austinpreneur

SXSW Panel Picker is up - cast your vote!

Every year, SXSW puts up all of the great panel submissions and lets the community vote on which ones are best. They combine this data with their own advisory panel and staff to select the final panels.

At the very minimum, please show your support for me and OtherInbox by clicking here and
PLEASE VOTE 5 STARS FOR THESE 4 PANELS.
http://panelpicker.sxsw.com/ideas/index/3/company:otherinbox

Here is a list of all the panels I'm involved in, of course I'd recommend them all!

Don't Declare Email Bankruptcy! Take Control of Your Inbox.
Joshua Baer, OtherInbox.com

Your inbox is overflowing with spam, bacn, ham, email lists, Bcc's, and even a few emails that you actually want to respond to. Learn about new tools to help protect you from spam, prioritize your inbox, and save you time. Don't be a slave to your inbox!

Should I Build my Startup on Ruby on Rails? Joshua Baer, OtherInbox.com

You've heard Ruby on Rails is the hottest new technology for developing web applications. You've also heard of concerns about scalability and hiring talent. How do you separate the facts from the hype? Hear the business perspective on why to consider Ruby on Rails now and why you might want to wait and see. Get ready for a head-to-head comparison with PHP, Java and .NET!

Hackproofing Ruby-on-Rails Web Applications Mike Subelsky, OtherInbox.com

Ruby-on-Rails makes building web applications deceptively simple, and for most Rails startups, security is usually an afterthought. Through a live coding demonstration, I will demonstrate how thinking from the attacker's perspective can help you protect sensitive data and avoid the pain of a hacking incident.

Scaling Ruby-on-Rails Using Cloud Computing Mike Subelsky, OtherInbox.com

Skeptics argue that Ruby-on-Rails "can't scale". In this talk, I prove them wrong by demonstrating how cloud computing technologies have changed the game, enabling developers to use the expressiveness of Ruby and Rails to build high-performance applications that scale easily. Will include a case study and live scaling demonstration.

Email Deliverability Secrets from Deliverability.com Dennis Dayman, Eloqua & Joshua Baer, Datran Media

Okay so you have read all the white papers about email deliverability and you've got the basics covered - but some of your email still goes to the spam folder. Learn about advanced techniques for segmenting by IP address, building your email reputation, removing spamtraps, and more. Find out how to get your problems priority access from ISPs like Hotmail or Yahoo. Plus we'll take 3 volunteers from the audience and help to diagnose your deliverability challenges on the spot!

Spend More & Pay Less: How to Create a Great Company Culture Brett Hurt, Bazaarvoice & Joshua Baer, OtherInbox.com

Learn from successful entrepreneurs the do's and don'ts of building a company culture. Take home a list of specific ideas you can implement to make your employees perform better and increase their loyalty. What's the rationale behind providing free drinks, catered meals or free cab rides? How much strategy and financial information is appropriate to share with the entire company? Can employees work from home? How do you celebrate your successes? Find out what really works and what is just a waste of time and money.

Hire an Employee, Hire a Local Contractor, or Outsource it Overseas? Steve Bell, ShangBy.com & Joshua Baer, OtherInbox.com

Should you hire employees in-house, work with local contractors, or outsource overseas? Learn the overall pros and cons as well as the specific exceptions. Hear personal success stories and horror stories from entrepreneurs who have extensive experience building products in-house and overseas. At the end, we'll take specific examples from the crowd and give recommendations on how to proceed and who to work with.

So You Want to be an Angel Investor? Hall T. Martin, Central Texas Angel Network & Joshua Baer, Austinpreneur

Wishing you were an early investor in Facebook? Have some extra cash? Or maybe you just love talking to startups? Whatever your reason is, Angel Investing can be fun and financially rewarding. As software and hardware costs go down, many startups don't need as much money and Angel investors become more attractive than venture capitalists. Hear from a panel of experienced Angels to learn basic strategy, evaluate opportunities, negotiate terms and find other investors to partner with.

The New Inbox Mark Schmulen, NutshellMail & Joshua Baer, OtherInbox.com

Everyone knows that email is the killer app. But we get so much email that we're in danger of information overload - and its only going to get worse. New paradigms for email are evolving to help prioritize the email you want and ignore the email you don't want. Hear from the innovators in Inbox management about what to expect in the years to come.

Bootstrap Your Startup Bijoy Goswami, bijoygoswami.com & Joshua Baer, OtherInbox.com

Dell, Oracle, Microsoft and Virgin were bootstrap companies that were able to get started without raising traditional venture capital. Bootstrapping is not just capital efficient, it has many other positive influences on your business and your potential to profit from its success. Learn why you should consider the bootstrap method and ask questions of a successful bootstrap entrepreneur.

And here are some other friends doing panels that are also worth voting for:

Widgets and Mashups - Enablers or Risky Business?
David Altounian, iTaggit Inc.

Time-to-market demands on web developers are leading to the creation of widgets, mashups, and embed code to add functionality to sites. This panel will explore the options, benefits, and risks of using third party sites and modules.

