johnwilker.com

2011 in review

I was traveling by car from Denver to Vancouver WA during the holidays and didn’t get much laptop time. A blessing and a curse for sure :) but wanted to take a few minutes to put down my thoughts on the year that just ended. It’s been a roller coaster for sure, in both good [...]

We’re all busy, stop saying it and do something

I see this on twitter, and in real life face-to-face conversations a lot, “blah blah, working on something awesome, super super busy” or some other fairly douchey version of that sentence. Typically said by the same people over and over, as if saying something like that makes you cool, as if repeating it somehow makes [...]

sometimes you want to quit

As is typical of life, I’ve had this blog post sitting in a Safari tab to be written about. I’m in a blogging mood today so I sat down to talk about this post, and turns out it’s a company who just signed on as a sponsor of 360|Flex. There’s no real correlation, but I [...]

Tom and @GaryVee made my day

Tom was at a Thank You Economy reading last week, and stuck around long enough to chat with Gary. To my surprise and pleasure, they talked about me, and 360|Conferences. We’re in our 5th year. They (i hate ‘they’ and if I meet them they’re getting punched in the neck) say most startups don’t make [...]

Technology and Conferences, finally some good

Last week was Ignite Denver 7. You can read all about Ignite Denver on the blog, but among all the numerous new things we did to reboot Ignite Denver, we used technology.

It worked awesome!

There were two things we used, Eventbrite’s iPhone app and the Square reader and iPhone app.

How does iThoughtsHD have this and Apple doesn’t?

I caved, and paid $10 for pages. Complete waste of money. I edit a lot of pages files. Sponsor packets,etc. All the time. I’d love to pull one up on my iPad, edit, and without having to think about plugging into iTunes, copying the files out of iTunes back to my iDisk where they live, overwriting the old one.

Pages, and most apps, come kinda close, you can access the file, pull it in locally, make edits, but then you’re stuck, the document is trapped in the iPad and iTunes.

Why not make the iPad apps (at least the Apple ones) more connected to Oh I dunno, say Apple’s own cloud services. iWork.com and mobileMe. Some of us (still) pay for mobileMe hoping it’ll mature and actually be useful. I have no idea what iWork.com is for, but it seems like it’d make perfect sense to tie the iWork iPad apps (maybe the new iLife ones too) to Apple’s own (though dropbox, et. al. would be nice too) services to extend their usefulness.

If it looks easy, it’s not

It’s weird (both flattering and a little insulting) when people look at what you do, and think, “well if he’s doing it, I can do it” vs. possible partnership, etc. Sure there’s a part of all of us that wants to do things on our own, or own way. But in business especially I think [...]

Looking Forward, Looking Back

It’s been an interesting year. More so than normal years. It’s also the end of a decade, so I’ve got some thoughts on that too. Fair warning. This is a longy.

Decade first:

in 2000 I worked for a company that was basically an IT Staffing firm that decided to get into software. I worked internally on a web app that would (in their terms) revolutionize staffing. I bailed, they failed, it was 2000, that happened a lot to a lot of people and companies.

I spent most of the 2000′s as a programmer, first doing ColdFusion, then moving to Flex. It never occurred to me to try out M$ tools, or any other. I liked Macromedia (Now Adobe) offerings and stuck with them.

IgniteDenver October 14th

I’m back again with Ignite Denver. We’re rocking Casselman’s again! October 14th! For the most up to date info, make sure you follow the Ignite Denver blog, that’s where speaker and sponsor announcements are made, etc. We’re looking for help! Ignite Denver is looking to grow from a 2 people operation, to a committee run [...]

Ignite Denver 3 Lineup

I posted the line up for Ignite Denver 3 on the Ignite Blog, but wanted to post here too. Nicole and I went to check out the Irish Snug the other day and meet with the Manager. Very impressed with the Snug. I know the single biggest problem with past Ignites Denver has been the venue, and hopefully I’ve made it clear, it’s an experiment. Denver is too big and too cool a place to settle on a college classroom, when there’s so many great places. Unfortunately that also means we try some ‘less than cool’ places. I think the Snug will make amends for the last two venues!

keep looking »