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SXSW: Our final Dev/Tech meet up

Barton George — Wed, 14 Mar 2012 03:13:17 +0000

As I mentioned in my last several entries, during SXSW Michael Cote and I, on behalf of Dell, organized a series of mini meet-ups focusing on developers, tech and social media folks. These were relaxed informal affairs with the idea of getting people together to learn what they were up to and for us to let them know what had been keeping us busy.

The final meet up was held on Sunday evening at the Hilton bar, Finn and Porter. Here is a mini-montage from the event:

I asked the folks to say who they are, where they’re from, who they work for and what they hope to get out of SXSW.

The line-up

Jonathan Bryce of OpenStack/Rackspace, from three hours outside of Austin
Neelan Choksi of Tasktop, from Austin
Ben Kepes of Diversity Limited from Waipara, New Zealand
Sandeep Parikh of 10gen, from Austin
Yoram Heller of Morph Labs, from Los Angeles, CA
Ernest Mueller of Bazaar Voice, from Austin
Matt Brutsche of Present Now, from Austin

Extra-credit reading

Pau for now…

SXSW: Our Saturday night Dev/tech meet up

Barton George — Mon, 12 Mar 2012 20:12:39 +0000

During SXSW Michael Cote and I, on behalf of Dell, organized a series of mini meet-ups focusing on developers, tech and social media folks. The second event we held was on Saturday on the top level of Speakeasy. Being Saturday night, this turned out to be the biggest of the three get togethers.

Here is a small sampling of the folks who dropped by (notice the atmospheric lighting, for half of them they were literally lit by candle light):

The Line up

Sam Ramji of Apigee, from Palo Alto, CA – talks about the launch of UserGrid
Ed Saipetch of Joyent, from Indianapolis, IA
Polly Squires of T-Systems, from Houston, TX
Alex Williams of SiliconAngle from Portland, OR
Robert Duffner of Apigee from Seattle, WA
Gina Rosenthal (Minks) of Dell from Austin, TX

Extra-credit reading

Pau for now…

SXSW: Our first developer Chill and Chat

Barton George — Sat, 10 Mar 2012 19:20:44 +0000

This is the 26th year of the SXSW (South by Southwest), the annual music, film, and interactive conference. Everybody whose anybody, and even a few who aren’t, are here. Yesterday the 10-day event kicked off. As a company, Dell is a big participant and sponsor from panels, to music lounges, to an entrepreneur’s UnConference, to education, to gaming.

As for the Web|Tech vertical we have taken our own guerrilla approach to participation in this shindig in our own backyard. Besides going to parties that customers and partners are throwing, Cote and I have organized a series of informal “chill and chat” meet ups for developers and tech types.

Last night we held our first soiree at Opal Divines. Here is a mini-montage I made featuring a few of the attendees:

I asked the folks to say who they are, where they’re from, who they work for and what they hope to get out of SXSW.

The line-up

Nosh Petigara of 10gen, from NYC
Michael Cote of Dell, from Austin
Rob Smith of 3M, from Minnesota
Maggie Fox of Social Media Group, from Toronto
Charlie Wood of Spanning cloud apps, from Austin

Our next events

If you’re around here’s where we’ll be tonight and tomorrow:

Saturday, March 10th 7-9:00pm – Speakeasy – Downstairs (412 Congress Avenue, Austin, TX)
Sunday, March 11th 5:30-7:30pm – Hilton Bar (Finn and Porter) (500 East 4th Street, Austin, TX)

Extra-credit reading

Pau for now…

Rackspace evolves OpenStack Governance

Barton George — Thu, 17 Mar 2011 03:34:24 +0000

One of the trickiest things to get right in an open source project is the governance model. Who makes up the various boards and gets what authority is something struggled over and something that virtually no one gets right straight out of the gate. Its particularly interesting if you are a commercial entity sponsoring a project and want to maintain a certain amount of influence over the endeavor but also want it to grow and flourish.

Two weeks ago Jonathan Bryce, Rackspace cloud co-founder and one of the leads of the OpenStack project policy board, announced the changes that were being made to OpenStack’s governance.

