Well, last week was a very interesting one for me. I met so many interesting people. I wish I had more time with all of them.
Yesterday I tried to decompress by hanging out with Matt Carter and his kids at Fry’s. He’s a group program manager over in Microsoft’s eLearning division (they used to be called MSPress). Just to put a nice cap on the week we ran into Raymond Chen, one of Microsoft’s smartest programmers. His blog is still one of my favorites, it gives a really geeky look at things in Windows.
By the way, does anyone have a business card strategy? What do you do with business cards? I have about 50 cards from the past week. Not sure what to do with them, other than they remind me of stories.
For instance, earlier this week David Teten, CEO of Nitron Advisors, invited me to dinner and Alan Kipust, Senior Vice President of Register.com was there and we talked about how important identity is to the world. Got his card, so if anything ever goes wrong with my domains I’ll have someone to call.
At the geek dinner in NYC, there wasn’t space in the main restaurant, so I, and a handfull of other people moved to a table out in the food court at Grand Central Station. Sitting next to me was Michael Dunn, Vice President of Hearst Interactive Media. Don’t recognize the Hearst name? It’s one of the biggest in journalism.
Also at the dinner was a couple of guys from MorganStanley’s IT department. Ryan Barrows and Srikrishna Sridhar. Great guys and told me what it’s like working inside a very conservative and regulated industry.
At the geek dinner in Minneapolis, I met Tim Broeker, of Mambofrog.com. He’s an open source developer, who uses Mambo to build Web sites for companies in Minneapolis. At the dinner, I met a woman who has been programming since the 1960s. I forgot her name, does anyone who was at the dinner remember it? She was most interesting and told us lots of stories.
At Target alone I have a bunch of cards including the famous Bob Giampietro. He’s Vice President of Strategic Alliances. But that doesn’t do him justice. It seems like everyone knows who he is inside Target. We talked about what Target is doing to bring new features to their guests. Plasma and RFID are two things on his radar screen.
Going back to the session I did at my brother’s law firm, I met a guy who went to high school with Bill Gates: Web Augustine who is now a general partner and co-founder at Xelerate Venture Partners. He told me stories of how a small group of geeks, including Gates, would hide out in the computer room to avoid doing physical education. The PE teacher would come in and force them outside to do their exercise.
At the BDI conference I met Vada Manager, director of global issues management at Nike, Inc. Really great guy, we talked about the famous Tiger Woods shot that was played up on the blogosphere (that post got emailed around inside Nike).
And I still have 40 cards that I haven’t mentioned to you. I wish I had more time to tell all the stories from just the past week. But gotta work on the book. Thanks to everyone who I met, I have a ton of new blogs to subscribe to too, like http://www.smallbiztechnology.com/ , (cool video of the NYC geek dinner is up there. The video includes Mary Jo Foley and other famous bloggers who showed up) and products/services like http://www.blogharbor.com/ , which is a blogging tool, to check out..
Robert Scoble is the founder of the Scobleizer blog. He works as PodTech.net’s Vice President of Media Development.
Go to Scobleizer …
