So I made it down to the Belmont bar along with Cecy to see what the buzz was with Facebook’s event.  The Austin Young Chamber of Commerce hosted the event.  One of the first things we noted was that Facebook didn’t realize that when you thrown an event at 5pm on top of a bar in Texas summer heat everyone sweats a lot!

However, the show went on and Sarah, the spokesperson of the event for Facebook (and Austin office manager) gave a great speech about Facebook wanting to hear and see what Austin techies have been up to.  They emphasized their plan to have an office of over 200 people in a few years and that they wish to create a fun work culture that encourages innovation.

For more information check out their Austin job openings.

On a personal note, I was excited to see a former student of mine from the ACTLab as one of the Facebook Employees, I made him take a photo with his boss, I know I am cheesy!

I just wanted to plug ProductCamp 2010 and remind people to check it out.  It has grown from a small grass roots effort into a large unconference that I believe is a good example of a barcamp that balances corporate sponsorship and community participation.

Also I would like to give a shout out to Lynn Bender and crew for hosting Linux Again Poverty for a second year.  It is amazing to have people in our community doing such projects.  Make sure you stay tuned for the next LAP event.

And it should be mentioned that this movement isn’t just in part to the traditional large business savior situation, but the great attitude and creative space that Austin geeks and social media nerds have fostered over the years.  It is truly amazing!

With such a great network setup it has been amazing to see how small businesses, consultants and corporations alike have begun networking in such a way as to create opportunity at all levels of participation.

So if you are new to Austin, take a look at our links page and our calendar, there are things going on almost everyday.  This is a renaissance time for the web 2.0 and a time to look and see what the next.

Over the next couple of months we will be having guest contributors offer their ideas of what is “next” both technologically and socially for Austin and the central Texas region.  So stay tuned and enjoy the ride!

I attend Refresh Austin pretty regularly. Refresh Austin is a monthly meet-up of developers and designers in the Austin area. We meet at Buffalo Billiards the second Tuesday of every month (you can check out the Refresh Austin site here.)

This past Tuesday Michelle Greer kindly organized an excellent panel on start-ups and how to get funded our acquired. The panel included Jason Cohen (SmartBear software), Pat Condon (Rackspace Hosting), Jim Curry (Rackspace Hosting), and Josh Baer (OtherInbox).

The panel was excellent! We’re about one month away from SXSW, but the quality was on par with SXSW. Video of the panel should be posted soon, so here are a few interesting bullet points I took from the meeting:

Bootstrap: Most start-ups thrive due to bootstrapping. It’s not greed! Bootstrapping builds a good sense of what’s really important in your business, and allows you to focus on what matters. Once you make it as a successful business, what you have learned from bootstrapping will keep you on the right track.

Don’t get VC unless you need it: Sure, Venture Capital is great. Someone gives you money and you get to work on your business. However, you should not rely on VC. If you can get started on your business, get started! Don’t let the wait for capital freeze you and keep you from even starting your business. Acquire a couple (or a few) clients to get you enough of a cash flow to stay afloat. Having a small number of clients will help you focus your business, while proving to a potential Venture Capitalist that your business is worth it and can make money.

The business plan: Most panelists agreed that a business plan is not important: You can’t predict where your business will be in 5 years or 10 years. Moreover, you can’t predict how your business will change in 5 to 10 years. That said, I think a business plan is important because it allows you to sit down and write down your ideas concisely. Writing a business plan will allow you to articulate your idea for your business, which in turn should enable you to give a good business pitch when the opportunity arises. Ultimately, panelists seemed to agree that a business plan should not be longer than 2 pages.

NDAs: Should I sign a Non-Disclosure Agreement and what are the rules for disclosing information in a business meeting? No! First of all, a Venture Capitalist is not going to sign an NDA, so why should you? Just keep it simple and refrain from disclosing secret information about your business. You can discuss your business at length without revealing anything that you feel would compromise your business. Do keep in mind, however, that if you think your idea is too good to be revealed, it probably isn’t. Think about it: if your idea is that easy to steal, you probably need to move on to another idea, or fine tune your current one.