I ran into Jonathan on Monday during South by Southwest and sat down with him to get some more insight into what the changes were and why they were being made.

Some of the ground Jonathan covers:

From Mosso to Rackspace cloud to OpenStack
How they’ve been surprised by the great uptake by the community and how this has led them to evolve the governance structure.
What the various boards are and what their make up will be
Which roles will be 6-month stints.

Extra-credit reading

OpenStack Governance Election Process — The OpenStack blog

OpenStack Governance Update — The OpenStack blog

OpenStack Governance Model — The OpenStack wiki

OpenStack Installer Demo at SXSW — Barton’s blog

Pau for now..

OpenStack Installer Demo at SXSW

Barton George — Tue, 15 Mar 2011 18:55:30 +0000

Last week and this, Austin’s downtown has been taken over by the South by Southwest festival (SXSW). What started out nearly 25 years ago as a music festival/conference has grown to include parallel film and interactive events as well. During the event every bar and venue downtown is occupied with bands, films or tech companies showing their stuff.

Yesterday Rackspace commandeered the Kung Fu Saloon in the name of the OpenStack project. As part of this event, and before the drinking began, Dell did a demo of “Crowbar,” our OpenStack installer that we recently announced.

Check out the mini montage below that includes a quick interview I did with Dell solutions engineer Greg Althaus right after he finished the demo.

Don’t take our word for it

Dell is currently field testing crowbar and plans to donate the code to the OpenStack community after testing. If you are interested in testing crowbar yourself, email us at OpenStack@Dell.com.

Some of the ground the video covers

Intro montage: Welcome to the Kung Fu Saloon, setting up and a snippet of the demo
[0:40] Talking to Greg
- What actually is crowbar and how does it work with OpenStack compute and storage?
- How fast can you spin up a cloud using it?
- Where does OpsCode’s Chef fit in?
- Our plan to donate this code to the community after field testing.

Extra-credit reading

OpenStack heads into Interstellar Overdrive

Pau for now…

Animoto – The Poster Child for AWS & EC2

Barton George — Wed, 25 Mar 2009 14:24:48 +0000

At SXSW interactive I came across the booth for the cloud-based app Animoto. I was intrigued since I have seen a couple of Amazon Web Services presentations and both held up Animoto as a great example of an application that would have been impossible to deliver any other way.

Animoto, which creates videos for consumers and corporations, relies on a huge amount of processing power and has had gigantic spikes in usage (e.g. going from 70 servers to 8,500 servers in 5 days). You can say they put the “elastic” in Amazon’s “Elastic Compute Cloud.”

Here is an interview I did with Animoto co-founder and President Jason Hsiao.

To watch in High Quality: after clicking play, click the “HQ” button that will appear on the bottom.

Some of the things Jason talks about:

Total number of servers owned by Animoto = 0
The most expensive piece of equipment in the office is the espresso machine.
How the enterprise side of the business has taken off.
Why they’re based in New York and where the founders came from.
How their extreme processor intensiveness allows them to work extra closely with Amazon.
See how he deftly avoids the question about what feature he is looking forward to seeing from Amazon, they must be working on something

Extra-credit reading:

Amazon.com CEO Jeff Bezos on Animoto

Pau for now…

Talking with Charlene Li about Social Networks

Barton George — Thu, 19 Mar 2009 03:06:01 +0000

On Saturday at SXSW interactive I ran into my old friend and former business school classmate, Charlene Li. Charlene who used to be an analyst at Forrester, is the co-author of “Groundswell: Winning in a World Transformed by Social Technologies“ and has recently set up her own consultancy, the Altimeter Group.

Charlene was at SXSW as a speaker and I caught up with her not long after she finished her session in the main ballroom. You can check out the slide deck she presented below. You can also access the Twitter feed and a summary of the presentation from Charlene’s post. [BTW don't miss the blooper reel at the bottom]

To watch in High Quality: after clicking play, click the “HQ” button that will appear on the bottom.

