The Good, The Bad, & The Ugly
| Feb 28, 07 in Entrepreneurship |  2 Comments |
I am feeling all Oscary. So with a nod to Clint here is my take on the 2007 Georgia Technology Summit.
The Good
1. Rich DeMillo's presentation. Will post more later. The Bad 1. No Wi-Fi access. There was a signal, it was just password protected. When I asked for creditionals they told me that it would cost $250 for the day. Hello! That's 12 months of service on Boingo and they have 60,000 locations. There were over 500 people that had paid $100 each and 40 companies that had paid $1,000 each at the event. Wi-Fi is pretty much expected at conferences these days. If I can go to Taco Bell and buy a Carne Asada Taquito and get free access you think I could get it for shelling out a hundred bills for the morning. The Cobb Galleria Centre needs to enter the 21st century. Or as Chris Anderson said, think of bandwidth as free. The Ugly 1. Not staying on schedule. By the time 10:00am we were an hour behind. By the time Chris got up to speak the place was half empty and folks were walking out on him to get to meetings they had previously planned. Not exactly the impression you want the Editor In Chief of WIRED to leave town with. Somebody needs to make the trains run on time.
2. Chris Anderson's talk about the economies of abundance. Getting a free copy of "The Long Tail" was an added bonus!
3. The 40 innovators. Included in the top 10 that presented were ATDC companies Asankya, Nexidia, Quellan, and Sentric.
Update: Official press release.
4. TAG's State of the Industry study. I have not had a chance to dig into it yet, but it seems chock full of good information.
5. Tino mentioning that KnowledgeStorm was going to be used to create a directory of Georgia technology companies. It seems bloggers can have an impact.
2. Using videos to make presentations when the person in the video was in the room. That's not innovative, its silly.
Lance,
The good news is that the majority of the feedback thus far has been very complimentary relative to the content. The bad news is that we did struggle with the timing for several reasons including starting late, running over on breaks and longer than expected presentations. All three have been highlighted by various planning committee members this morning and will be addressed next year with military precision. We will also look towards providing wireless access next year and recognize that it was a major oversight this year. Chris stayed and signed a number of books, which seemed to make those folks who stayed until the end quite pleased and as we escorted him to the hotel and back to the airport he seemed very positive about the experience. Our VIP reception on Tuesday evening for sponsors and the Top 40 Winners also received very positive comments. All in all, I would have to say that 2007 was a better show than 2006 and I'm betting 2008 is going to be a knock-out!
Cheers,
Patrick
Patrick D. Gaul
Program Chair
GTS 2007