Grow Smart Business Conference – Register Now!

Don’t forget to register for the first Grow Smart Business conference coming up on Sept 29 in Washington, DC at the Renaissance Hotel. Here is the summary on the event:

Join us for a premier one-day event featuring renowned small business leaders and well-known industry experts, including keynote speaker Chris Anderson.

Small business owners and entrepreneurs should attend to learn how to overcome challenges that all small businesses face. Attendees will hear from an outstanding group of panelists for concrete takeaways including:

• Proven strategies for business growth despite the current economy
• Executable, cost-effective ways to market and promote their businesses
• Knowledge of what banks believe is the key to securing small business financing
• Actionable ideas for integrating and leveraging social media into existing marketing and communications efforts

Presented By:

Great Content from the Solutions Are Power bloggers

Many of you come to the blog on a regular basis and we have been putting out content that is focused on helping you grow your online business. We are about to unveil a new look for the blog and will be moving a newspaper column format with Joe, Ken, Shashi and myself having distinct column names with improved focus. In the mean time we thought we would share some great posts from Solutions Are Power that you might have missed:

Celebrating Twitterville with Network Solutions by Ken Yeung

Smart Working Book Review – Never Eat Alone by Keith Ferrazzi by Steven Fisher

Maybe You Can Stop Reality From Being Real: Augmented, Artificial, and Virtual Reality by Joe Loong

Gnomedex 9-Day 1: A Conference Unlike Any Others I’ve Been To Before. by Ken Yeung

Blocking Twitter Spam Followers: Does It Matter? by Joe Loong

Chris Pirillo is the creator of Gnomedex and is know for his TV work and his online show that is currently on his site, Lockergnome.

Last year, there was the first standing ovation at Gnomedex where the guy who drives the Mars Rover (how cool is that?) showed in his closing remarks an image of earth which was the first picture taken of our little blue marble from another planet – awesome. It got a standing ovation and took the conference to a whole new level.

This year did not disappoint and as you might have read in Ken’s recap of Day 1, Chris Brogan and Julien Smith talked about Trust Agents which is their book that just released and is now a NY Times Best Seller. It was capped at the end of the day with Drew Olanoff who I have known for a few years and first met at Podcamp Pittsburgh in 2006. He is an awesome guy and it was truly sad to hear that he had been diagnosed with Lymphoma cancer. Drew Olanoff is a community director at GOGII and currently resides in Philadelphia, PA. He has turned the unlikeliest of situations into a new media campaign based around Twitter hashtags called #blamedrewscancer. It is an awesome idea and is backed by the Livestrong Foundation showing the power of using Social Media for powerful change in this world.

Day 2 – The Awesomeness continues

Starting out, Frank Eliason from Comcast gave us an entertaining presentation on the 10 best ways to use Twitter. We had some great content all day but the last two presentations of the day just blew us all away and left our brains in a tapioca state.

Mark Horvath was up to talk about Social Media for Change. I thought that this was going to be a nice presentation on using Twitter or blogging or something. Boy was I wrong.

Mark took $45, a laptop, an iPhone and social media to develop InvisiblePeople.tv in November 2008 to tell the stories of homelessness. He showed videos of some of these “forgotten people” and truly humanized a topic that we ignore in our day to day lives. At the end of the presentation he introduced us to James, a homeless man who was looking well and working hard to get back on his feet. He was in middle of working toward saving enough money for his first and last month rent payment to get an apartment.

What do we do at Gnomedex? We take action.

Like the presentation from Beth Canter last year, this year we passed a hat around quietly on both sides of the aisle and raised $3000 in 20 minutes. Enough for James to get an apartment.

This crowd just humbles me and blows me away with each passing year.

If that didn’t make you cry, stand up and clap and feel like we can use technology to conquer any social ill, Amber Case was up to blow our minds and show us how we are almost all cyborgs or we eventually all will be.

