Review of SocialDevCamp East – Fall 2008
November 12, 2008 :: Steve FisherI mentioned in an earlier post that I was headed to SocialDevCamp East on Nov 1, 2008 for their fall session. They held their first one back in the spring and Alex Hillman wrote about Dave Troy organizing Social Dev Camp East which was to address a 37 signals blog post about building web companies outside of San Francisco.
We have many web companies in the DC metro area (Baltimore, DC and Northern VA) that are thriving and building a strong community. It is well known that this area has always been strong for IT because of the Federal Government and contractors. Over the last 10 years we have been building a strong web community that serves the government clients and the private sector. I think this gives us a balance and helped us when the bubble burst eight years ago to not feel the impact as sharply as Silicon Valley felt and is feeling again today with the economic downturn really impacting these web 2.0 companies.
Still, innovation must continue and companies must grow or die. SocialDevCamp was designed to help them grow and I am glad I didn’t miss this one (I missed the first one).
On November 1st, a few hundred of the East Coast’s finest social technologists gathered at the University of Baltimore for a day of exchange and creation, relationship and application building alike. The event was organized by Dave Troy of Twittervision fame and Ann Bernard, CEO of Yut Media and WhyGoSolo. Topics included but were not limited to iPhone app development, Google Analytics, Raising VC funding, Location Based Services and even “Finding a Job in Social Media” given by Shashi.
I even got to give an impromptu session on “Rules for Entrepreneurs” which was a list of lessons I have learned over the years running two businesses and making LOTS of mistakes. It was very successful and I was motivated to turn this into a written series that will start in 2009.
Here are other blogs covering the event:
- Ahson Wardak
- Alex Hillman
- Chris Busse
- Lindy Dreyer
- Maddie Grant
- Dave Troy
- Mike Subelsky
- Lotame
- Akshay Java
- Apps for Democracy
- DC Piazza
- Mark Scrimshire aka ekivemark
- Maxine Teller aka mixtmedia
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