Some of the topics Charlene covers:

Groundswell: How company leaders can leverage social networks rather than fear them
Which companies are making the best use of social networks
What social tools Charlene uses and her use of twitter (how it got her quoted in the Wallstreet Journal)
Not being afraid to show your age on the web
What Charlene is most excited about in the coming year with regards to social networks

The Blooper Reel

You may have noticed that there a few cuts in the video above. This is because they were shutting down the show floor and kept announcing it over the intercom. Check out the blooper reel below for proof — and these aren’t even all the interruptions. (Unfortunately I didn’t capture the part when the Elvis impersonator started singing.)

To watch in High Quality: after clicking play, click the “HQ” button that will appear on the bottom.

Pau for now..

Pics from the show floor at SXSW

Barton George — Tue, 17 Mar 2009 02:04:04 +0000

As I previously mentioned, on Saturday I headed down town to the Austin convention center and SXSW. Although I’ve lived here in Austin for 2 years this is the first time I’ve checked it out. I drove down after lunch and bought myself a day pass to the show floor.

: The entrance to the convention center

While the biggest part of SXSW, Music, doesnt start until later this week, the Interactive and Film festivals kicked off on Friday. Film and Interactive had a combined “Trade Show” which ran from Saturday thru today and that’s where I hung out on Saturday.

Although the show floor was a modest size it was chock-a-block full of tech and cinema offerings (here’s the map and list of booths — my unofficial guess would be it was 80% tech/20% film). I hung out there for about four hours catching up with old friends and checking out the various offerings.

Artifacts from the event: Rackspace tube socks, business cards, BarCamp pass, Montana film board leather coaster, a brochure from "Austin's only tiki shop" etc.

As you would guess, social media apps dominated the tech offerings and a lot things seemed to be some derivative of facebook/twitter/craigslist/linkedin with an innovative (or not so innovative) spin. Microsoft had a big booth as did Sun who was showing off its JavaFX.

Don’t touch that dial!

Coming up later this week, the video podcasts I did with Charlene Li of the Altimeter Group and Jason Hsiao of Animoto.

There were a fair amount of apps that looked like this.

Here are a few of the faces from the show floor.

A picture of Guy Kawasaki taking a picture of the Lunarr booth.

The ever helpful Josh Dilworth of Porter Novelli working the press info stand.

: Ka’awa was there promoting a tour of singers from Hawaii.

Kevin takes the hand-off. PR firm Porter Novelli gives new meaning to the expression "booth babe."

Pau for now…

Pics from BarCamp Austin 4

Barton George — Mon, 16 Mar 2009 02:03:52 +0000

As I mentioned in my last entry, yesterday I hit SXSWi. When the show floor closed, I moseyed over 311E 5th St. to experience the wild and wackiness that is BarCamp Austin. To accompany my video from the event, here are some stills. Enjoy…

MC Whurley: The Man behind it all.

The Schedule.

What’s in a Name

If you’re not familiar with BarCamp, contrary to what you may think, it has nothing to do with libations:

The name “BarCamp” is a playful allusion to the event’s origins, with reference to the hacker slang term, foobar: BarCamp arose as a spin-off of Foo Camp, an annual invitation-only participant driven conference hosted by open source publishing luminary Tim O’Reilly –Wikipedia

BarCamps started in 2005 and they follow the un-conference format where topics are posted the morning of the event. Yesterday’s BarCamp was Austin’s 4th and masterfully arranged by Whurley and Sara Dornsife.

Update: An inside look into organizing BarCampAustin and how they leveraged the cloud.

The Bar Camp Bar. Serving Vodka & Red Bull and cheese hot dogs.

A portrait of the artist and his work -- Cody, the guy who did the BarCamp mural.

The pressure finally gets to organizers Sara Dornsife and William Hurley and they snap like cheap toothpicks.

Pau for now…

Bar Camp Austin – A Quick Walk-thru

Barton George — Sun, 15 Mar 2009 03:00:04 +0000

I just got back from SXSWi and Bar Camp. I will post pictures from there as well as interviews with Charlene Li of the Altimeter Group and Jason Hsiao of Animoto in the next few days. Before then I wanted to post this one minute walk-thru of Bar Camp that I shot near the end of the event. Heck, watch this and you’ll feel like you’re actually there .

To watch in High Quality: after clicking play, click the “HQ” button that will appear on the bottom.

Pau for now…