Ones to Watch

The Etech conference is being held March 26-29, 2007 in San Diego. Though I can't go, I wanted to know a little more about what I'm missing. Looking through the Speaker's list, two programs caught my eye.

How to Innovate on Time by Scott Berkun (his blog). This talk sounds like an elaboration on what PaylPal founder, Max Levchin, said on NerdTV. "I actually think that a successful startup is 5 percent good idea and 95 percent execution." This idea that execution, implementation, and delivery are what success is about in the field of innovation seems to be a more shared view. I noted in a previous post on the Cox Review, which distinguished between creatively generating new ideas and using innovation process to exploit it's potential into real products and services.

Coder to Co-Founder: Entrepreneuring for Geeks by Marc Hedlund. This kind of training is necessary not only for programmers, but for all new media participants who are creating rich content. Also, in the session blurb he mentions intrapreneuring. This is what I do at George Mason. I don't have any contacts outside of the university. I just bounce between departments seeking to collaborate on different projects. I think this is a synergistic way of developing the next generation of doctoral students. They learn to work in a collaborative fashion, while professors get access to new technology skills and ideas.

When I went to his company's blog, Wheaties for your Wallet, to find out more about him, I noticed that he was attending SXSW. This seemed strange to me because I thought this was a music festival. Boy was I wrong.

The South by Southwest Interactive is kinda of a mashup of an O'Reilly conference and Sundance and Bonnaroo. Or at least that's what it seems like on first glance. Especially on the new media side, it might be a great place to interact with new people. Seems very cool and I plan to go sometime soon.