I am very fond of Amber and she is someone that I love having a stimulating and intelligent conversation with especially over a beer. Amber is a Cyborg Anthropologist and New Media Consultant from Portland, Oregon. She founded CyborgCamp, an unconference on the future of humans and technology. She can be found online at http://www.twitter.com/caseorganic

In her talk she showed us the first cyborgs and how with all our devices that we are are pretty much a cyborg in one way. At the end of the presentation she said that she had a lot more to include but said that she “didn’t think our brains were properly formatted at this time of the day”. Awesome.

Coming Next Week – 50 people 1 question – “What Makes a Great Website”

During Gnomedex I used the Flip camera and got quick 30-60 second responses to one simple question. That question was “What Makes a Great Website”. Think of this like a video Rorschach test. Let me just say that the results were fascinating. I am still editing and should have that ready for next week.

Other great links to Gnomedex coverage:

Real Networks Recap

Thinkers and Doers

The Intersection of People and Process

Media Shift

CNN

Microsoft Surface

Tech News World

Bacon is My Enemy

It is put on by, Chris Pirillo, the Original Gnome or “OG” and his Lockergnome crew in the beautiful city of Seattle. As I said in my post last year, “I have been to many conferences in the past and I have to say this is one of the best out there. Little things like working wi-fi for everyone, power in every seat to make your liveblogging acheiveable and awesome food that you would find at really expensive conferences”. This Gnomedex should be no different. In fact there will be a few surprises for us to announce as the date gets closer.

The Network gang attending Gnomedex this year has grown to include Ken Yeung, I am sorry, “The” Ken Yeung as he is known to all his fans (including me).

Like many conferences, the best conversations are usually in the hallways and this conference is one par with SXSW in that vein. Gnomedex has actually come to be known as the “affordable TED for everyone”. I really like that and suggested three years ago that Chris call the conference “GnomeTED”. Chris limits attendance to around 350-400 which makes it possible to meet almost everyone if you work hard and he really leverages web tools to connect people and employs backchannels like IRC and Twitter live to show what people are thinking as the presenter is speaking. He also does a live video feed for fans who can’t be there.

To check out who will be there in addition to Shashi and me, here is the attendee list (another great thing that most conferences don’t do) and the agenda which is going to be entertaining and educational.

Blogging from Gnomedex

We will be blogging from the conference every day (Thursday-Saturday) and capturing lots of interviews that should be rolling off the presses for publishing next week and into September. Ken will also be taking lots of awesome pictures that will be part of a Flickr feed we will have online soon.

Special Gnomedex Offer

We will be announcing a special offer for  Gnomedex attendees and those watching the event online can take advantage of for a limited time. More details to come on that soon.

If you want to follow the happenings at the conference check out twitter and friendfeed which should be quite busy starting Thursday evening.

I got to meet some new people and reconnect with old friends. One of the new friends I made was Giovanni Galluci of Viewzi, a Dallas-based startup. They are doing some cool stuff with search and have a killer interface. They are a “ridiculously visual search engine” according to Giovanni and function on a meta level. This means they work with numerous search engines and interpret the search and present in the most relevant way. You should check out Viewzi yourself to get the full picture and see how awesome this search tool is for everyone. Check out my inteview with him below:

This past August, Shashi Bellamkonda (AKA Social Media Swami) and I had the opportunity to attend Gnomedex 2008. Gnomedex is like the TED (Technology, Entertainment and Design) in that it has innovative speakers, a cutting edge variety of topics and is focused in one track. It is different in that anyone can come, costs $500 vs $8000 (for TED) to come and everyone is accessible. It is put on by Chris and Ponzi Pirillo who are wonderful people and put on one of the best events of the year.

I was able to spend some time with Greg and he shared some important advice on creating great email campaigns:

- Sponsoring Events is important for branding and being an influencer

- The basis of all successful email campaigns start with a great database

- There must be frequency (but not too much) with relevant content along with functional opt-in/opt-out capabilities.

