QC Merge & Cincy Coworks

Something special happened last week. A 1st-year conference gathered over 80 people in a funky downtown space for two days of learning, friendships, and inspiration.

Queen City Merge was, in my opinion, a success. No, it wasn’t perfect, but as a 1st-year conference it can only get better. The conference ended on the Reds party deck at Great American Ballpark. As I left I felt a lot of energy, but also a bit of sadness like when vacation comes to an end.

QC Merge was chartered to bring together folks from diverse web disciplines (hence “Merge”) to show how much talent is in Cincinnati for building web companies.  At the least, it got people talking. After the end of Jen Myers talk “Developers Can’t Design and Other Myths,” a rabid discussion ensued about why developers and designers don’t get together more often.  Why don’t developers congregate over here?  Why don’t designers congregate over there?  Should they congregate professionally or at a happy hour?  Cincinnati’s a good city for cross-pollination. Cincinnati’s a bad city for cross-pollination.

Jen’s talk was followed by Alex Hillman. Now, if you’ve followed coworking at all over the past few years, you’ve run across Alex’s name.  As co-founder of Indyhall in Philadelphia, he’s helped create one of the most successful coworking spaces in the nation (note I didn’t say largest, richest, or loudest).  Cross-pollination of ideas, creating community, gathering diverse folks – Indyhall breathes these ideas and the QC Merge debate was like a coworking values game of Scrabble™.

As a web developer, I am fairly active in the local developer communities. I attend the user groups, hackathons, and happy hours.  You know what I find there?  Other developers.  When I look at the local AIGA chapter’s roster of events, I see all kinds of events.  Same for the AMA, and the Adclub.  There are lots of developer events.  There are lots of designer events.  And there are lots of marketing and ad events.  How is it that someone like me who loves going to developer events has never encountered someone from the these other groups (not until recently at least)?  How is it that it takes a two-day conference to start the conversation?

We want Cincinnati Coworks to be a big part of this conversation.  I ask AIGA Cincinnati, Cincinnati AMA, and the like to be a part of it too. We all want the same thing, and we’ll get there faster together.

Cross-posted on Cincinnati Coworks.

Who Says Facebook Isn’t Useful?

IgniteCincinnati, Finally

The Ignite concept is coming to Cincinnati, finally.  Not to be confused with the excellent grant program, IgniteCincinnati is:

A night of presentations with a twist. 14 presenters each get 5 minutes to talk about their subject. 20 slides that auto advance after 15 seconds. It is quick, fun, smart and fills the Know Theater. Our next one is January 20th.

To qualify this, I should say that these type of short-format talks have been going on in the area for a while now time under different names.  Whether you call it Ignite, Pecha Kucha Night, Open Mic night, lightning talks, jolt talks – the events are always fun… AND educational!

I love these events. I try to make them whenever they occur, and hope to see you there on the 20th. 

Register for IgniteCincinnati.

Cincinnati Impresses: Center Of Innovation

The Center of Innovation program at the College of Applied Science at UC aims to show seniors that their choices for employment upon graduation is not limited to Fifth Third, Kroger’s, and Great American Insurance (not that there’s anything wrong with those fine companies). The program also aims to show them that, in a region full of marketing, design, and business talent, there is serious need for young technology talent with an entrepreneurial bent. For those who might want to take the plunge, the program also outlines business skills and resources they’ll need to complement their technology skills.

This is a great thing, and kudos and support goes to Andy Erickson and Dr. Hazem Said for their work so far.

This past Tuesday I gave a short talk to students in the Innovation Seminar series in CAS at UC about what' it’s like to work in a startup from a coder’s point of view. I talked about transitioning from a cubicle farm job to a startup environment, the nature and pace of working in a startup, and the tons and tons of learning that is inevitable.

You won’t get a lot from these slides without the narrative, but I post all my talks here so I thought I’d post this one.

Cross-posted on my programming blog.

