On March 2 I announced the Build My Timbuk2 Bag contest and promised to announce the winner by midnight. Twenty four people joined in the fun and one person was even inspired to go get a Bag In A Box Gift Card for their wife's birthday. Thanks to everyone that participated and special thanks to Erika Brookes and SJ for helping me judge the entries. There were some tough calls.
Andy Macdonald, a 23 year old Graphic Communications student at Clemson University, earned honorable mention with his subtle semi-monochromatic design. It matches my car nicely, and if this was going to be my use all the time bag it would have won. But I have a standard issue Tumi that I use when things get serious, so while a valiant effort Andy did not take home the grand prize.
Ajai Karthikeyan, a second year College of Computing student at Georgia Tech, went bold with a design that mixed the FoG color palette with a tribute to my MindSpring heritage. Very nicely done. Another worthy mention.
Ultimately the judges landed on Clark Griffiths' design as the winner. Clark is an urban designer/planner and aspiring professional photographer out of Tampa Bay. The bag's blue/white/spinach scheme is both bold and fresh. It builds upon the equity that I have built in my FoG color palette. It is just smoking hot. A great bag for when I am hanging with the up and coming Atlanta startup crowd.
Congratulations to Clark for the winning design! And thanks again for everyone that played and helped out.
Team Skribit gave me a Timbuk2 Bag In A Box gift card for the work I have been doing with them. And what I am going to do with it is build my own bag. I have selected the medium laptop messenger as my bag of choice. Now I need to design it.
Issue is I am not much of a designer. I can provide design direction. I can even tweak design. But I am not much good at design itself. So I am going to have a little contest and have you design my bag for me. Winner gets the choice of a $20 iTunes or Amazon gift certificate. Spend 15 minutes. About $80 an hour. Seems fair.
Here are the rules.
- Go to the Build Your Own Bag page.
- Select Laptop Messenger.
- Choose Medium size.
- Design the outside of the bag.
- Go to the next step and select the color of the logo.
- Make a comment on this post indicating your design by midnight on Sunday March 8.
- Use the following form in your comment: left panel color/center panel color/right panel color/logo color. For example Navy/Rocky Road/Army/Olive. (Timbuk2 really needs a save/share function).
- Winning bag design will be selected and announced on FoG by midnight on March 11.
- The winner of the contest will be decided by Erika Brookes who has been described as an expert on being both technically smart and chic, SJ who has a bit of a bag fetish, and me.
- I don't have to actually use the winning design.
- If I don't use the winning design the winner still gets the $20.
- One entry per person.
- I can make up more rules as we go along.
That's it.
Make something beautiful.
"No one is going to run a mission critical application on Windows. It has a tendency to crash."
Jim Whitehurst
Atlanta has long been known as a center for the InfoSec industry. It seems that ISS alum with the quiet support of Tom Noonan spawned a nice little cluster of well over 30 startups.
Well leave it to a guy from North Carolina to point out that another such cluster is raising in Atlanta. An open source cluster led by JBoss alum. With the support of Marc Fluery. Who does nothing quietly.
In an article explaining why Marc is his hero, Mark Hinkle lays out the following:
I think one of the biggest contributions Marc made to open source was
that he infected a bunch of guys with the bug to go make it on their
own. Many of them walked away with more than a little pocket cash and
they started their own open source companies. Here’s a list of JBoss
alumns and what they are up to now.
Appcelerator - Rich Internet Applications
JBoss alumni: Jeff Haynie, Ben Sabrin, Matt Quinlin
LoopFuse - Marketing and Sales Automation
JBoss Alumni - Roy Russo, Tom Elrod
RingSide Networks - Social Networking Server
Jboss Alumni - Bob Bickel, Rich Friedman, Mark Lugert, Shaun Connolly
All of these companies made Mark's list of future open source superstars. The beginnings of I nice OSS cluster in Atlanta.
And finally I have news for you. The real reason Marc F is not Mark Hinkle's hero... I AM! : )
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