That’s it! That’s what I took from it. The next Refresh Austin for March 2010 will be a lightning speed round for those lucky souls presenting at SXSW who want to practice before the big event.

For a link to more panel information, click here.

Kristine and Dustin just began their first semester in the Media Studies master’s program at the University of Texas at Austin where they have been tearing it up talking about new media and geek centric issues.

I am hoping Dustin will soon write an article about his adventures with the Drupal development movement taking place here in Austin, as he has been one of the behind the scenes players hosting barcamps and monthly development meetings.  His work with Lauren Roth and other great geek Drupal leaders like Lynn Bender and Four Kitchens has been invaluable.

Kristine has been working in the ACTLab where she has been tearing it up learning quickly how to “Make Stuff” and has been taking her new media skills to a new level.  Maybe she post about her experiences taking an ACTLab course for the first time.

Me (Joey), well I have been up to no good.  While I have been less then good about going to all the tech happy hours, I have met some really cool people when I have made the events.  In the summer I attended John Erik’s going away party and met some very delightful geeks and new media moguls.

Oh and a shout out to Conjunctured who recently celebrated their 1 year anniversary, I remember going to Jelly and watching Dusty, John, Caesar and the rest of the crew put together that great business, it was awesome to watch.  You all rock!

I have also had some great conversations with the Austin Entrepreneur Network folks here in Austin, they have been tearing it up as well, hosting low cost seminars about all the new media technologies.

And of course GeekAustin has been the backbone to our great scene here in Austin, Lynn’s work is always amazing to watch.

And Whurley, don’t think we are not watching you kick ass as well! Oh the list could go on forever.

Enough Shout Outs.

If you are all are wondering why I have broken out into such a different writing style from my previous academic style posts, it probably has something to do with the fact that I have been working for the past 6 months in the automotive industry doing new media development for various Austin Automotive companies such as Boost Logic, American Racing Technologies, UpRev and other companies.

As well as making my way around the automotive industry, this fall I am helping TA 3 courses in the ACTLab.  In addition to the ACTLab courses, I was invited by the University of Incarnate Word in San Antonio to be an adjunct in Audio Production.  I have since had a great time down in San Antonio once a week working with a great set of students who are truly amazing and inspiring.  This last week I took the students to a  music recording studio (Studio M), yes they still exist!  We had the pleasure of meeting with Michael Morales who gave us a great tour and really brought to light the new vs. old mentalities of copyright and new media production.  We had a great discussion.  And one question I came away with was “will we be able to sustain high-end high level purpose built recording studio’s when everyone is making their music at the coffee shop on their laptop?”

So while this post brings you all some what up to date, I hope it leaves you wanting more.  Trust me, there are some great articles in the making and I look forward to seeing what Dustin and Kristine have to write about their new found geeky experiences in Academia.

Most fittingly, we received a tip on this upcoming charity event from the folks at Austin Browncoats.

According to their site,

We strive to make all of our charity drives a fun-filled gathering with entertainment and great company.

At Austin 3.0, we respond with a cheerful – hell yes.

Geekstravaganza looks to be an entertaining night with musical acts (Marian Call), an All-Geek Talent Show, All-Nerd Costume contest and Sci-Fi SAT.

This charity geekfest unites Geeks, Nerds and Browncoats alike to raise money for SafePlace in their goal to end sexual and domestic violence through safety, healing, prevention and social change.

Bringing nerds together for a good cause is something worth celebrating..or blogging.

Deets:

• When: May 17, 2009 at 5:00 pm CDT
• Where: Buffalo Billiards
• Tickets: $16 each

IT Administrators will soon become the new blue collar workforce.  Like licensed plumbers of today, IT workers of the near future will primarily be called on to fix problems after they have occurred, the cubicle will become the new white van and the on call pager will finally be rewarded with time and a half instead of the salaried pat on the back.  This is not an attempt to belabor the tired “series of tubes” metaphor that former Alaskan Senator Ted Stevens choked up during a Senate committee hearing; I am instead interested in the shifting perception of the personal computer as a piece of specialized work equipment to an information appliance.

