Here are a small handful of technology events upcoming in the next couple weeks.  I’ll be at TECH cocktail, see you there!

Saper Law Open Source Symposium
When: 8:30am-5:00pm, Tuesday, February 17, 2009
Where: DePaul Center, 8th Floor, 1 E. Jackson Blvd.
Cost: $145
Register: http://saperlawopensourcesymposium.eventbrite.com/

This all day conference brings together members of the open source community for an in depth discussion of the business and legal ramifications of using or producing open source software. The panel of speakers will range from independent software developers, to CTOs of established businesses, to representatives of software giants like Microsoft. In addition, Saper Law attorneys will delve into licensing and intellectual property issues while university professors will lend the policy reasons behind the open source movement. New software that assists businesses and their attorneys with open source licensing compliance will also be debuted at the event.

TECH cocktail 10
When: Thursday, February 19, 2009
Where: John Barleycorn, Wrigleyville
RSVP: EventBrite

The largest technology industry networking event in Chicago.  Join 700+ others in the technology industry in Chicago for drinks and networking at John Barleycorn.  This event is not to be missed!  See you thee!

E.Factor: Building Your Business on Social Networks
When: Thursday, February 26, 2009, 6-9pm
Where: Mid-America Club, Aon Center, 200 E. Randolph, 80th Floor
Cost: Free to Premium Members, $80 for basic members and guests
RSVP: E.Factor

Does the word Social Media and Web 2.0 make you nervous?  It shouldn’t.  Join E.Factor and its panel of experts to learn about how you can tap into the online world without feeling overwhelmed.

Speakers include:

• Howard Greenstein, President, Harbrooke Group (www.harbrooke.com) - social media expert
• Charles Fellingham, Founder, QAlias (www.qalias.com) - entrepreneur and personal branding expert
• Ted Greene, CEO, SkatingCircle.com - Chicago serial entrepreneur
• Blagica Bottigliero, Founder, CondoPerks.com and Senior Account Supervisor for Consumer Brands and Social Media, Edelman - Chicago entrepreneur and web marketing expert

Moderator: Cd Vann, Founder, Sohobiztube.com (www.sohobiztube.com) - entrepreneur, networking and social media expert

Today I’m at the Loyola campus downtown at the TECH cocktail Conference. This is the first “tech” conference I’ve attended in a while, and I’m pleased that it’s here in Chicago with the local business perspective that sits firmly outside of the echo chamber. Plus, it’s the perfect combination of an impressive speaker list with a great track record and familiar faces I’ve gotten to know over the last couple years at area mixers.

Here are a few personal highlights from the speakers:

• Mike Domek of TicketsNow, a company that now does over $200MM in revenue (2006 figures), shared highlights from the early days of bootstrapping through to receiving funding and investing in scaling the business to where they are today. He said that too many people start with an exit strategy in mind, and encouraged entrepreneurs to start with a passion instead. Mike also entreated the audience to step out, take risks, and make mistakes.

• Corey Brown of Squidoo highlighted the benefit of speed when working with small teams. He touted Squidoo’s “competitive advantage of being 1/100th the size of everyone else” where they would iterate in the course of an afternoon when larger players would take months.

• Nick O’Neill of Social Times observed in the Social Apps & Widgets panel that if you build a business based on an application entirely within a walled garden like Facebook, you’re limiting your audience. Instead, start with a web site that can gather traffic from the entire Internet, use the Facebook app to augment it, and build the application across multiple social networks. Also, one panelist observed that we’re starting to see “application blindness,” much like ad blindness where users ignore areas on a web page that commonly contain ads.

Nick Fera’s Partner Ecosystem. Photo Credit Leora Zellman.

• Nick Fera, former CEO of Parlano, who was acquired by Microsoft, laid out a quadrant of the “Partner Ecosystem” that provided a well thought out framework for evaluating the strategic partnerships you go after while building your company. On picking strategic relationships between competitors, Nick said “We heard earlier today that 90% of these things fail, if you don’t pick a horse and ride it, you’ll never succeed anyways. Pick that horse and ride that horse.” (Note: I will post a photo of this later, unfortunately I could not obtain one myself while it was on the screen).

