Shortly after the discussion I attended as a guest and found out that it was in fact a BNI meeting. At that point I didn’t care because I had met a phenomenal group and realized that they did things different from what I would have expected.

Had the individual that told meet about the meeting pitched it as BNI, I might not had gone. I had been to them in the past and decided that it wasn’t a fit for my company.

This raises a few questions:

1. What do customers immediately think of when they hear your name?
2. Is it what you want them to think of?
3. Should initiatives to break out of a certain role be part of a new brand?

These are just a few of the questions you may want to ask yourself about your companies brand image. What issues has your business encountered with your brand?

Yesterday evening I attended the Atlanta Bloggers Meetup and had the pleasure of meeting Rob Sutton who owns and operates Bike198.com. Sutton is an informative owner who was open about his operation including the ways that he generates leads, makes money and markets.

Since I have been thinking of starting a newsletter for CRMStage.com we dove into the topic to discuss how he leverages them. Here are a few of the details that I took away from the conversation.

• Non techies want something in their inbox

Even though people are all hyped up on social networking juice, many people still want data delivered.

• Gain Trust

If you have affiliate marketing it is important to gain peoples trust and make sure that they don’t always feel like they are being pitched. This seems straight forward but we have all seen companies that overdue it.

• Click through rates are much higher in newsletters

Prior to this discussion I had never researched the specific conversion rates of newsletters vs web advertising.

Do you send a newsletter for lead generation, marketing or promotions? What tips do you have?

Overall it was a great Meetup in a new time and location. Although the presentation was intended to be more about building modules than GetSocial Twitter Pro, we ended up discussing various ways to better promote the GetSocial Twitter Pro module.

There was a lot of great feedback and I want to thank all of the attendees for offering your thoughts. I also want to thank SugarCRM for hosting.

One of the first gentlemen that I spoke with said that this would be one of his final TAG Young Pros events since he was nearing the cutoff age. I had wondered if there was an age specified on the TAG site but figured that they would leave it open to anyone who wanted to attend. Come to find out they do actually specify that it is for 35 and under. Looks like I am OK for a while.

It was a good event with lots of mingling and the standard “what do you do” questions. The room and food was supplied by the sponsor The Intersect Group. Along with The Intersect Groups personnel there was a healthy portion of recruiters in the room, likely trying to fill some positions. Overall it was nice deviation from the mostly technical events that I attend.

Thank you The Intersect Group for the sponsorship.

For more info on the TAG Young Professionals head over to the website.

Without giving speeches, presenting, or sitting on panels you can automatically limit the number of people that you can get to know per event. One common tip for networking is to be genuine. I completely agree that if you are not genuinely interested in what others do then your networking adventure will not be near as successful. In being genuinely interested you must commit time to speak with people at various events and gatherings. Although it is time well spent it limits the number of people that you can meet per event. On top of that, many people attend similar events and cluster together to say hello and discuss the latest happenings. This common clustering effect also narrows the number of people not engaged in conversation that you can get to know.

Although the standard networking ritual is a requirement there is one way to increase the number of people that you meet per event. The solution is to speak, present, or sit on a panel. With presenting you still get to network before and after the event but you also get to immediately put yourself in front of people that are interested in what you know. Once you present information you are seen as a resource for anyone who did not already know the information that you provided. At the end they will approach you with more questions and most likely give you a card or request more of your time.

In conclusion I would like to add that you should not present with this as your soul purpose. Presentations need to be genuine and for the main purpose of spreading knowledge and information. If you truly want to help others and spread knowledge then good contacts and people will find you.

The conference payment and registration was now complete so I needed to find a class and get registered. It wasn’t immediately apparent to me when I logged in to my new PHP Arch account how to select the class without having to pay for it. I may have overlooked the area but there just didn’t seem to be a mapping in the system which understood that I had met the requirements for the conference that would result in a free class. With the contact info quickly accessible via the website I gave them a call. I was promptly put in touch with a human who solved my problem in a matter of minutes. He had me sign up for a class via the website and immediately waived the cost due to the conference tutorial day sign up. For me this was a great start to a beautiful friendship. There is nothing better than the feeling you get with prompt customer service that ends in problem resolution.

