"Just Give the Most Inspiring 2 Minutes of Your Life" : A Behind-The Scenes Look at the #MassTLC 2010 unConference

The MassTLC Innovation 2010 unConference was a huge success. I am so thankful to the volunteer experts who had over 300 1-on-1 meetings with entrepreneurs, and to all the people who came and created an agenda with over 100 sessions in 31 venues. On the day of the event, I enjoyed shooting video. This year, I captured some nice behind-the-scenes footage on the morning of the event. I've edited them together so you could get a sense of what it was like leading up to the opening. Enjoy!

Re-Blog: 10 Ways Driving Someone Else’s Ferrari Is Like Being An Entrepreneur #MassTLC cc:@cgallello @JoshSamBob

This is such a great blog post, I just had to re-blog it here:

...With Josh (Babson MBA 2008) behind the wheel and Chris (Olin College 2012) riding shotgun, we decided to drive all the way from the World Trade Center in the Boston seaport to Babson/Olin to show it off to our friends. Along the way, we realized more and more that the Ferrari ride was actually a lot like entrepreneurship. Maybe this is just a cheap excuse to relive the excitement of tooling down the Mass Pike at 95 MPH, but maybe it’s to show Bill Warner that we actually held an unConference session in the car. Josh and Chris present:
10 Ways Driving Someone Else’s Ferrari Is Like Being An Entrepreneur

Part 3: @billwarner's #MassTLC Oct 13 Anything But Work Pre-Party photostream - Great Party! cc:@gweber

Here is a set of photos from my camera during the MassTLC 2010 Anything But Work pre-party on Wednesday, October 13, 2010.
Thanks to our amazing hosts at the Microsoft NERD Center! This party helped so many people get to know each other on the night before the unConference. I believe the party was one reason that the event the next day was such a huge success.

These photos are also available on the Facebook page for the event at: http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=33772&id=146968118681646.
Also Dan Bricklin posted an amazing 400 beautiful photos of the unConference itself on Flickr at http://www.flickr.com/photos/danbricklin/sets/72157625162266374/ These are available in a variety of resolutions, including full resolution and all can be downloaded and used under the Creative Commons With Attribution license.

Later, I will post to Flickr or some other site that will allow download of the full resolution photos contained here.

Part 2: @billwarner's #MassTLC unConference photostream - What an amazing day!

Here is another set of photos from my camera during the MassTLC 2010 unConference on Thursday, October 14, 2010
These photos are also available on the Facebook page for the event at: http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=33768&id=146968118681646. I added a bunch of captions on Facebook to help with tagging.

Also Dan Bricklin posted an amazing 400 beautiful photos on Flickr at http://www.flickr.com/photos/danbricklin/sets/72157625162266374/ These are available in a variety of resolutions, including full resolution and all can be downloaded and used under the Creative Commons With Attribution license.

Later, I will post to Flickr or some other site that will allow download of the full resolution photos contained here.

@billwarner's #MassTLC unConference photostream Part 1 - What an amazing day!

Here is one set of photos from my camera during the MassTLC 2010 unConference on Thursday, October 14, 2010
These photos are also available on the Facebook page for the event at: http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=33766&id=146968118681646. Facebook is a great way for you to tag your friends and spread the word about the event.

Also Dan Bricklin posted an amazing 400 beautiful photos on Flickr at http://www.flickr.com/photos/danbricklin/sets/72157625162266374/ These are available in a variety of resolutions, including full resolution and all can be downloaded and used under the Creative Commons With Attribution license.

Later, I will post to Flickr or some other site that will allow download of the full resolution photos contained here.

I love Boston. I love Cambridge. I love it here. What an amazing day! #masstlc

It's 5am and I already woke up. So many thoughts from today!

I fell in love with Boston the first time I came here, in 1976. My sister was going to school here. I grew up in New Jersey, and my exposure to a city was New York. Huge, imposing...yes exciting... but surrounded by a moat and you had to pay a toll to get in.

