HeresTomWithTheWeather

Maia Oden will be returning to Texas in a week and she's going to make a trip to Austin to play at Cafe Caffeine the evening of December 27. This is great news!

After attending college near her hometown in Texas, she found her way to Boulder and Taos for many years. It is just recently that she started to record music. Some of the songs are on her MySpace page. The name of the band is Laughter's Fountain.




I don't keep up with too many people from college. But I've kept up with Maia and also with my friend Lewis as Lewis and I frequently enjoy the live music at the Continental club. Lewis and I saw Maia perform a couple of short gigs in college. It will be great to see her sing again!

Labels: austin, maiaoden, music

I'm really looking forward to the Austin Co-op Music Festival tonight at the French Legation Museum. A new crop of sustainable businesses (Black Star Beer Co-op, South Austin Food Co-op...) are emerging in Austin and this seems like a great place to talk to like-minded people.

802 San Marcos St. (Google Map)
Austin, TX
When: Friday Oct 24
6-10PM

Labels: austin, coop, music

Update 9/28 - Barry Ritholtz shares a bailout comparison graphic buried in the Sunday NYT.

Dozens of protesters along 6th street in front of the offices of JP Morgan and Senator John Cornyn yesterday evening.


An Austin man questions the sanity of giving handouts to the same people who created the financial crisis...


Another protester shares his thoughts...

Labels: austin, banking, federalreserve, protest

Today is One Web Day, Earth Day for the Internet. Cafe Caffeine is hosting Austin's OWD today (Live video feed here). If you want to hear how this interview of Bernard relates to One Web Day, tune in this evening at 5:30.

Update (1:15pm central): Douglas Rushkoff is guest blogging on boingboing today. His book Get Back in the Box introduced me to Bernard in January '06.

Update 9/23: Rushkoff blogs at boingboing today on open currency.

Update 9/23 #2: "It is time we use the inspiration and power of this technology, this community, this dream, to fix what is broken in this real world. It is time the virtual gets used to fix the real...But the fact is things are this dark, and we have been given that tool. And we must use it to learn again how citizens govern." - Lessig on One Web Day.

Labels: austin, onewebday, owd, sustainability

Here's Brandon Wiley welcoming everyone to StartupCampAustin. Agenda here.

In the first session in the Quadrangle room, the tables were arranged facing the podium but there was no speaker because sessions were topic-driven, not speaker-driven. We decided to scrap our expectations from previous barcamps and we rearranged the tables in a circle, campfire-style.

This first session was on scaling. A facilitator was chosen and we were off! But something wasn't quite right with the topic. The topic seemed somehow inappropriate (even though we voted for it), maybe because of the many different circumstances that scaling refers to or maybe something else. By the end of the session, there seemed to be a rough consensus that a startup generally shouldn't be wasting time thinking about scaling their technology solution. It seems that often times scalability problems result from failing to practice the principle of subsidiary function. "But we're too big to fail!"

The next session I attended was the cooperative solution. For me, this was the most educational. Donald Jackson facilitated this one. The main contentious claim by a few participants was that, sure, a cooperative might be good for some things (outdoor sports equipment, credit unions, food, etc), but worker-owned cooperatives are not a good solution for a technology outfit. My response to this was that, although a collective might not deliver growth associated with well-known powerhouses like Google, there seem to be several advantages for independent freelancers to form a small collective. Often times, a cooperative can provide better service to customers with better availability and skill sets than one person can provide. How would a cooperative be any better than an S-Corp, LLC, etc?

Speaking of which, the last session I attended was on the well-known business entities. Scott Allen advised that sometimes an entity is not the right path as a contract arrangement for joint work may be a lot simpler. Scott, Joshua McClure and Jennifer Navarrete and others shared lots of great advice. The campfire style was perfect for this topic.

At the end, people were invited to give 3 minute pitches of their products. This was a great idea because I've seen 30 minute pitches suck the life out of barcamps. The pitches were fun this way.

Brandon and Joey Lopez did a great job un-organizing startup camp. At the end, several people expressed the desire to have startup camps once every 3 or 4 months.

Labels: austin, barcamp, startup, startupcampaustin

Tonight at Tech Night at MonkeyWrench Books, there was a conversation about Twitter which drifted into a conversation about the more decentralized open-source identi.ca done by Evan Prodromou. My mis-pronounciation of Evan's name sounded familiar enough to Brandon Wiley, the original coder of Freenet, that he recognized him from the early days of Freenet. A funny story about their first meeting which was at the O'Reilly P2P Conference was followed by an interesting conversation started by Donald about a decentralized urban farm in San Francisco called myFarm.

After the meeting, Brandon reminded us about Startup Camp Austin and I asked Brandon if I could get him to do a PSA for the event and he agreed.



Brandon, who is a regular at Austin Jelly, has a new startup called Ringlight. Brandon introduced StartupCampAustin at his blog a week ago.

Labels: austin, freenet, jelly, startup

An interesting thing happened on Friday. I showed up for the weekly Jelly at 10. The wireless router was on its last legs. I twittered a heads up. At 10:25, I decided I would be more productive at my client's site. It wasn't a wasted trip as I got to talk shop with a few people before I left.

Back at Cafe Caffeine, Jelly was still happening but without wi-fi and wi-fi is the sine qua non. So, after weighing alternatives, Stephen Gutknecht and Sarah Vela chose a plan of action. Since the manager of the coffeehouse was away, Stephen assumed the risk of the purchase of an Airport Extreme which Sarah picked up from the nearby Apple Store at Barton Creek. By noon, Jelly had wi-fi.

Soon afterwards, the manager arrived and Stephen emphasized that it was his choice to do it and wasn't looking to force them into buying a particularly expensive router. Management appreciated the grassroots energy and reimbursed Stephen for the router.

Chalk up another win for local independent coffee.

Labels: austin, cafecaffeine, jelly