This marks the first of many posts that will be related to PHP Architect. I look forward to passing on information about how the well class goes as well as semi-live blogging the conference.

After lunch I attended Russell Journey and Loren Normans overview of Amazon Web Services. We received a quick overview of Amazon EC2 and then talked about when to make the switch from your standard hosting environment. The consensus seemed to be that you never actually make the switch. EC2 and other services are really built to assist in making your application fully scale when traffic starts to flood in. One example use is to have you website configured to spin up new EC2 instances when a certain load is met. With the correct structure EC2 is a cheap alternative to building out your own infrastructure and can easily handle getting Slashdotted or making the Digg front page. The second part of the speech was a flurry of URL’s to help developers more easily handle instances and cloud services. Here is a list in case you are researching cloud services and management. It also include some of the audiences preferred web hosts

• bluehost.com
• slicehost.com
• ylastic.com- I believe someone said these guys were local.
• rightscale.com
• scalr.net

Next I jumped into a security talk from Shauvik. He was giving an overview of the latest web security, projects, and updates. He went over various FF extensions used for auditing and some tools from OWASP.

Tools:

• FireCat
• Live HTTP Headers
• Wikto
• Nikto
• W3AF

Following the security update I sat in on the Mini Startup Gauntlet session paneled by Lance, Sanjay, and Don. For those who are not familiar with Startup Gauntlet it is a reoccurring event in which you present you startup pitch and the panelist tell you how to make it better. During the mini version there were presentations by Russell Journey, Mike Mealling, and Tejus.

Tejus completed his pitch of SCMPLE and I had to rush out to give one of my presentations which was Attack Detection and Remediation using RIA’s. I will have full posts up on my presentations shortly.

Now it was time for the last session of the day. Actually, it was the second to last but it went so well that most people turned it from a 30 minute session to an hour. Doug hosting the open discussion about tagged Open Source: The who, what, when, where, and why. Since most people in the room could fill in those answers pretty rapidly we attempted to think on a deeper level about open source. By doing this we really expanded the conversation. Here are some example answers that were written on the large white papers surrounding the room.

What: Other than software what are other uses, copyright and media,

• Who: attributes of who? Customers are architects and devs, freelancers, cheapasses, savvy cio’s, “do it yourselfers”
• When: when to use the Open source structure/arch?
• Where: everywhere
• Why: cost savings, community / collab, learning, better and easier to maintain, ready made consulting markets,
• How: more freelance help, google code
• How much: is open source free, jboss was purchased for 360,000,000 , mysql was bought for 1.2B, redhat 30% yr over yr growth for 4 years running,

As you can see, many of these were more questions just to expand the topic. We spent much time analyzing companies that were open source/free, open source enterprise, commercial open source, and other forms of hybrids. Overall my biggest take away was that the word open source has really gotten skewed over time. In the past and even today many people treated open source as if it was synonymous with free. For a period of time that was somewhat accurate. However, some of the largest open source companies today don’t have as much to do with free software as when they started. Overall this was a very compelling end to BarCamp.

Lastly I have to thank everyone who made it happen.

If it weren’t for Mike Mealling and Lance Weatherby this would have never happened. Thank you for a great event.

I must also thank the BarCamp sponsors that make these possible.

