August 18, 2007

Live from Exit/In: BarCamp Nashville

I must admit it's a bit odd to be writing a blog from inside Exit/In, let alone have my computer open, be connected to the internet, be in a slightly work-directed mindset and have my laptop bag beside me, but the occasion is BarCamp Nashville.  It's hotter than a rock show, at least temperature-wise.   I'm currently listening to the presentation "Design for the User" by Matt Reed of Nashville design firm Cabedge, first reminding us to think about the designer, client, user and Google.

In other news, CMJ picked up our latest and greatest yesterday complete with a catchy title.  Speaking of CMJ, we hope to be in NYC for the Marathon in mid-October.  More info on that to come.

Chris Wage of CentreSource gave a nice overview of what Web 2.0 is and isn't earlier, the core of his message being that it is participatory, has open communication (two-way), decentralized architecture (less monolithic), includes social networking and is evolving into a semantic Web.

Well, back to networking for now.

dw

August 16, 2007

Speakerheart love

As Lee mentioned, Speakerheart saw some press pickup yesterday in announcing our spin off from PassAlong Networks.  Hypebot, Billboard, Digital Media Wire, Coolfer and inclusion as a new application at Simple Spark.  All-in-all, a pretty good day.  Also, check out our newer, fancier tutorial complete with enlarging images for you interactive types.  And yes, that's one of Nashville's great young songwriters, David Condos, whose debut album was declared "quite an achievement" by American Songwriter.

dw

August 13, 2007

Late Night Music

It was a busy week for the Speakerheart team. After writing code and marketing plans for the first couple days, Lee, Cedric, myself and the "consultants" decided to hit up the Music Society of Nashville show at Christopher Pizza.We're going to be sponsoring every Wednesday in September, so we thought we would do a test run..good music, just can't beat that.

Somehow the night was quickly extended instead of ended. Although the smart bets were on going to bed, some of us (me and Cedric) decided to check out a late night picking party on the porch of some of the Speakerheart early adopters, Tyler and Kyle, and Zach from Futureman's Black Mozart Orchestra. They were excited about the upcoming launch and showed us some footage of the "Orchestra" performing on PBS. Can't wait to get that loaded up on our site. We were late getting to work, but as the boss put it "Someone's got to do it".

Thursday...Sleep. 14 hours of it as a matter of fact.

Friday, had a day of Speakerheart planning of digital takeover....Friday night, back at it with a birthday party of an assistant from the William Morris Agency. The party was full of agents, assistants, interns and musicians. It went to wee hours of the morning with the group talking about the future of music, and how to band together to make everyone's job more worthwhile. This was of course, after the disco party...

The common denominator was that people do not want to settle for average or good, they want to be the best and will do whatever it takes. Even if that means staying after a party to get to know someone by helping pick up.

bill@speakerheart.com