My first impression of Boston was that it was so beautiful, so compact, so walkable, and so inviting. I came in 1977 to go to MIT, and I've been here ever since. The city, the region, and the people just keep getting more amazing. I love it here.

Today, we had the MassTLC Innovation 2010 unConference. It was an amazing event. I'll say more later, but for now:

Thanks so much to everyone who made this event just awesome!

Check out this tweet roll (Thanks Chris Myles) http://masstlcun.blogspot.com/p/masstlc-tweets.html

Check out these amazing photos: (Thanks Dan Bricklin) http://bit.ly/bOMJEi 

Okay, back to bed. Thanks everyone! Wow.

Mega System! Real-Time Twitter/Blogging/Note-Taking for MassTLC2010

SUMMARY: All you need to know is this: Click on this link www.masstlc2010 from anywhere.
- Your smartphone when you're at the MassTLC 2010 unConference,
- Your desktop if you can't come, and want to follow along. Cool real time tweets PER SESSION!
- Anytime after the event, browse to this location to view EVERYTHING about any session! Thanks Chris and Nick!

I love it when things work out great. I love it even more when they work out way better than you ever thought. And when you can even use software at a party (see below).

For last year's unConference,  I asked Nick Tommarello to create an iPhone web-app (looks like an app, but no install needed) so everyone could know what sessions were on the agenda wall without having to go back and look at the wall. He did it, and it worked great. That system is still running, and you can look at all the sessions from 2009 at www.masstlc2009.org. Try it on a browser or an iPhone or Android.

This year, a new player came on the scene and really upped the ante. Chris Myles, who was part of the Anything Goes Lab session in July, came to me a few weeks ago and described a system for fully capturing everything that goes on at the unConference. Frankly, I was swamped with getting the conference going, and it looked really complicated, and I didn't have the brain cells to figure out how it would all work.

Well, fast forward to the last minute, the very time that Nick and I reserved for updating this year's smartphone app. We re-engage with Chris and I start trying to figure out how his whole thing works. Again, I'm kinda stumped. But then finally Chris tells me what I really needed to know: Just hook to these three links, and everything will work. Well today, we did that, and by gosh, this nice clean web-app connected to the Chris Myles megasystem actually works! It will allow all the attendees to capture and view tweets, notes, video, audio, and photos, all in real time, and all properly filed under each session.

So, here's a look at the system:

UI and Core System: (Nick)

- Broswer or web-app
- Ability to quickly add all the sessions to the database at the event
- Browse sessions on Android, iPhone
- Automatic generation sign-in and hash tags for Twitter
- Automatic generation of tagged/hashtagged posting via email

Back End Megasystem: (Chris)

- Build a Blogger page for each room/session (over 100)
- Put real time feed of session specific tweets on each Blog page
- Capture all session tweets in FriendFeed for archival storage
- Replace the real time feed with archival feed after the event on all pages
- Grab all the emails in a Gmail account (for archive purposes and replying to folks later)
- Send emails to Posterous Blog with proper tags per session
- Each Blogger page will later become the "curated" session history. 
- Each session curator will be able to easily find all tweets and content in the Posterous unCut
- Each session blog page will have a Disqus comment section for threaded conversations.

Says Chris: "Instead of having all the Session content scattered throughout the webosphere, we will be gathering the content back into virtual online sessions. These focused virtual sessions will be used to curate key takeaways and content so participants, and those unable to attend, can continue the valuable discussions, shared knowledge and energy long after the unconference is over"

What does all this mean? It means that the over 600 people can truly document and at the same time observe, what is going on in all the sessions. And, for people who cannot come to the event, I believe we will have the most extensive, most organized real-time system for viewing (and maybe even participating in) a remote unconference.