• Angus McRae
• Appcelerator
• Microsoft
• Ryma
• ATDC
• GeorgiaTech Venture Lab
• TechLinks

BarCamp Atlanta 2 Links:

• Pictures from Lance
• Why Erlang Slides
• BeagleBoard
• Web Security
• Generating Buzz ( Without being a scumbag spammer )
• Push Protesting
• How to build your own Guitar Hero/Rockband clone in a week
• Hacking Ubiquity
• All of the Tweets

“a unique network of local roundtables for the support of startup entrepreneurs.” – GangOf5.net

In other words, it is a group of 5 to 8 entrepreneurs of various backgrounds that get together on a weekly basis to help each other solve problems. I was unfamiliar with the Gang of 5 until I met Mathew Sweezey a local Atlanta entrepreneur. Once he told me about the group, what they did, and who was in his group I realized that I knew everyone that was in his “chapter.” Since the “chapter” never really spoke about the group they were jokingly called the Illuminati of 5. After word started to spread about Go5 more people gave thought to creating their own groups.

I to have given thought in creating a group and would love to put one together in my area. Below is a map pinpointing my location with a 20 mile radius overlay. I would like to start a weekly Go5 meeting anywhere within this circle. If your radius overlaps with mine then please contact me so that we can get our Go5 group started.

To get more information about Go5 head over to Mathews post which includes the rules.

We are wrapping up day one of BarCamp Atlanta 2 with some Texas hold’em and Jameson. Josh Watts won the first game and is hoping for a second win. So far it has been another exciting event with lots of good presentations. I will give quick recap or the presentations that I attended.

The night started off with a presentation from Lance Weatherby about Atlanta StartupWeekend 2. This years StartupWeekend will be a little different in that there will be multiple projects started and no actual companies organized. It will be up to the group members of the project to determine if they would like to move forward in any way. Lance had a quick talk which then opened up the floor for Calvin and Paul to tell us more about Skribit which was the company formed at last years StartupWeekend. Paul and Calvin gave us a little insight that they will be moving to the freemium business model which should be completed by December. Another piece of good information is that Sanjay is working on the patent filing for the provisional patent.

After getting the update on Skribit and StartupWeekend 2 I watched Kieth McGreggor present on Genetic Algorithms in Javascript. Kieth is a member of Venture Labs and from his presentation has dealt with a large number of algorithms for all kinds of data. His presentation displayed a lot of deep information about mapping genes ( 1′s and 0′s ) and grouping chromosomes ( groups of 1′s and 0′s ) that get fed into fitness functions to detect the optimum outcome from data sets. Examples of his javascript code can be found at http://theconceptory.com/ga/.

Next up was Brad Anderson which spoke about why people should use Erlang. His main points were that if you wanted your program to be massively concurrent, seamlessly distributed, and fault tolerant then you should use Erlang. One very shocking point was that the London mobile network runs Erlang and has 9 9′s uptime. This means that they have 32 milliseconds of downtime a year. To me this means that they don’t really have downtime. One of the reasons for this is that you could hot swap code. To me this was an amazing concept. You can swap in new code and all current processes will finish using the old code and all new threads will use the new code.

One thing about many of the people that are in the Atlanta community is that many of them love Ruby on Rails. So the next presentation was Screen Scraping with Ruby by Jeremy Raines. You can check out his slides on slideshare. The presentation consisted of using Xpath and RubyRegex to screen scrape any data that you need off of a website. The base concept is to request a page and turn the html tags into a xml document that can be iterated through. Each iteration uses Xpath and Regex to pull out the required data.

The last two presentations that I witnessed were related to food. With Ivey we took a total detour to discuss coffee. I learned that to truly get the full taste from coffee that you should use it within 10 minutes of grinding. The next thing that I learned was that the water used for fresh coffee needs to be at least 200 degrees. I am not a big coffee drinker but at least I am more educated than before I started.

The last presentation that I watched was Randalls: Fun with Food and Nitrogen. This pulled a large crowd because everyone wanted to see what he was going to do. Dressed in a lab code and using $600 liquid nitrogen container Randall moved forward in creating frozen marshmallows, frozen Cheetos, and instant ice cream for everyone to eat. This was a huge hit and a great ending to the presentations for the night.

Currently all attendees are either drinking and playing poker or drinking and playing guitar hero. All in all, day one was a huge success and a great deal of fun.