Posts Tagged ‘conferences’

The world of online video doesn’t have to be restricted to the world of “online”. Sometimes it’s nice to step away from your computer screen and get out in nature to talk about your passions and meet the faces of web video out in the real world.

Read more

Want to be a success? Then you’ve got to learn how to fail. At least that was the mantra at the second annual FailCon, which brought together 400 entrepreneurs in San Francisco to learn from their startup failures.

The day-long show featured panel discussions and smaller discussion groups where entrepreneurs recounted their failures and how they learned from them.

“It’s not simply that failure helps you learn. It also makes you stronger,” said panelist and investor Esther Dyson of EDventure. “Once you’ve failed and come back from it, you’ll never have that fear of trying something new again.”

Other advice given included:

• Learn to recognize if your business is failing. Often times executives can be too close to the problem to notice it, according Dyson.
• Practice integrity, and fail gracefully. Don’t sign long-term deals if you know you’re going out of business in a couple of days, and don’t borrow money if it won’t help anything, said Guy Hirsch, CEO of recruiting firm SayHired.
• When angling for a last-minute buyout, hold your cards close, according to Manu Kumar of K9 Ventures. One of his entrepreneurs accidentally let slip how much cash his startup had left, so the buyer just waited until the company failed and bought it out at 1/10th the price.
• Keep healthy personal finance habits. Kumar said he usually looks at how an entrepreneur handles their personal finances to get a sense of the state of how a startup handles money.

If you’re a 3rd-party developer of Twitter apps and are planning to attend the Chirp conference Apr 14-15th, you can propose questions for presenters to answer. The Chirp conference, which takes place in San Francisco, will have a number of Twitter staff presenting, including CEO/ co-founder Ev Williams, co-founder Biz Stone, COO Dick Costolo, and Director of Platform Ryan Sarver. Non-Twitter speakers include tech publisher Tim O’Reilly, web entrepreneur Anil Dash, several venture capitalists and others.
Read more

I’m about to drive downtown to speak at the Boomer Business Summit on a panel about social networks and blogs for boomers. This is definitely foreign territory for me. The main boomers I know are my parents and their friends. So how are boomers using social networks? I know that both my parents are on Facebook and use the site regularly. I don’t think they are the average boomer though.

I’m curious to find out what type of social networks the boomers are involved in and what their thoughts on transparency are. As I posted about this morning, Gary Vaynerchuk suggests that the world is going to become increasingly transparent and we won’t be able to hide from ourselves. Ultimately the truth about everyone will be public information. I think that the boomers may be one of the last generations that aren’t totally transparent.

Then again I have friends that avoid putting all their information online. They are not going to become Twitter users anytime soon. They use the web for email, instant messaging, news and stalking their friends on Facebook. Are you a boomer? What types of social networks are you active on? Do you think boomers are more hesitant to become more transparent? What suggestions do you think I should make for the boomers while at the conference?