Archive for October, 2010

The other evening I was at a party with a lot of other geeks at Geekhouse in Aarhus. It was an evening of lightning talks by the Aarhus geek community followed by free beer, wine and fun networking time (exactly what I’m going to miss the most when I leave Aarhus).

Being a girl at these events usually means you are the odd one out, which doesn’t bother me. It also means that sometimes what you get the most excited about is not the same as what the guys get excited about. What I remember most from that evening was a demonstration of a new brand of covers and handbags designed for women with gadgets.

My favorite item they have made is this simple and elegant iPhone cover made in really fine materials with a soft leather lining THAT POLISHES YOUR IPHONE. I know most men don’t care about the greasy fingerprints on their smart phone but as a woman it bothers me and this is such a simple solution.

One of the guys behind this new brand saw that I was falling in love with this cover and he gave me one as a gift. Oh, how I love being the odd one out :-). This brand is only sold in USA so here in Denmark it’s a rare item.

P.S. You could speculate that I’m just writing this blog post so I could get one of these as a gift. This is not the case. I did get one for free but I write this blog post because I like the brand, not because the brand told me to. And yes, I stole the product photos from the coverlicious website.

Most of the time startups focus on getting investors and optimizing for how much money they/we get out of it. But is that really the best strategy?

Github founder Tom Preston-Werner doesn’t think so. Github has never taken founding from VCs or Angel investors. Tom believes that you should optimize for happiness instead and actually that could also have a positive effect on the money part of things. If you build it they will come…

I recently found a video of Tom giving a presentation at startup school. I really likes his way of thinking:

Watch live video from c3oorg on Justin.tv

I was (as I previously mentioned) at a talk by Tom Preston-Werner a few weeks ago at JAOO about Github and Git. He is a really great speaker and his star in my book did not fade because he and the other github-people sponsered a drinkup during JAOO. I got to talk to some really interesting people and that lead to an idea that I’m going to work on in the future. It seems like what Tom is talking about in the video really works.

My main takeaways from Toms presentation: creating win-win situations, helping luck through proximity and being creative in not paying for things. It seems like I have been on the right path all along ;-).

If you have to chance to hear Tom present, don’t miss it. He is a laid-back, really cool guy.

The team behind JAOO was kind enough to let me attend the speakers dinner at JAOO this year where the charming Kevlin Henney took this photo of me with my two favorite JAOO speakers: Dan North and Michael Nygard.

It’s true – blondes really do have more fun.

This is almost as cool as the Lego Turing Machine and much cooler than the regular Lego printer: a Lego 3D printer.

Challenge: make a Lego 3D printer that prints Lego 3D printers.

I just have to share this – Bill Gates having an affair.

It is not my favorite strip from Wulff-Morgenthaler though – this one about computer scientists is.

I have been to a lot of conferences and seen a lot of presentations from brilliant people, but sometimes those brilliant people fail to make a presentation that connects with the audience. As an audience member (and not speaking as one of the brilliant people presenting) I have just one advice for those speakers.

Speak at conferences because you are on a mission. Don’t give a presentation just because people ask you to, and you are flattered. Make sure to think about what you are giving the audience – what the audience should take away from your talk (and make it simple). At conferences most attendees are on information overload, so you have to inspire them for further investigation. Tell jokes, tell anecdotes, use images to let your audience connect with your material. Be enthusiastic. Be memorable. Be tweetable. Be bloggable. Be the odd one out. Make sure that everyone knows why you are on that stage and what you are talking about.

That’s it.

Last week I was at the JAOO conference – the last JAOO conference ever. The conference runs from Monday-Wednesday with training days at Sunday and Thursday-Friday. On Monday the JAOO organizing team had a surprise for all attendees: the conference changed it’s name to GOTO (in the logo it’s written goto;). The next day all the JAOO banners were gone and big GOTO-banners had replaced them – and now the conference is PINK. A very bold move for a techie conference, but then again so is the new name GOTO (the jokes are endless: goto considered harmful is the most obvious).

I have been part of the JAOO conference for a few years now and I guess now all my conference-stuff with the JAOO logo is going to be worth a lot of money on Ebay for all the true JAOO fans – or maybe not :-). My favorite thing is these JAOO green shoes (with the JAOO logo on the toes) that is really nice to wear even for a whole conference.

JAOO is dead – long live GOTO!

The GOTOguy Kresten Krab with the tombstone for JAOO