Development In A Startup

View more presentations.

InOneWeekend Registration Open

Registration is open for InOneWeekend 2009.

FRI BRAINSTORM SAT BUILD SUN LAUNCH

InOneWeekend is an innovation and entrepreneurship organization that hosts participant-driven weekend events that create and launch viable start-ups in a single weekend. Our low-commitment, low-cost, high-return, highly awesome events allow like-minded, diversely experienced individuals to create an elevating experience and quite possibly the next big thing.

I participated in InOneWeekend last year and can say that no matter what the outcome of the work, the experience itself was extraordinary. Not only was the weekend-long coding quite fun, I learned a great deal from all the non-programmers - marketers, designers, business planners, attorneys - that were crammed into the same space.  There is only space for 100 participants, so sign up today!

InOneWeekend 2009 - 100 people create a start-up in a weekend 

• When: Friday, August 28 - Sunday, August 30
• Where: Tangeman University Center at the University of Cincinnati
• What: A special keynote speaker (!) will kick-off the second annual InOneWeekend with a lecture open to the public on Friday afternoon.  Then the selected 100 participants will brainstorm over 300 ideas with Jeff Stamp of Bold Thinking and vote on the concept.  Saturday, they will build the product and write the business plan and investor presentation.  Sunday: Launch!
• WAITLIST OPEN: InOneWeekend is assembling the dream team of design, technology, and business participants.  To find out more and apply, visit www.inoneweekend.org and click on 'Register for upcoming events'

 

Cincinnati Impresses: ShareThis.com

At a recent OINK-PUG meeting, the accessible folks from ShareThis.com talked about their ubiquitous Javascript button and their server infrastructure.

If you aren't familiar with ShareThis, they provide the sharing button that appears at the bottom of this very blog post. Every page I go to these days seems to have the little green button. Occasionally I find myself wanting to share a page that uses not ShareThis but one of the alternatives, and I find myself cursing because I do not have immediate access to my contacts. (Thank goodness I have the ShareThis Firefox add-on to fall back on.) I bet that there are a lot of people in Cincinnati using the button on their web properties, and don't even know that the company is based right here in the Queen City.

ShareThis started in Columbus, moved to Cincinnati, and now has an office in Mountain View, California. They boast a number of accomplishments to be envied by any company in any city, the least of which being $21 million in venture funding. A $21 million dollar funded consumer internet company, in Cincinnati?

But equally impressive to those in the industry is the raw technology that powers their infrastructure. ShareThis was one of earliest case studies on Amazon Web Services, and the Rightscale demo given that night was memorable (maybe that says more about Rightscale).

They've got that hockey stick growth according to relevant traffic measures, so I'm excited to see what happens from here onward. Let's downplay that Mountain View office, and keep the PR coming from Ohio.

Streetcars & Pecha Kucha

Some short notes on a couple items in Soapbox this week. First, an excellent opinion on the streetcar.

It should be noted that the proposed Mill Creek Expressway/I-75 project will essentially add one single lane of freeway in both directions of I-75 between the Western Hills Viaduct and Paddock Road, while also revamping on/off ramps, and will cost an estimated $642.5 million. That's an extra lane of freeway for 7.9 miles, plus revamping interchanges.  ...In addition to the $642.5 million Mill Creek Expressway project, the Through the Valley project will engage in an additional widening exercise from Paddock to I-275 at the cost of an additional $149 million (at least).

...Coincidentally enough, if the full stretch [of the streetcar] to the zoo and back were implemented, it would be a route of roughly 7.9 miles, the same stretch of widening on I-75.

So we have critics carping on the profligacy of spending $185 million versus a whopping $800 million for freeway widening.

 

The second item I noticed was about the apparent success of the first Pecha Kucha night in Cincinnati.

"PK Vol. 1 was such a huge success," says official organizer, Greg Lewis. "It demonstrated that the same desire that got PK started in Tokyo six years ago is present here in Cincinnati today."