I am not trying to say that IT won’t still be important in 10 or 20 years.  We’d be in deep shit if we didn’t have plumbers, and the same would be true if we didn’t have IT professionals.  “Indoor plumbing” as we know it today has only been in place for about a century, and the median income for an entry level plumber in and around Austin is about $37k a year.  That’s pretty good for a job that doesn’t require a degree – an equivalently skilled Geek Squad employee would be lucky to bring home $30k.  Ten or even twenty years ago, entry level computer skills were highly valued and hard to come by, and the pay was commensurate.  It is often joked that at least one kid in every family will be the computer nerd and take care of the family’s problems – how many families pop out a skilled plumber every generation?  This thought still prevails, but every generation of ‘techies’ seemingly knows less about how computers work, and more about what they do. Greybeards can dole out assembly code the way I can speak Unix the way kids today can communicate in 160 character bursts.

As an IT Administrator myself, I have come to a startling revelation.  When I was younger, everyone thought that young people knew more about computers than adults.  This thought still prevails, but with one very important caveat – young people today don’t know more about computers, they simply know more about websites and video games and video text messaging and how to make that happen.  If you asked the average 19 year old how to check their IP address and verify that they can ping yahoo.com, I would be happy to see a 40% success rate.  Ask the same 19 year old how to upload and tag Facebook photos from their friend’s new phone, a model they have never used, and I would be surprised to see less than 90% success.

Much of this is obviously due to the larger userbase of computers now versus 1999.  Computers and the internet in general are much more of a general audience experience than ever before.  Years of hard work by the geeks of generations past have led to unbelievably simple user interactions for very complex tasks.  Keeping a blog in 1999 meant having web server knowledge, HTML knowledge and FTP knowledge, or at least a good friend who knew all of those things and had the time to spare.  Keeping a blog in 2009 requires the ability to open a web browser, point it to one of the numerous blog providers online, and remember a password.  As we abstract the unpleasant from the experience, more and more participants will join the conversation. This is something that is astoundingly great for the collective consciousness of the cyberworld, but portends poorly for the prestige of the IT Administrator.  Don’t worry, I’m not bitter, I’m just gonna go to grad school .

So Dustin and I made the voyage over to Bryan, Tx, as well as Texas A&M (which we came to learn are two totally different places).  I had a contact at A&M, a Professor in media studies, Patrick Burkart, who set us up with a slew of talks and meetings to go to in order to orient ourselves with the campus.  Our first meeting was a talk about metadata systems and modeling, which at times proved very interesting, especially when the idea of doing qualitative/quantitative analysis of twittering came up.  But I digress….  (into academia boredom!)

Emerging from our meetings, Dustin and I came away with a new respect for academia in A&M, while also wondering why the engineering buildings seemed to be 10-100X nicer then all the other buildings

We then met with Patrick where we talked about his upcoming book about hacktivism, cyberliberties and evidently the ACTLab (at least a little, here’s hoping!).  We then headed over to The Creative Space in Bryan, Tx where we met with Cody and Bill.  Here is a short interview I did with Bill about the vibe of The Creative Space.

After showing us around, the Creative Space people took us to dinner.  A couple days before our trip Cody informed me he was organizing the first DorkBot BCS meet and invited Dustin and I to present a project or two.  Never ones to turn down a good Dorkbot, Dustin and I showed up with some cool ACTLab hardware projects based around homebrew amplifiers and hard drive speakers.  To say the least the crowd was impressed and we were impressed by the crowd.  There was some great energy that night.

So yeah, BCS was a good time and if you are ever in their neck of the woods make sure you drop by and say hi to Patrick at A&M and Cody and the gang at The Creative Space.