Here's a portion of what the system looked like last year. This year, we've added automatic links to each session that let you:
- Sign into the session and tweet your attendance
- Take notes in the session , then email the notes, post to the blog, and tweet a link ...all automatically
- Take photos, video or audio, and then email it to the blog, which will automatically post a tweet to our handle, @masstlcun

Here's what the system looks like this year. Try it! on your phone or your computer. www.masstlc2010.org This year's unConference has four sessions (five was too many last year...people were exhausted!). We also have the system working for the pre-party, so when you get to an area, like Ping Pong, you can sign via twitter. You can then tweet with the hashtags, or maybe document the valiant wins or crushing defeats via email posts by just clicking the Session Notes link. You can also see everything that's been uploaded to the Posterous blog by clicking the "View Blog" button.

thanks to Nick for his work in both years, and to Chris Myles, for his wonderful new contribution.

Thoughts on "Anything But Work" Pre-Party 6PM Wednesday Oct 13 NERD Center Cambridge

Don't miss this event! All registered attendees are already on the list at NERD. And you can bring a guest! Ideally, please RSVP at http://anythingbutwork.eventbrite.com/. If you forget, and you're registered for the unConference, just come! You're on the list.
I was thinking about how parties and play mix with meetings and work.
Some words seem important, serious and valuable, like "work" and "focus" and "goal."
Some words seem friendly and frivolous, like "party" and "play" and "fun".
For MassTLC 2010, we've got both. And both are part of an overall scheme to drive innovation. The scheme is simple: help people get to know each other, help them meet in work settings (at the unConference) and in casual settings (at the Anything But Work pre-party). But mainly, get them to have fun doing what they love, both in their field of work, and in their field of play.
I urge you to not to miss this party. You'll party and play and have fun. And it will help you with your work, your focus and your goals.

Congratulations to David Cohen and Brad Feld on "Do More Faster"

David Cohen and Brad Feld collaborated to create TechStars, and now they have expanded that collaboration in a new book called "Do More Faster." Like TechStars itself, this book too much of its input and energy from the mentors who help the entrepreneurs in each TechStars city. (Now Boulder, Boston, New York and Seattle.) I wrote two of the chapters in the book, and I look forward it its release in a few weeks. You can pre-order the book here.

I'm excited that David Cohen will be one of our volunteer experts at MassTLC Innovation 2010 at Boston Seaport World Trade Center on October 14, 2010. In addition, five companies on our roster of Sponsored Entrepreneurs are TechStars graduates.

Brad and David will be in Boston on October 21 for the Do More Faster book tour. They are also going to these cities:

12OCT   Palo Alto
14OCT   Los Angeles
15OCT   Seattle
18OCT   Denver
19OCT   Boulder
21OCT   Boston
25OCT   New York
28OCT   Chicago
08NOV  Raleigh/Durham

Here are some selected photos from my first exposure to TechStars, when I visited there in December 2008.

David Cohen takes a break in his office in the "Bunker" in Boulder. TechStar's offices are in the basement in a modern office building right in the middle of downtown Boulder. The place used to be a health club, and the Jacuzzi is still there, but dry. David's office is windowless, but the space is painted very brightly and natural light does pour down the main stairway.

Brad Feld at one of our meetings in Boulder. He took me to so many companies, I can't remember where this photo was taken. But I think that climbing man sculpture will answer the question.

David Cohen with Andrew Hyde. Andrew Hyde has spent four years working on TechStars and is also the founder of Startup Weekend. Andrew is embarking on year off, which he describes here. 

TechStars provides working space for the companies in each session. When I visited in December, the summer session had long ended, so this room was lightly used.

How many startup accelerators come with their own locker room?

Fast forward to Boston, June, 2010. This is TechStars Boston Demo Night, our second one.. The room was packed, and investment committments were made right then.

Shawn Broderick, our Executive Director for Boston, stands in our space used for the first two years of TechStars. We should call it the "unBunker" While it lacks the colorful paint or the locker room, it does have amazing amounts of natural light, and really high ceilings. It's on the top floor of the old Cambridge Electric Light Company building in Central Square, so it got the name "The Penthouse."

Our TechStars Boston space occupied the top floor of this building for TechStars Boston 2008 and 2009.

Here's a photo (well, two photos) of the company sheet from Demo Day 2010. It's really been great working with David, Brad and Shawn, and all 19 of the companies and their founders and co-founders. I look forward to TechStars Boston 2011, starting in March 2011.