile Love

Adobe Lightroom

Photo by (or at least in his feed) Chris Heuer

iPhone and AppleTV

Fanboy Whining

Finally

Image by chadum