Gary Vaynerchuk @ Tech Cocktail Chicago

TECH cocktail, a community building startup founded in May 2006 by Frank Gruber and Eric Olson, offers events and community-powered projects open to bloggers, technology enthusiasts, entrepreneurs & professionals interested in technology in under served technology communities.

Today, Loyola University hosted a bunch of speakers the one I was most interested in hearing was Gary Vaynerchuk of Wine Library TV.

I found a short summary of the talk from Tim Courtney:

Gary Vaynerchuk said definitively on community, “It’s irrelevant whether you’re a traditional business or a new media business, it’s all about the community. The community is the entire thing you should care about 24/7/365. What you need to become is a rat. Real, Authentic, and Transparent. Because you can’t hide anymore, everything you do is documented.” The core of his message is that people, marketers, companies, everyone — needs to be real with their audience or they will be exposed and leave open a vulnerability for smaller players who are authentic to come up and usurp your leadership position. My thoughts: Your character is who you are when no one is watching. Gary observes that the times when “no one is watching” are getting fewer and fewer as people adopt social tools. This doesn’t make character any more important, but your actions are becoming far more public so character flaws and inauthenticity is now more exposed.

But more importantly qik user bryanthatcher streamed it for us.  The sound quality is poor but you can still make out most of what he is saying.



(image from twitpic user timcourtney)

Google I/O 2008 - Day 1

Google IO is a two day developer conference in San Francisco which is held in the Moscone Center.  This year the conference is focusing on technologies like Android (mobile phone OS), Gears (ability to extend the browser to make your site work offline and sync when your online again), Gdata (API to work with Google Services like Calendar, Gmail, etc.) and finally a look into OpenID, OAuth and OpenSocial.

Since this was in San Fran it was fairly heavily covered and TechCrunch has a good write up with live blogging, video demo's (embedded below) and many pics. James Hamilton provides some rough notes from various talks from throughout the day. Update: Andy O posted his blog in the comments which has a well written detailed thoughts of the conference.

Some interesting announcements from the keynote.  MySpace is going to work with Gears.  Gears officially changed it name to Gears dropping Google from the previous name of Google Gears.  The reasoning is that Google wants to strongly urge that Gears is Open Source and is for the community.AOL officially joins OpenSocial.

Here is a video demo of Android:

Finally, Scoble gives an idea of what the hot topics are at the Google Party:

(Photo from flickr user Nancy-. Used undeer the Creative Commons License)

Kings of Code 2008

Last month I first heard of ROFLCon from a coworker who asked for a couple of days off to go to Boston to attend this convention.  Well when he went I was doing some searching on Flickr and watched blogs to see if I could see any pictures of him from the uploaded pics.  Needless to say we didn't see any pictures of him.  I did however see 10 or more pics of John Resig and 100+ images of Jay Maynard (the Tron Guy).  So needless to say we are on the verge of firing our employee for lying to us about attending a convention he obviously didn't attend (I am only joking about firing him...or am I?).

Anyways, the point I am trying to make is that I felt that I in some way experienced the convention through the eyes of everyone that attended.  There were countless photos, video's, blog posts and twitter was huge as well.

So today I heard about the Kings of Code conference that is happening in the Netherlands today.  I only heard about it because John Resig is a speaker.  So I try the normal routine of doing flickr searches and blog searches on Kings of Code.  Sure enough I got enough info from people that posted on it that I felt like I truly experienced a part of it.

First I started out with the conferences web site (which is translated via Google Translate) and I got a sense of who the speakers are and what the schedule is like.

I then went to Flickr to see if there are people there that are posting pics.  This usually tells me if there are people there who are willing to post info on the conference.  Sure enough there are people posting pics.  And there is a picture of John speaking.  So that's cool I get the feel of how big the conference is and what the stage and stuff look like.

Now let's see if I can dig up what the speakers are actually talking about.  I go to Google Blogs (or Technorati) and do a search for Kings of Code and sort by date added.  Jackpot, I stumble on to Gijs van Zon's blog who live blogged the whole thing. He broke it up by per break.  We need to use Google Translate again and the translation isn't 100% perfect but you still get a lot of the information that was presented. Here are his live blogs:

• Javascript Events and NetLog
• W3C and CakePHP
• Yahoo! and Open Source Pitches 
• eBuddy and jQuery - Mozilla 

I found some of the info in these talks useful and I wanted to share.  Thanks to those who posted pics and took the time to live blog the conference for those of us on the other side of the world to enjoy.

Update: With a little more digging I found some live streams of John Resig's talk.





(Photo from flickr user Inferis. Used under Creative Commons license.)

VMWare Fusion 2.0 Beta 1 is released

I heard through Twitter a while ago that VMWare Fusion is a lot better then Parallels at virtualization.  I don't own a Mac or use a Mac at work so I told my boss who does.  He got five copies to try. I overheard him talking with our systems administrator one day and he said "Ralph was right" I even listened to what he said I was right about and it was that Fusion was better.

I heard that 2.0 beta 1 was released the other day.  I went to go check it out and I'll tell you what, Fusion makes me want a Mac just so I can load Windows onto it.

It now supports Multiple desktops and DirectX 9.0 Shader Model 2 3D.  That means it can play a lot of the newer games in a virtualized environment.

Watch this video and be amazed: