Well, today got off to a rockin’ start. Can you sense my sarcasm?
Getting the day started part 1 After going out with the the guys last night, I ended up bringing all my collective items back to the room. Unfortunately for me, I’ve been leaving my badge in the car…which didn’t happen today. It made for a nice scenic and unintentional round trip drive to the convention center. I tip towards the optimist side a bit, so there was a silver lining. No sense making a wasted trip out of this right? While at the hotel I found 2 strangers that were headed to the conference, but were waiting on a cab. After all, I’m a bit of a socialite. I had the pleasure of meeting Rita and Dan who by the way were great conversationalists.
Getting the day started part 2 After making the 2nd trip down the convention center for the day, I was ready to attend a few sessions. Unfortunately I miss the Intuit Storyboard session, but all of my cohorts obviously thought it was worthwhile. They all went to the same session and sang rave reviews.
To get my juices flowing I attending a nice discussion about side projects. The conversation was good, but I was really after 1 thing. How do you get funding? After all, isn’t that what every side project needs? A little cash love. Bringing up kickstarter.com proved to be a worthwhile topic. I found a woman who had just the experience I was looking for. She told me of a group that needed blah…blah…blah, but got 2x what they needed…$20,000 in total. Wowsers! That’s what I’m talking about!
My big takeaways from her comments were to tie video and social media to the initiative. Don’t just stick your project on kickstarter.com. Market it. Tell the story via video, social, any way you can, but get the word out.
After that, it was off to something a little more interesting. A circle of friends. Actually, we weren’t friends, but the chairs were setup in a circle. About 200 people attending a pretty interesting session on business 101. It was a collaborative session where facilitators from innochat.com walked the group through some quick business issues and fielded questions from the group. For only having an hour, they did a phenomenal job. Renee Hopkins and Drew Marshall were great. If you’re an innovator or entrepreneur, visit innochat.com.
Exhibitor Hall I spent a huge chunk of the day in the exhibitor hall. Why? It’s has a ton of great vendors. Normally this kind of stuff is rather unimpressive. I’ve already seen most of it. However, I did find a few quality vendors for social media tracking, market research, and a host of other things. Well worth the 3 hours I spent talking to people. Oh, and I bumped into a few Dave Ramsey fan/vendors.
Wrapping up the day We skipped the parties tonight since we bombed on last night’s event. However, we did attend a 6:00 reception put on by IBM that was definitely the best evening activity so far. We met some really cool people, ate good food, heard great music, and made it home by 8:30. We event bumped into some hard core Dave Ramsey fans in the process.
Enjoy the videos from earlier in the week. Raw format.
Technical Difficulty – Videos not uploading via Hotel connection. Check back later.
USHIP (don’t get motion sickness)
Great party. Not the best video. 🙂 Frog Design Party 1 Frog Design Party 2 Frog Design Party 3 Frog Design Party 4