• Allan Cox brought the room to silence during the lunchtime keynote “Discovering Your Inner CEO” when he observed that as we build our careers, and sometimes our companies, start families, buy houses, and build a net worth, we discover in our forties that we’ve totally lost touch with what we valued most in our younger years. He also exhorted the audience to be alert to flashes of insight that get you excited but so often you allow to fade, either due to distractions or fear. “I’ve never taken counsel from my fears” -Stonewall Jackson

• I sat in on Jason Rexilius‘ talk on Cloud Computing and Scaling, and most of the talk was way more technical than my surface-level knowledge as a non-coder. He threw out some rather practical tips though that resonate with me being at XNet; The label maker is your friend. Label the front and the back of your server. Label both ends of your cables, and color-code your cables - one color for private network, another color for Internet-facing. A bit esoteric, but it surely stuck out to me.

• 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.

For a summary of the tweets relating to the event, see this Summize link.

Overall, the conference was a great event and a wonderful job done by the TECH cocktail crew. It was a bit like drinking from a firehose as so many speakers, panels, and topics were crammed into a one-day conference that could easily fill two days. But that’s good news — there’s no shortage of activities and speakers, and it sets the stage for the next tech conference here in Chicago.

And at that, I’m off to dinner and John Barleycorn for the TECH cocktail Mixer!

I started this blog to build up my presence on the web. A positive side effect has been that I feel a sense of accountability to my audience for the things I write; especially when writing about personal goals. Hence, it’s become quite helpful in keeping me motivated, especially after my Week 10 2008 goal wakeup call post. Life is different when you have an audience, no matter how small.

Recently I started attending Jerry Mitchell and Bill Price’s 6-month Bootstrappers class on new venture creation. It’s the same class they teach in a local B-school. I decided that now was as good of a time as any to get a rounded education on the startup process and use it as an excuse to research some long-term business ideas. The side effect of this is I’m in a class with (and in some cases working in a group with) successful entrepreneurs. I see their work ethic, resourcefulness, and commitment and it challenges me to up my own game in areas where I need to grow. In effect, they’re my audience and my silent accountability.

If you don’t have one already, I encourage you to seek out a reference group. Find yourself a group of peers, both at your level and above, to pull you up. You’ll be surprised with the improvements you start making when you associate with the right people.

While home for lunch yesterday, I read a great column by Robert Kiyosaki in this month’s Entrepreneur magazine, “Keeping Tabs: Numbers that are tracked and reported are numbers that grow. How does your business measure up?” Lately I’ve been immersed in looking at CRM tools and developing measurement systems. This article was a breath of fresh air; here’s my takeaways:

1. Measurement doesn’t [have to] equal complexity. Pick one thing [tied to sales/profit/growth] you can measure and do it diligently. They chose to measure how many people played the Cashflow Game as an indicator of how they were serving their customers.
2. Get started. “At first, the reporting was awkward and the numbers weren’t always accurate. But over the past year, the reporting has become much more precise.” -Robert Kiyosaki

A Tool You Can Use Today:
As if that article wasn’t timely enough, today Ben Bradley at the Bradley Wiltjer Marketing Group posted an article on measurement that includes his very simple marketing measurement tool. The post helped me bring clarity to our own measurement efforts, and I believe you will benefit as well. Read Ben’s post and learn:

1. Why measurement is not one-size-fits-all.
2. What things you should and should not measure.
3. A simple tool you can use to get started with your own measurements.

BenBradley.net: Dont Sweat Marketing Measurement

I saw this post over at Peter Christensen’s blog about Illinois Math and Science Academy (high school) students developing software for the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) project. The notable thing about this is these are high school kids, where every other school group participating in this project is from Ivy League schools or very technical colleges.

I’ve been around the FIRST LEGO League and the FIRST organization, and through my involvement with the open source 3D LEGO community, I’ve had the privilege to meet some talented youngsters who are very confident in their technical skills. I’m inspired every time I hear news about young engineers–while I don’t know much firsthand about OLPC, it’s clear they’re developing software for a good cause and building their experience and confidence at the same time.

Arthur played this video of Anthony Robbins speaking at TED yesterday in our company meeting, and I think it’s worth sharing: