Barcamp Omaha 2009 If you care to comment, email me at bradley@wogsland.org with "Political Vloggery" in the Subject line. All links are good on the day of posting, but you know how some tend to die after a while.

Friday I bought an iPhone in part to facilitate my attendance of a conference on Saturday. Though I only found out about it earlier in the week, Barcamp sounded like an event worth attending. Held up in Omaha, the premise was to bring together technical, entrepreneurial and creative people together to share ideas. Plus it only cost $5 and they supplied breakfast, lunch and drinks. Really there was nothing to loose. So bright and early Saturday morning I hitched a ride with my Mac-obsessed friend, Chris De Jabet, up to Omaha. Upon arrival we discovered a number of other Lincolnites which I see infrequently in meatspace, but interact with rather often on the internet. Free bagels! And cokes! I came with a vague idea that for my next freetime project it might be fun to program an app or two for the iPhone. I also wanted to testdrive the device full bore at a conference, so I started tweeting pictures of everyone - you can follow the whole even by searching the hashtag #bco2009 on twitter. That is, at least for the next couple weeks until they disappear from the twitter search results ... but I won't gripe about that here. Barcamp is semi-spontaneous order. Anyone who's got a talk prepared could give one under the three headings: Creative, Technology & Entrepreneur. I spent the first part of the morning in the entrepreneur track. Jim Linder of UNMC shared his experience as a venture capital (VC) investor. He and his wife are part of the Nebraska Angels. Their group invests $200K on average in a project to own 20-40% of a company and he plugged their latest investment, Skyblue, and its iPhone app "Battle Bears". He also talked about the Halo Institute, another funder of entrepreneurs in Omaha. Apparently there are 3 kinds of investors: financial, strategic & angel. Sometimes strategic investors are companies that see you as a threat and want to kill you. Their kiss of death can be avoided by building milestones into the contract. Angel investing, Linder's specialty, usually looks for investments with the possibility of a 30X return. From Jim's wife Karen I also learned that Apple takes 1/3 of the money from iPhone Apps. Next up in the entrepreneur track was Troy Johnson, who wrongly assumed there would be good internet access at the conference (Nomad, the venue for the event, had one wireless router to accommodate several hundred people). Coming from the Creighton University Law Library he talked about the difference between patent, copyright and trademark protections. The Us is apparently unique in having a first to reveal rather than first to file rule for patents. His former student Jason filled in many of the gaps from the absent powerpoint presentation. The most interesting part was probably that the Supreme Court agreed to hear the Bilski v. Doll case, which may invalidate many of the ridiculous patents that have been granted over the past decade. Getting a little tired of hearing about law I headed over to the creative track for the next talk, where Pete detailed his plans to "Kill Ticketmaster". Pete actually came to pimp his startup, ShowIgniter.com, which plans to bilk bands out of profits by making them guess their worth. Pretty sure that's not gonna work out... After that I tried a Technology talk, where Stephen of Bizo.com told us what he liked and didn't like about Amazon's simple DB. Up to 1 GB is free, but you pay after that. The drawbacks include: only text values, lexical sort only (ie 2 > 10 but 02 < 10), difficult to escape, etc. He is a fan of the NoSQL movement, but not of any of its participants. Next was Gary Overgard. He's kind of a hippy, but also an engineer and he's really stoked about neuro-enhancement. Basically he wants to replace chemical methods with physical ones - maximizing alpha waves with a a bluetooth EEG. His wife also plays harp and would like you to take her free DVDs and CDs. On the whole the information was useful in that those utilities have moved past the prototype stage, but it was still quite a fruity presentation. Admittedly, the thing faded after lunch... Tim Kephart talked about building a culture in a startup from his experience at Grafitti Tracker. He runs his startup somewhat like a frathouse, including "blackballing". The creative track shot off a "cat rocketship" of ideas for artists to build a community. Then there was a presentation on Intraprenuership - a fallacy in my humble opinion. The day finished up with networking, networking, networking. In that regard the day was a complete success! There was an afterparty, just like there was a preparty, but with a 3 hour gap it just didn't seem like it was worth my time. Chris De Jabet and I headed back to Lincoln. Overall it was an incredible day!