Uh, I don't mean anything negative, but I know that technology groups around the region have been doing these presentations for last two years.  They may not have been as flashy, and certainly none were in as cool a venue as the CAC, but they have been around.  You may have heard them mistakenly referred to as Machu Pichu talks, or Pikachu presentations, but PK has been present in Cincinnati for a while now.  So thanks for participating.  :) 

State-Of-The-Art Simulation Center... On Short Vine

Soapbox writes about the University of Cincinnati's Simulation Center (UCSC) in collaboration with Procter & Gamble.  The UCSC is a high-performance computing center for simulating products, systems, and processes that are related to P&G product lines.

For some reason, I think it's interesting that it's in the middle of Short Vine, an area I never took for advanced anything, despite its proximity to UC.  Ever since I've been able to drive, Short Vine has conjured up images of tattoo parlors, punk clothing and beauty product stores, Bogart's, and Top Cats.  Now, the only reason I walk the street is when I go to Martino's.

But I guess with all the new Uptown Consortium development on MLK, the area is changing.  I always thought that the Short Vine area would be one of the best neighborhoods to live in a parallel universe.  There is a library, post office, drug store, and grocery store - all the ingredients of a walkable neighborhood.  But of course, it's not one of the best neighborhoods to live in, yet.

In any case, here is the building.  I remember seeing the UCSC building being renovated a few years ago.  I remember thinking to myself, "that's interesting. Somebody's rehabbing that building. I wonder what for?"

 

View Larger Map

Who Says Twitter Isn't Useful?

If You've Ever Wanted To Know About Web Security

Next OINK-PUG meeting:

When: August 21 @ 7:00 pm
Where: Bridge Worldwide, Downtown Cincy
Topic:

Chris Shiflett will be presenting Security 2.0 (which was the keynote at the DCPHP conference). Chris will also be handing out hard copies of the slides from his Essential PHP Security talk to all attendees. If you're not familiar with Chris, he's the author of several PHP books (http://shiflett.org/books) and one of the most prominent experts on PHP security. This is a must-see; Chris is an awesome speaker, very knowledgeable, and happy to answer any questions you have. He's also flying in from New York, so it would be nice to have a good turn out.

UPDATE: I want to say this: if you have any use for the topic at all, I highly encourage you to attend. Why? Not because I care about the security of your web applications, but because if Cincinnati is to become the technology hub that it can be, then when industry "names" like this come to town, we need to show them that there are interested and skilled people here.

What InOneWeekend Was About For Me

As I alluded to in my last post, there was a part of Roy Gilbert's talk that really hit home. You can watch that part on InOneWeekend's blip.tv channel. It's around the 6:50 mark. It's actually the ending of his speech. Here is what he says:

I'll leave you with one other point. Something I just thought of from this manager's conference we had. We had this professor from the Wharton School of Business. He's head of the leadership department at Wharton. He's an incredibly compelling speaker.

One thing I thought was really interesting was that he said when you look at the most successful leaders in business, government, academia... He actually did research around this, and asked them where they got their leadership knowledge, where they got their leadership skills. Evolved it down to a formula. 10% said they figured out came from their book learning and the skills they got in their formal courses. Some of them had MBAs. Some of them had business degrees. 20% came from formal mentorship. Learning from their boss. Learning from some sort of mentor at the company that they operated in. Does this sound right to you? So the mentorship is about twice as valuable as the book learning. I heard that and said, "Yeah, that resonates with me. That sounds about right."

The other 70%? Of the most successful leaders they saw, the people who had the most outstanding results... The other 70% came from situations they had been in when they had gotten in over their heads. Jobs they had where they didn't have a formal checklist of things when they went in. Where they actually had to go in and
figure out the checklist on their own. Positions in roles where they didn't really know exactly what to do and had to figure it out with significant enough risk.