They also launched a few months ago their blog for customers and practitioners in the email marketing space. It is called “The Thinking Inbox“. Check it out but before you do, check out the full interview below:

Above are Chris Pirillo, his wife Ponzi and Kat who works for Chris. They are the three that held the center tight so everything around did not fall apart. Here are some highlights of people there that evening:

Robert Scoble, meet the Robert Scoble of Network Solutions

In a funny exchange, Shashi met Robert Scoble and talked about our work on Solutions Are Power, I interjected that everyone calls him the “Robert Scoble” of Network Solutions. He jokingly said, “be careful you don’t fired” but was really glad to see a company like Network Solutions using social media to reach out to customers and evangelize what we do here. Below is a picture of the two Robert Scobles. I will leave it to you to figure out which one is the real Robert Scoble.

The two funniest guys in the room discuss social media

Dave Delaney and Chris Brogan are funny dudes. Both are passionate about social media and are very successful evangelists for the companies they work for. They are also really funny.

I met Dave for the first time here at Gnomedex 2008 and he has traveled all over the world and even to Ireland where he met his wife – who is from Tennessee. I mean, he goes all the way across the world to find and marry another American. There is a joke in there somewhere. It is the reason that he lives in Nashville and just got a job as the social media guy for Griffin, the iPod accessory people.

Chris Brogan is Social Media. As the originator of Podcamp Boston he is someone who has been at the center of the social media tornado these last few years. His personal blog ChrisBrogan.com has 8000 subscribers and his work on events for his company, CrossTech Media, allows him to put together events with serious social media angles.

Both guys were talking about the future of social media and how this year’s Gnomedex compared to last year’s. For a great perspective on this year to last year’s event, check out Chris’ post.

I am turning in early while most are still going until close. Looking forward to a fantastic second day at Gnomedex 2008. See you in the morning.

We have shown you the tools now go out and use them

Many conferences have been about educating and evangelizing to people how they should use tools like blogs, podcasts and social networks. There has definitely been a shift in the winds. At this point, people who want to know about them or learn about them, have at some level. Now it is not about education but about implementation and adoption. I think you will see this trend continue at future conferences, but you saw it first here at Gnomedex.

You can use this technology to not only build your business but make positive change in the world

From watching Beth Kanter raise $3700 to send a girl in Cambodia to college, to using Twitter to get a audience following the Mars Rover, to Salaam Garage using social media tools on their photo/video trips, everyone can use these tools to make a difference in this world. All of the attention for these projects and their popularity would not have been possible with out tools like blogs, podcasts, twitter and flickr to name a few.

Everyone needs to go next year – yes, everyone.

Chris Brogan summed it up the best in his post “I found Gnomedex to be the single-most valuable conference for me and my own personal and professional development that I’ve attended in the last 12 months. (In saying this, I realize that I’m rating it over my very own PodCamp Boston and several other events where I know and love the organizers. To you, I say, “I loved your events as well. They were also useful to me.”)

It will be interesting to see what comes next year, and I will certainly plan to attend. You should, too.”

See you next year for Gnomedex 2009.

Jon Malkin of Vocal Joystick

Jon works with user interfaces and there is no easy way to describe this session other that a really cool way to interface with a computer. With the use of vocal tones he was able to program the mouse cursor do all kinds of things and when used in combination he was actually able to play a video game. All everyone talked about how this could do amazing things for disabled individuals to interact with a computer when they never could in the past.

The Hubble Project (not the telescope)

The Hubble Project was presented by Arvind Krishnamurthy and Ethan Katz-Bassett. Hubble helps find black holes across the internet. Specifically, looking at why some websites become persistently unreachable. A black hole is when paths are available to a web server, but traffic persistently does not reach the server. So how long do black holes last? According to a 3 week study start 9/17/2007, 31,000 black holes involving 10,000 network had 60% last more than 2 hours each.

For more information, check out the website and to see it working go to http://hubble.cs.washington.edu

Boxee

Dave Mathews is serial entrepreneur having served as the Forward Thinker at Sling Media, identifying consumer trends leading to the development of the latest in digital media products. Prior to Sling, Dave was handpicked by the former chairman of Radio Shack as the Director, Product Innovation to develop their modern home strategy. Before joining Radio Shack, he was co-founder of Digital:Convergence – creator of the CueCat – a first-ever consumer barcode reader, distributed through Forbes, Wired, Parade and Nielsen Media publications.

