Archive for the 'Events' Category

02
May

Heading to Maker Faire 2008

By Randy Stewart 0 Comments
Categories: Events

makerfaire.com_ Maker Faire.jpg

About to get on a plane and head down to the San Francisco Bay Area for the annual Maker Faire this weekend.

This is the first Maker Faire I’ve attended and I’ll be bringing Heather and Olivia in tow for the event. We’re all pretty excited for some hard core nerdery this weekend.

What is the Maker Faire?

From the site:

Maker Faire is a two-day, family-friendly event that celebrates the Do-It-Yourself (DIY) mindset. It’s for creative, resourceful people of all ages and backgrounds who like to tinker and love to make things.

The event takes place Saturday and Sunday at the San Mateo Fairgrounds.

If you are unfamiliar with the Maker Faire, here’s a little video.

If you’re going and want to meet up, call me at 415.297.4215. Alternatively, I’ll be on Twitter with status updates all weekend, so follow me here. Hope to see you there.

01
May

Seattle Social Media Club Meeting Tonight

By Randy Stewart 0 Comments
Categories: Events, Social Media, Social Media Club and Twitter

social_media_club_logo.gifI’m doing a talk tonight at the Seattle Social Media Club Meeting tonight about using Twitter for business purposes.

Here’s the skinny:

Seattle Social Media Club
A Published Stream of Consciousness: Do Business and Micro-blogging Mix?
Thursday, May 1, 6:30 – 8 p.m.
Text 100 Office

Micro-blogging services such as Twitter are continually growing in popularity, but many business people are asking how this fits into their professional life. Announcing to friends that you’re “exhausted from a late Saturday night” or “going to buy tickets to the TP concert…anyone interested?” seems far removed from anything co-workers (much less your boss!) wants to know.

While Twitter is great for personal use, many companies are using micro-blogging to enhance their business communications as well.

Join the Seattle Social Media Club to discover how you can use micro-blogging services to enhance your personal brand, grow and strengthen your business network, notify customers, promote your blog and more.

Randy Stewart, social media strategist and Senior Product Manager of Boxbe will be presenting short introduction to Twitter and microblogging followed by an interactive forum designed to help you get the most out of your micro-blogging feed

Let us know you are coming by signing up here.

13
Mar

SXSWi 2008 in pictures

By Randy Stewart 1 Comment
Categories: Events, Geek Fun, Pictures, SXSW and SXSW 2008


Created with Admarket’s flickrSLiDR.

I’ve been taking pictures of events for almost a year now and SXSWi was clearly the biggest event that I had undertaken. South by Southwest is both rewarding and grueling in the sense that meeting great folks, learning new things, trying to upload photos in somewhat real time while trying to get sleep is pretty difficult. You can sleep when you’re dead…

I’m not taking pictures for anything other than fun and personal enrichment (and to give something back to the folks who give so much of themselves to putting on these events). I really enjoy the work that Kris Krug [kk+] and Scott Beale [Laughing Squid] have been doing for years and hope to be as good as they are some day. I’m really thankful for all the tips and tricks that they have shared with me in the last year.

Not all the photos are gems, but I cut this group of pictures down from 700 pictures that I took down to about 160. If you want to see with folks on Flickr like best, go here for my 12 most “interesting” photos from South by Southwest Interactive 2008.

FYI - I’m shooting on a Canon Rebel XTi with mainly a Canon 50mm f/1.4 lens.

You can view the rest of my Flickr stream here.

20
Feb

Ignite Seattle pix

By Randy Stewart 0 Comments
Categories: Ignite Seattle and Pictures

Ignite Seattle Screen

I’ve posted my pix from last night’s Ignite Seattle event.

Ignite Seattle is a tech geek meetup held semi-irregularly that brings out some of the best and brightest in the Puget Sound region.

Had a great time and hope the next one isn’t so far off in the future. Wish my pix were better, but I’m still new at this whole photography thing.

Here is a link to my photos on Flickr - http://www.flickr.com/photos/stewtopia/

Feel free to use my photos in blog posts and what not, just link back here for attribution.

09
Aug

Ignite Seattle 4 - Hot night in Seattle

By Randy Stewart 1 Comment
Categories: Ignite Seattle and Seattle

ignite_mcclure.jpgOk, so it was a smidge warm inside. Why I thought wearing a long sleaved shirt was a good idea, I’ll never know.

I try very hard to not be one of those people who incessantly compare this to that, saying it was better when blah blah blah. I remember lamenting at Ignite 3 that the draconian format had lost it’s edge as people got more accustomed to doing 5 minute presentations with auto advancing slides.

Last night, I got over it.

Wow… what a great event last night. So many good speakers, so many good ideas. Thanks again Brady (and Bre, wherever you may be) for a great night out.

I took a lot of photos last night but didn’t take many notes. I’ll collect what I’ve found below.

  • Fluvial has a behind the scenes video
  • Great summaries of the talks from Brett Nordquist here.
  • Nanotech speaker Deepak Singh offers his comments

Video from Bryan Zug and PowerPoints of the talks will be up on the Ignite Blog soon.

Oh ya, and Noonhat still scares the shit out of me.

05
Apr

Ignite Seattle tonight (with a special Social Media Club half-time meetup)

By Randy Stewart 0 Comments
Categories: Geek Fun, Ignite Seattle, Seattle and Social Media Club

See… I’m back on the bike. Really, I blog regularly… really.

Tonight in Seattle for one night only, Ignite! If you are a geek in Seattle and haven’t made it out to an Ignite Seattle event, you are truly missing out.

Bre Pettis and Brady Forrest from O’Reilly are brilliant hosts for what has been great fun. If you are a Maker, you’ll want to join in on the Paper Airplane Challenge at 6:30.

boxbe.gif
If you are in the social media scene, Chris Heuer will be on hand leading a meeting of the Social Media Club. He’s in town tonight to meet up with Seattle’s movers and shakers in the social media scene.

In either case, if you are perpetually late like me, don’t be late for the Ask Me Later presentations, which are guaranteed to be good, well, at least if they’re not, they only last 2 minutes. Being a little ADD addled, 2 minutes for an idea, a pitch, or a cause is a great way to get creativity flowing.

I’m pretty excited about going tonight as the first one was so much fun and I regretfully missed the second one, which was even bigger than the first.

Details from the site:

6:00 - Doors Open
6:30 - Paper Airplane Challenge Begins
8:00 - Break
8:30 - Ask Later Talks: Round 1 begins (full schedule)
9:15 - Break
9:45 - Ask Later Talks: Round 2 begins
10:30 - End of Ignite

Hope to see you there.

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