And what he concluded was that the great thing about new ventures, and the great thing about entrepreneurship, is that you can manufacture these situations where you end up over your head yourself. All of you this weekend are going to have an opportunity to create a venture which is going to put you in over your head. It's an incredible opportunity for growth. An incredible opportunity to develop as a person. So I am jealous of you. I wish you good luck. And I greatly appreciate you letting me be apart of this. Thank you.

Sorry for the long quote. Speech contains more words than you think at first.

Anyway, I hope I articulate well what I am about to say – I believe that most people are capable of rising to the occasion when called upon. But I don't think most people will volunteer for a daunting task if given the choice. Trust me, when faced with big opportunity, I know well the battle between the thrill of risk and chance of success, and inherent laziness and complacency (neither of which are bad things).

So given these assumptions – to strive towards leadership and develop as a person, you need to thrust yourself into situations where you are in over your head, but in doing so you sacrifice your time, your energy, perhaps your family and friends – what are we to do?

My answer to that: close your eyes, and just say yes. (No, I won't use the ubiquitous Nike tagline here.) I'll take Roy's point one step further: you don't even have to manufacture these situations. Often, they'll find you. And when they do, the question will be: "Do you want to?"

I've been using this rule for longer than I'm aware. Not only professionally, but even when making family decisions. When I learned about InOneWeekend, I just said yes. (Of course, that was easy, since by definition, my commitment was at most one weekend.) But when they asked me to continue the work for a little longer, I just said yes.

Confidence always helps. I know what my capabilities are, and can position myself in situations where risk is acceptable. But what if someone one day asks me to run for office? It's definitely outside of my domain, so I probably wouldn't. (Or would I?) And sometimes there's room for compromise. Tell them, no, you won't lead the effort, but you can help out. Know the worst case risks. Once, I volunteered for a day of painting for charity. It didn't really do anything for me, but all I lost was a Saturday.

Once upon a time, I had this idea for a website that listed all the weird and quirky things around town. I put it up, and it was kind of cool. Because of that website, I found myself attending a blogger's meetup of sorts. As I neared the meeting place walking by myself, my social anxiety began to rear its head, but I just said yes. That was where I got the idea for a site about fake local news. I put that up, and since then everything has changed.

What if I hadn't attended that first meetup? It was a public announcement. I knew nobody there. Nobody would have missed me. Sometimes I wonder. Sure, life goes on and I would have encountered other opportunities, but I think the past few years would have been remarkably different.

I have no real problem walking into a room full of strangers anymore (usually). I don't know if I'm more comfortable with that fact, or if I know that now there's always a good chance of running into someone I know, or know of.

Where will this LifeSpoke.com business take me? No way to know, but for now, I can close my eyes and try to hold on.

Keeping Talent In Cincinnati

Expect a lot of posts in the next few days. There's a lot on my mind.

So I just discovered that CincyTech has videos of the Roy Gilbert talk with excellent sound and visual quality (sorry, Andy). There is a part of the talk that hit home that I'll discuss in a later post. But the only thing missing from the video is the Q&A portion.

Fortunately, Andy Erickson did capture the Q&A portion in his audio recording. I ask the very last question (around the 1:09 mark) about keeping talent in towns like Cincinnati. With great difficulty, I've transcribed the entire question and Roy's answer (with paraphrasing) here.

Question:

So you mentioned in an earlier question that companies like Google will open offices in areas of talent and in areas that encourage talent, but in Cincinnati a lot of times talent leaves. So I believe there is talent here. It starts here and comes through here and a lot of times it ends up leaving for whatever reason. A lot of people think, "Oh I have to live in New York City. I have to live in Manhattan." Or "I have to live in Silicon Valley." So it's kind of a catch-22 because you're saying that companies like Google will go to an area with talent, but talent wants to live in areas where companies like Google already are. So how do cities in the Midwest keep their talent?