He is the “user experience guy” at boxee and a consumer product expert, specializing in the convergence of digital entertainment devices. Boxee is essentially an open source version of Apple TV that allows you to put it on any kind of hardware. It is currently in Alpha and I just got an invite to try it out. I will do a review in a future post.

Mars 3.0 with Scott Maxwell

Wouldn’t it be cool to drive the Mars Rover? Scott Maxwell does it every day. He talked about the evolution of going to Mars in its 1.0 and 2.0 iterations. He clued us into why the rovers have gone so far past their 90 day mission – they expected to have the solar panels covered in dust making it inoperable but they didn’t anticipate high winds that would clean them.

Scott’s goal for the presentation was this:

“Ultimately, my goal is to ask the audience to help design the future of space exploration — what I’m calling, admittedly with a certain bias, “Mars 3.0.” How could NASA use the Net not just to communicate better with the public but to actually enable the public to meaningfully participate in this grand adventure? To help the audience help me, I start with some background about JPL’s role within NASA, summarize how Mars 1.0 and Mars 2.0 worked, and describe how we drive the Mars rovers today. Then I discuss some of the legal, contractual, and practical restrictions on involving the general public in our mission. Finally, I’ll invite the audience to suggest approaches and help solve some of the problems that currently stand in the way of Mars 3.0.”

He showed beautiful pictures of the Martian Landscape and blew people away with pictures of wispy clouds that you would have thought was taken right here on earth. He showed Mars moons eclipsing the sun, how far the sun was and how small it was compared to what we see on earth.

Then came the little yellow dot.

At the end of his presentation he showed a picture of a small yellowish dot. I thought it was another picture of the sun, but it was a picture of earth. Sounding like the Heir Apparent to Carl Sagan, he had the audience in complete silence as he said “everyone we know, we love and ever met, all our wars, our disagreements are on what Carl Sagan calls that Pale Blue Dot”. It brought chills to me and everyone in the room and showed us for that moment how things we think are so important are so insignificant in a huge universe that is just waiting to be explored.

He finished and then…

HE GOT THE FIRST STANDING OVATION FOR GNOMEDEX 2008 and the SECOND IN GNOMEDEX HISTORY. This picture below shows it. It was awesome and would compete with any presentation given at TED. It was very cool to be a part of this kind of history.

BugLabs Overview with Jeremy Toeman

Jeremy said he had a hard act to follow after Scott’s presentation, but he didn’t disappoint. He talked about the past history of hardware and its closed environments. He showed of the modular systems from Bug Labs which are different kinds of modules that can be programmed to do certain things and joined together to perform even more powerful functions.

Here is a link to his presentation slides and video of his presenation on the Bug Labs site.

He also announced a contest for everyone at Gnomedex and watching to come up with their own use of the Bug Labs components. It is located here. Enter (here) by Friday, 8/29. Reps from Bug Labs and Gnomedex will review the submissions, and pick the winners!

Gnomedex 2008 is a wrap

With a final session of Ignite Seattle! we are done. Some closing thoughts in my final post.

We jumped right in with another presentation of more highlights from Ignite Portland and Josh Bancroft

Heated Discussion with Sarah Lacy and my fellow Gnomedexers

With a presentation switched at the last minute on Chris Pirillo and titled “What Happens When You Get What You Want: The Growing Blogosphere Angst” it was appropriate irony. She got what she wanted and most of the crowd gave her alot of angst. As merely an observer, which I will get to in a minute, it was supposed to be a walk the crowd format similar to Oprah, but it soon turned into the Jerry Springer show.

There is extremely good coverage of this particular session by cNet.com, especially the heated discussion shown in the picture above with Sarah Lacy and Geoff Livingston.

