Our kick-off monthly meeting for 2008 was held at Cav - a fancy-smancy wine bar that even serves beer. The gang included Mary Choy, Rebecca Kidder, Nancy Purcell, Doris Beers, Erin O’Neil, Eleanor Beaton and my humble self.
As usual, wonderful conversation on a wide ranging set of topics and even some business was discussed.
Our theme this year will be “Knowledge Sharing”. The idea is to have formal and informal events where SFWoW members share their knowledge of a topic to other members who are interested.
We have a group of fabulous women who know so much about technology, arts and graphics, business and marketing — our goal is to share that information amongst ourselves.
This is a chance for you to toot your own horn. No special credentials needed. You have answered questions on the list, what topics do you usually post about? Lets get together and learn about it from you.
Our first event will be organized by Eleanor. It will be an informal gathering to learn about LinkedIn. Lots of our members are interested in using LinkedIn but may want to learn more about how to become a power user. I know I am a heavy user of LinkedIn and have some tips to share; but I’d love to learn from others too. So come out to the event when its announced.
Feel free to respond to this post with your ideas of topics to discuss - what do you want to learn about? what do you want to share?
_Susan
So I got a free exhibit pass via the Mobile Monday yahoo group and decided that Tuesday was my day to visit the Web 2.0 Expo event.
The event was a bit of a yawner if you ask me. I don’t see the paradigm shift that many people are talking about; it just seem likes a new branding of the same all stuff; some of it will make money and most of it will burn out in a flame of dust.
In the am. I sat through all the presentations. Not much to say about them. I had seen 2 of the 3 launchpad companies already Tellme and Vidoop. I did get the special invitation to signup for Vidoop at their booth but haven’t had a chance to do it yet. Their thing is a secure login using visuals rather than keystrokes. Tellme was just acquired by MSFT and they do voice search services that are pretty good. Eric Schmidt talked about Google’s acquisition of Double Click - ho hum.
The exhibits were open in the pm. It was difficult to tell what a lot of the companies were really doing. There were several booths showing corporate Wiki applications and they all looked the same to me. I agree that Wikis can be a great corporate groupware tool; but is that all there is to Web2.0?
And some of those companies need real marketing help — one booth only had the company name with no indication of what they do and no one really interested in telling me about it. Lots of the booth signage was really not informative.
Another interesting note - I haven’t seen so many free t-shirt giveaways since the height of the dot-com boom. And there were fun giveaway toys at a lot of booths. An ominous sign.
Unfortunately I was not at the event on Monday so I missed the opportunity to boo and walk out on the Spock demo - unbelievable that MCPs are still willing to show their stripes in SF these days; but there is no accounting for cluelessness among the supposed-Digerati.
I never heard of Spock but apparently they won the voting for the best Launchpad for Monday. Imagine that. On Tuesday the realtime voting count was available but not on Monday so they announced it on Tuesday. That was when I first heard the name but no one was talking about the demo, as far as I heard.
Later I heard about it from the 2 women at the Women 2.0 stand. My first encounter at their stand was with a Frenchman who was trying to understand why there would be a need for such an organization and claiming that there wouldn’t be a need in France (which I quickly corrected for him, having worked at 2 french companies in my last 2 jobs)
After he walked away, the Spock demo came up. I told the women that this was a perfect explanation for why we need organizations like SFWoW and Women 2.0 and they should be talking about their disgust at the demo and how it simply strengthens their commitment to their organization.
Next up for me is NAB in Las Vegas, its bound to be more interesting.
