A flurry of activity has surrounded our tiny idea to hold a big conference for Indiana bloggers. With the support of title sponsor IU School of Informatics and local blog software company Compendium Blogware, we are excited to announce registration is now open for Blog Indiana 2008!
Blog Indiana 2008 will take place August 16th – 17th and feature topical sessions lead by some very talented local bloggers. So far, we’ve confirmed Chris Baggott, Douglas Karr, Bil Browning, Jim Shella, Jerame Davis, and Tom Britt (and we are hoping to announce several more in the coming weeks!).
Sessions will include topics such as blogging for beginners, using blogs in your business, monetizing your blog, political blogging and more advanced topics. There will also be panel discussions and group discussion topics voted on by attendees during the months leading up to the conference (look for this form coming soon!).
One of our goals with this conference was to bring bloggers together from across the state for an unforgettable experience with a low price tag. At $49 total for both days, I think we’ve done that.
Check out the official site: conference.blogindiana.com
More on this later, but I’ve decided to move my blog from wpstar.com to NoahCoffey.com and refocus my blogging and some online efforts around my name. This is mostly a temporary style until I have time to fully develop the theme of the site.
This past weekend, I participated in Bloomington Startup Weekend. And, while I’m not yet allowed to talk specifics about the resulting company/product we created that weekend, I can share what an amazing experience it was. 100 technologists from around the area gathered together to bring their experience, expertise, and talent to produce a company and community in one weekend. Developers, Marketers, Business Developers, Project Managers, Designers, Lawyers, and more spent 52-some hours at City Hall in Bloomington, Indiana working towards the same goal.
It was a truly unique experience that I would highly recommend to anyone with even the slightest interest. It really does give you an idea of what it’s like inside a startup company, only much condensed. There are highs, lows, excitement, tension… it’s a lot of fun. I’ve been describing it as the only time I’ve enjoyed being annoyed. You kinda have to experience it to know what I mean. Hopefully, I should be able to give out the details of the product and company we’ve created in the coming weeks.
With that said, I highly encourage anyone in the Indianapolis region to head over to IndyStartup.com to proclaim your interest in having a Startup Weekend in Indianapolis. That site will also direct you to the Startup Weekend City Vote project where you can vote for Indianapolis to be one of the next locations (very important).
Have you ever wondered what a group of highly talented and motivated people could accomplish in a weekend? Could they start a company from concept to completion?
Startup Weekend answers that question and more. A unique three-day experience, Startup Weekend brings the best and brightest people together in a local office space to select the concept, break into teams, and develop the product, marketing and revenue model.
Bloomington Startup Weekend is coming February 8th – 10th!
…and I’ve got a golden ticket! Well, it isn’t golden, but it feels golden! I am incredibly psyched up about this unique experience. Probably because I only found out about it a few days ago and signed-up almost immediately, and realize that the last thing I can afford to give up is an entire weekend of not working my side business. But, for some reason, this is making me just crave the experience more.
In all honesty, some of the execution that has come out of past Startup Weekends have left me a bit underwhelmed. I’m sure I’ll change my tune a bit after having gone through the experience. I just had hoped to look back at previous events and seen bigger, more financially viable ideas. I understand it is only a weekend, but if 75+ great minds can develop an amazingly great idea, and crank out a rough, working prototype in 3 days, and emerge with a core group of determined individuals to push the company forward over the next 6 months, I think it has great promise. Alternatively, trying to crank out a finished, polished product in 3 days kinda forces you to set your sights a bit lower. So, I hope at the Bloomington event we can aim high and leave with (at least) half a product instead of a half-assed product.
If you are in driving distance and are so inclined, I highly recommend joining me in a couple weeks at what should be a very memorable event. Look for live updates and likely some streaming video on this blog during the marathon weekend.
I’m very pleased to say that Smaller Indiana is one of the local sponsors of the event!
Just a quick word to the wise: AVOID NETWORK SOLUTIONS LIKE THE PLAGUE.
Sorry if I’m being a bit dramatic, but I tend to get a bit sensitive over companies that behave badly the way Network Solutions is. The DomainTools blog is covering the shady tactics that NetSol is now employing. It appears now that when you search for an available domain name at netsol.com, if the domain is unregistered NetSol will register it within minutes!
They will place a 4-day hold on the domain and then release it back into the wild. The major problem with this tactic is that it:
- Forces you to buy the domain from Network Solutions (they are expensive compared to most)
- Makes the domain you wanted available to any number of domain tasters and generally anyone watching expiring domain name lists waiting for good ones to drop.
If you lose a good domain name this way, the odds are against you that you’ll manage to recover it without having to buy it from Network Solutions.
I tried this just 10 minutes ago with a not-so-nice domain name with a few numbers thrown in. I made sure it wasn’t registered. I checked it’s availability on NetSol.com, and within 5 minutes it had been registered by Network Solutions. Unbelievable.
I’ve lost domain names by not registering them fast enough in the past, but this is to the extreme.
This is only an educated guess based off some exploration of Mosh Mobile’s “temporarily offline” website and a small scoop (if I’m right), but it looks like Indiana-based Mosh Mobile might be offering Blackberry Pearl service as a part of their free cell service offering. They will make an official announcement later today at 1:00 PM.
Their service is still in closed beta, and their service area appears to only be northern Indiana and much of Michigan. However, their potential service model is quite interesting. Through agreements with their service providers, they can offer free mobile phone service in exchange for sending you up to 3 “dialogs” from one of their sponsors. The “dialog” could come in the form of a survey, a free game or a video. All you have to do is “answer” these dialogs to maintain your free service.
You can learn more at this page that, for some reason, is still online despite their site being down until their 1PM announcement today: http://www.moshmobile.com/learn.php.
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