Managing Online Relationships with Eve Maler of Sun Microsystems

To change things for a more calmer discussion, Eve Maler of Sun Microsystems was next up. She presented her take on Vendor Relationship Management and the issues and opportunities it shares with other disciplines; here are her slides. In summary, VRM is similar to CRM but the difference is that there a mutually beneficial data sharing relationship that people would have. There are new data standards that take data sharing while being secure to a whole new level. I invite you to review her slides or go to her blog to learn more.

The Adeona Project – “LoJack for your computer”

Adeona is the first Open Source system for tracking the location of your lost or stolen laptop that does not rely on a proprietary, central service. This means that you can install Adeona on your laptop and go — there’s no need to rely on a single third party. What’s more, Adeona addresses a critical privacy goal different from existing commercial offerings. It is privacy-preserving. This means that no one besides the owner (or an agent of the owner’s choosing) can use Adeona to track a laptop. Unlike other systems, users of Adeona can rest assured that no one can abuse the system in order to track where they use their laptop.

They described the motivation, design, and evolution of the Adeona laptop tracking service, as well as briefly give a high-level description of some of our other pursuits in academic computer security research. They also gave some hints of what’s in store for future versions of Adeona.

With that, we are ready for lunch. In the next post we will cover the afternoon sessions and have some closing thoughts on the overall conference.

For those of you who don’t know Kris, he is a fashion and editorial photographer based in Vancouver, British Columbia, and founder of photography studio Static Photography.

He is an author, having co-written BitTorrent for Dummies with Susannah Gardner, and a technologist. He was also the president of Bryght (a Drupal development company) and founder of early web community spark-online.com. Now he is president of Raincity Studios who acquired bryght some months ago. Raincity studios is the A-Z supplier of web services from planning to development to implementation to hosting.

Krug is the organizer and founder of PhotoCamp, a photography unconference with BarCamp origins, and has organized 5 of them including Northern Voice 2006, BarCamp Shanghai, Barcamp Vancouver, Northern Voice 2007 and Northern Voice 2008.

Krug is a well known contributor to the Flickr photo sharing community website. His photographs have appeared in JPG Magazine, ION Magazine, Business Week, Wired Magazine, and others. He has published interviews with technology personalities in Digital Web Magazine, and he has covered events as diverse as SXSW, the 2006 Winter Olympics, and the Consumer Electronics Show. He has been a regular guest on The Lab with Leo, a talk show devoted to technology and its effects on the G4Tech channel talking about topics like Facebook apps to the growing Chinese market. As a speaker, he has been invited to a number of media and technology events, such as SXSW.

He just got back from Beijing and taking photos at the Olympics. His big piece of advice that was non-technical was to find a theme of your pictures (faces, reflections) to find a style that people will recognize your work. Plus, and most of all, take photos every day if you want to get good.

Here is a great summary of his tips for everyone with any kind of camera:

Tips:
1. Light in someone’s eyes (that little twinkle in person’s eye)
2. Evaluate the light
- Sun? Shade? Incandescent. Halogen?
- Look around – highlights, shadows, spotlights
- Put your subject in good light

- Work with Whatcha Got
3. Shoot in Low Light/Available Light
- Sometimes don’t use flash
- Increase your ISO (ASA)
- Increase your aperture (F-stop) make it lower 1.2, 1.4, 2.8
- Decrease your shutter speed
- Focus manually if autofocus fails you
- Tinker with manual setting/metering
- Brace on things (tripod, gear bag)
4. Reflections are Yummy!
- Puddles
- Glass
- etc.
5. Pick a theme
- ex: Gnomedex Wall of Love
- Poloroids
- Portraits
- Black & White/Sepia/Over-exposed
- Laptop Stickers/Geeks & Gear
- Funny Faces
6. Learn your camera
- Isolate the variables – depth of field, shutter speed, aperture, ISO, etc.
- Tinker, tweek, shoot lots, share your photos, get feedback, change it up
- Share your gear – find someone you can test out lenses, flashes, etc. with
- SET THE WHITE BALANCE!!!

To check out his work, head on over to his Flickr site and start drooling.