Category Archives: Conferences

Gigabit Challenge Finale

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I attended the Gigabit Challenge finale yesterday and I was left with one word to describe the experience; underwhelmed.

That said, I feel the need to quantify that one word description. I framed my viewing of the final 18 pitches within the following context: The business must be financially viable, and the business would require the use of the incoming google fiber network. It was this fiber network requirement that was the downfall in my expectations. Several of the businesses pitched would make decent businesses, they just wouldn’t need the speed of google fiber to accomplish their tasks.

In all I felt that two, possibly three companies would even see a decent benefit from the increased bandwidth. Of these three companies one of them did win the grand prize awarded in the competition. In my opinion the competition judges did a fine job and certainly a top tier business plan won in the end.

What I do disagree with is the structure of the prizes. There were three prizes awarded among the final 18 competitors.

The Peoples Choice Award (or more appropriately; The How I Gamed The Online Voting Award) which was valued at $100,000 in services provided by Think Big Partners and their sponsors.

There was a second prize which I don’t know the name of, but I believe it was provided by Gramercy Venture Partners. This amounted to a $250,000 convertible bond investment and coaching for a Series A funding round. This was a prize awarded by the individual judge from that company and not the judging panel as a whole. As such it should have been named The OMG This Companies Business Plan Must Have Kicked Ass On Paper Because Their Pitch Sucked Ass Award.

The Grand Prize package was the same as the Peoples Choice Award but it also included a $20,000 cash prize. This award should have been renamed as the WTF, Those Other Guys Got A Shit-ton More Money Than We Did Award.

Perhaps it’s a perception issue and the bond award will not be as beneficial in the end, but damn it’s hard to look past the numbers.

jQuery Conference Day Two

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Used under Creative Commons

As expected day two didn’t quite live up to day one for me. That’s not so say it was that way for everyone. In fact I talked to several attendees who disagreed with me. That said, the highlight of the day for me was the better lunch spread and side conversations. Even with that though, the conference was well worth attending and I hope to attend next year as well.

For me I think the problem with day two wasn’t content, because the talks all had decent content, it was the dryness/lack of public speaking experience by a few of the presenters. That and the crowd new more about a subject than one of the presenters. Combine it with a general lack of concentration (and tiredness) on my part and it adds up to a slow day.

My takeaways from the conference were plentiful. I have several items to explore further and some of them will be incorporated into my workflow. The code testing talks were especially helpful. I’m not sold on coding javascript in an MVC manner but the concept was interesting.

That’s my quick and dirty wrap-up, see ya next time.

Day One: jQuery Conference Boston

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This is how a developer conference is supposed to be.  I learned, I shared, I learned some more.  The quality of speakers was phenomenal.  It may be hard for day two to live up to the standards set, I’m not kidding.

Day one consisted of six sessions for me.

  • Opening Keynote
  • jQuery Mobile
  • Object Oriented CSS
  • Test Driven Development
  • Rapid Testing, Rapid Development
  • Contextual jQuery

The only hiccup on the day occurred during the Test Driven Development talk when the speaker used videos to show all the code creation, not taking into account that the projector wouldn’t be bright enough to show a code editor which had a black background.  This caused half the slides to be unviewable.  Other than that though, everything was smooth sailing.

I suffered my own technical glitch when my Evernote app crashed on my iPad during the most interesting talk of the day.  That would be the one about Contextual jQuery.  I hope they release the video of that one soon because I’d like to go over it again.  Some great stuff in their about traversing the DOM.

I also learned today that I have been using object oriented CSS without knowing that was what I was doing.  While developing my framework for WordPress theme development I also adapted a CSS structure to help facilitate rapid development.  As it turns out it “mostly” follows the norm for OOCSS.  I think I may use that as a talk for the upcoming Barcamp in KC next month.

Check in tomorrow night and I’ll have a recap of day two for you.