Hello,
January really flew by and was probably the shortest month I have had in California to date, especially with such an incredible number of events I attended. Let’s dive in:
CES (Jan 7-10, 2010)
With over 120,000 attendees this year and 2500+ exhibitors, the Consumer Electronics Show’s main venue, the Las Vegas Convention Center, was filled to capacity with gadgetry and electronic accessories. The Convention Center is at least the size of three football fields, so you can imagine just how much there was to see. The most apparent observation from the show was the 3D TVs and Internet TVs being heavily pushed by the television industry. My photos from CES are here.
SOCIAL GAMING IN 2010 (Jan. 21, 2010)
Hosted on the Google Campus in a meeting room adjacent to their enviable Dance Studio, this panel featured five leaders in the gaming industry who represented Zynga, RockYou, ThreeRings, and two other local gaming industry entities. The purpose of the event was to hear and discuss their predictions on where social gaming would go in 2010. All the panelists seemed to agree that Facebook is currently the best distribution platform for social games and that growth in the industry would continue. Specifically, the panelists also predicted:
* the re-definition of “digital goods”
* more cross-platform games
* more sophisticated ad strategies in game mechanics and in payment mechanics
* continued Facebook growth
* even more “social” in social games
* more ad revenue experimentation
* mobile app developers might surprise the social gaming industry this year
DESIGN 4 DRUPAL (Jan. 23, 2010)
Drupal is an open-source content management system (CMS) which I strongly believe will become the system small-to-medium-sized businesses and communities go to for their website solutions in the coming 2-3 years. In my quest to become a Drupal “Ninja”, I attended the Design 4 Drupal Camp at Stanford University. One of the positive outcomes of the conference was a small group initiative to organize a weekly training course, possibly in Mountain View. If you are interested, let me know. If you’d like to learn but can’t make the course, I highly recommend starting off with “Using Drupal” from the O’Reilly series.
GIT CATALYST CONFERENCE (Jan. 26, 2010)
In exchange for volunteering to edit the conference video footage, I was given a free ticket to attend the Catalyst Conference in San Francisco. Hosted by Girls in Tech and largely billed as a “women-only-please” event, the conference featured top women (and one or two men) sharing their tips/thoughts on Branding, VC, Negotiation, Social Media, Developing, Gaming, Social Causes and Innovation. It was excellent having the company of 300+ women all day and any conference that provides peach smoothies and Boudin box lunches is tops on my list. To see the tweets from this event, search under #gitcc.
GOINGS-ONS
Two weeks ago, I began doing some work for an internet company in Mountain View and have since decided that I must cut down my 3.5 hour/day commute. I’d like to move to the Palo Alto, Mountain View, or Sunnyvale area immediately. If you know of any potential housing situations available there, please put me in touch!
Lastly, I have an extra hardcopy of Tim Ferriss’ “Four Hour Work Week” so if you would like to have it, let me know and I’ll make sure to get it to you. Thanks so much and have an amazing February ahead.
Warmest wishes,
Crystal