Answer:

So, we opened an office in Ann Arbor, MI. It's a great town with a great university. We really looked hard at it, and we knew that a lot of people were leaving Ann Arbor. Jennifer Granholm, the governor of Michigan came to Google and said, "People are leaving our state. They are smart people, and they are following Larry Page and going to Silicon Valley or going to New York. Help us bring them back." So companies are interested in doing this because companies are interested in expanding their operations and finding new talent. So I wouldn't worry about companies. They'll come to you.

My advice to you, especially if you're coming out of college, and you're thinking about leaving the Midwest, is this. There are are incredible opportunities everywhere. And I think it is often easier to get traction in terms of new ventures in your home city. One, because you know the lay of the land and kind of how things work there. So it's incredibly easy to make an impact and acquire talent without having to compete with every single startup and the likes of people who have left Ann Arbor and Cincinnati. So I think there area a lot of advantages for people who are really savvy about it.

I'll tell you, I talked to an entrepreneur today who is hosting a lot of his business online using Amazon hosting services, and hosted applications. Using storage not in Cincinnati. Using Google Apps to run his email system. It's easier to start an entire business. It's actually very minimal. So you can start a business and focus on building great talent. This is a lot different from a year ago or a few years ago. The infrastructure is a lot bigger. There are a lot of great companies that do this and can help you out. Whether you're in technology or shipping logistics or whatever. So I think the tide is turning and it will take some courageous people that turn around and come back.

Or you can just listen to the audio of the question and answer, shamelessly cut from Andy's podcast. It's 3:04 minutes long.

InOneWeekend Wrap-Up

It was quite a weekend last weekend, and the week that followed was no pushover either. Last Friday, we went from 2 pm to midnight. Saturday, 8am to midnight. Sunday, 8 am to 5 pm.

After Sunday evening, I thought I might take it easy and recuperate throughout the week. Little did I know, I would find myself helping out to shepherd our new company forward.

No real commentary or summary in this post, but expect a couple more posts on InOneWeekend coming up here. Besides, there has been lots of that already from much more capable people. For now, you'll have to deal with a list of links.

• LifeSpoke.com - the company. Sign up for the beta!
  
• The main InOneWeekend site has some post-weekend details.
• Feature story about the weekend on Soapbox Cincinnati. (I'm pictured in the last photo.)
  
• Business Courier article.
• The InOneWeekend public blog, launched after the weekend, with contributions from IOW participants.
• Some pictures of the event.
• The CincyTech blog has video of Roy Gilbert's keynote talk.
  
• Andy Erickson has audio files of the weekend's speakers, including an interview with IOW's founder Elizabeth Edwards, and some personal thoughts on the weekend as well.

If You Need Me This Weekend, Here's Where I'll Be

I Have An Idea For The New Skyscraper

I have an idea for the new tower at Queen City Square. In Dubai, construction is set to begin on David Fisher's Rotating Tower, a 59-story residential tower with independently rotating floors, completely powered by sun and wind.

Each floor is composed of 12 self-contained units, complete with plumbing and electrical. Each unit is attached to a central spine or axis, enabling each floor to rotate independently. Once the central spine is in place, each unit can be fabricated in a factory, sent to the site, hoisted up and attached independently. Over 90% of the tower will be manufactured.


In the comments of the linked blog, the challenges of such a design are debated. A local mention makes it through:

This is not as complicated as you’re all making it, Psuedo and PaTrond. Buckminister Fuller designed and built a rotating house, the Dymaxion House. Hell, there’s even a rotating restaurant in Covington, Kentucky, not to mention many far more cosmopolitan cities. Plumbing and electrical connections are not a problem. Rotation is typically no more than once per hour.

Please, how much more cosmopolitan can you get than Covington, KY?

The coolest thing is are the wind turbines sandwiched in-between each floor:

The 59-floor building will be powered entirely by sun and wind energy. And, the architect claims that the building will generate 10 times more energy than required to power it, thus making it a positive energy building. Solar panels will be fitted on the roof to harness sunlight, and a total of 48 wind turbines will be sandwiched between the rotating floors, placed so that they are practically invisible. Each wind turbine could produce up to 0.3 megawatt of electricity, and it is estimated that 1,200,000 kilowatt-hours of energy would be generated every year.

That would make a pretty nice addition to the skyline, eh?

Watch the PR video.

State Of Technology In Cincinnati

Bob Coy over at CincyTech presented at the Greater Cincinnati Venture Association on the state of the Greater Cincinnati entrepreneurial ecosystem. It was CincyTech's first year as a state-chartered Entrepreneurial Signature Program for southwest Ohio.

Pay close attention to slide 13.

| View | Upload your own

Information Overlord

Definitely been feeling the information overload lately. Between keeping up with all the local blogs, the technology blogs, the programming blogs, Facebook updates, LinkedIn updates, Twitter, and of course email, it's like I forget what I was working on in the first place. Lately, I've been trying to put as much into my feed reader as possible, and taking the attitude of, "if it's not in Google Reader, then it doesn't exist."

This has helped, but it's still no good. By the time I finish getting through a round of new content and hit refresh, there's always something even newer that appears. And it doesn't include Facebook updates other than status updates, and it certainly doesn't work with Twitter.

I've been trying out some aggregators, but I haven't fallen in love with any of them yet.

Is anyone else feeling it?

I have to agree with Techcrunch: Web 3.0 will be about reducing the noise. Or put another way, personalization, recommendation, personalization. I don't really know what that means, but I wish someone would start working on it.

I Know What I Hope I Get For My Birthday!

I was browsing through some junk mail the other day, when I came across an ad for this INCREDIBLY ADVANCED photo storage device. If you've already seen the TV commercial for Wallet Pix^TM, showing a bunch of older women showing pictures of their grandchildren to each other on this thing, then you know what I'm talking about. I mean, WOW!

Even though this thing is thicker than an iPod and most phones, it's probably so it can hold UP TO 58 PHOTOS! That's like... a ZILLION photos! I'll never be able to fill up that kind of storage. AND it comes with a built-in stand, for, you know, when you want to display family pictures on your end table on a screen that's smaller than a credit card. Act now! Only $19.99!

Presenting This Month

I will be giving this month's OINK-PUG topic entitled: "Optimising The Front-End Using YSlow And PHP In A Continuous Integration Environment." (I prefer the Queen's English in this case.) If that title doesn't pique your interest, then my name is Betty.


The event details are on our Ning page.

It's a pretty narrow target audience, but hey stop by if you want! The more the merrier, etc.

Cradle Of Brands et. al.

Earlier, I had asked, if we are the Cradle of Brands, then where are all the conferences and expos? I can give you one answer to that now. Over on Soapbox, I saw that, DMI, the Design Management Institute will hold its 20th Brand/Design Conference in Cincinnati on June 11, 2008. Now, I don't know what kind of conference this is. All I know is that it's neat to see Cincinnati alongside Singapore and Paris in the list of other cities holding DMI conferences.

Continuing this random thought of city boosterism, I came across this CincyTech blog. An older post relates a quote from Tim Draper of Draper Fisher Jurvetson.

Tim Draper of Draper Fisher Jurvetson (the most active VC on Sand Hill Road) once talked about Silicon Valley being the digital media hub, L.A. being the entertainment hub, and Boston being the biotech hub. When asked about Cincinnati, he responded that we are the “Marketing hub!”

I'd heard that quote before, but I'd never had anywhere to link to. Also, in the version I heard, he mentioned New York as being the financial hub.

And lastly, I'd been meaning to write something about this Enquirer article about a local industrial design company, Kaleidoscope, that started a blog that is trying to share the knowledge the company has acquired about sustainability of design and services to lead to a better world. Past posts include topics like "Dangers and Remedies for Multitasking" and "Surf community launches a wave of sustainability initiatives." But I never got around to it. So I'll just throw it in here and say: love the title.