Dancing With Zombies: Monetizing the 'Old Media' Graveyard Matt Cohen, OneSpot

With online content exploding, the “old media” deathwatch has become a popular spectator sport. But with large financial war chests, millions of readers, and a burning need to re-invent their business models, big media brands aren’t joining the departed anytime soon. They’re just turning into something new. This panel will contemplate the old media metamorphosis and discuss why these brands will offer substantial syndication and revenue opportunities to third party online publishers in the years ahead.

Blog Revenue Strategies for the Web Discovery Era Matt Cohen, OneSpot

What will it mean to be a professional blogger three years from now? As the Web becomes more intelligent, bloggers must be prepared to evolve their publishing, syndication and monetization strategies. A better collective understanding of individual consumers, “smarter” content aggregation tools and new models for content distribution will transform the current landscape, creating new opportunities for market leadership and revenue generation. This panel will examine the major trends at work, and dig deeply into these new opportunities for the online publisher.

PR for Pirates Jeremy Bencken, BuzzStream

Doing your own PR? How to use the latest tools and techniques for finding the right bloggers & reporters, researching their contact info, writing a great pitch, and conducting highly personalized outreach, without making it your full-time job.

The Whole Business Web - Making the Shift Jon Lebkowsky, Social Web Strategies

The accelerating emergence of Web 2.0 and the new converged digital social media enables business to move all its processes, not just sales/marketing/PR, out of the deep-hierarchy low-velocity world of conventional mass-based operations, up into the high-knowledge high-velocity network structures of the Web, creating a whole new platform in which the old tradeoffs of quality vs. speed vs. cost no longer apply. This panel explores how the Whole Business Web is emerging, and how you can make the shift now.

Making Green Visible Jon Lebkowsky, Social Web Strategies

Sustainability requires informed buyers. The accelerating convergence of real and virtual is opening vast new potentials for us to make the “green” visible in every purchase by increasing the interaction between the product and the buyer, making the product’s true history and composition transparent. This panel explores these trends and the globally emerging new technologies and businesses working to make this happen.

Showtime -- Bringing the Co-Web to a Screen Near You! Andrew Donoho, IBM

The Co-Web, the collaborative, media converged web, is upon us. Showtime uses Web 2.0 technologies (OpenAJAX, XMPP and RTP/RTSP) to build a Co-Web page where we all interact on the same data at the same time, see the same context and make better decisions as a result.

Measuring the Health of Your Online Community: Metrics That Don't Suck Miles Sims, Small World Labs

There is a lot of buzz today around measuring & defining community health. This panel will focus on the right way to work WITH your community to measure success and make sure value is being provided for both sides.

In the Cloud: Massively Parallel Computing for Everyone Mason Hale, OneSpot

"Machine learning" once implied PhD's and racks of servers. No more. With projects like EC2, Hadoop and Mahout, and accessible texts lining bookstore shelves, advanced distributed computing techniques are going mainstream. After introducing the basics of map/reduce and collaborative filtering we will ponder the possibilities of web-scale computing for everyone.

Martha Stewart-izing Your Site with Rich Complementary Content Steve Waters, OneSpot

Recipe for Vertical Media Destination Site: Place high volumes of exceptional content in bowl. Add 2 cups of affinity focus. Stir in 1 cup of SEO flavoring for richness. Bake at 500 degrees all day. Serve hot. Repeat indefinitely. Until now, only fabulously wealthy master chefs could make this dish, because only they could afford the staff and tools necessary for its successful creation. This panel will explore the emerging content syndication trends and technologies that are allowing the rest of us to turn our humble sites into vertical media destinations. Felony conviction not included.

Lessons Learned from the Open Source Software Neelan Choksi, SpringSource

Open Source Software, once considered revolutionary, has increasingly been accepted as mainstream. In this panel of some of the most experienced open source leaders and analysts, we will explore what has made open source successful and what lessons all businesses can learn from this paradigm shifting technology.

Making Money with Royalties and Revenue Share Agreements
Lou Ellman, RoyaltyZone

Technology companies often enter licensing or partnership agreements to target new markets and increase revenue. The panel will discuss common licensing agreement strategies, keys for success, and effective ways for companies to track and monitor agreement performance.

Come learn Ruby on Rails on August 2nd

If you've been hearing about Ruby on Rails and wondering what all the fuss is about, come spend a Saturday learning Ruby on Rails with a group of experienced Rails developers as your guide. The program will outline the major pieces of Rails and dellve into the practial aspects of building web applications with the framework. Hands-on work on your own laptop will be encouraged during the work session.

Major topics will include:

• Some Ruby Basics
  
• Broad Rails Overview
  
• Building a Rails Application From the Ground Up
  
• Active Record Models and Database Migrations
  
• Views, Controllers, and Helpers: A Guided Tour
  
• Application Deployment with Capistrano 2
  
• App Lab

We'll be hosting the event on August 2nd from 10am to 5pm at the Datran Media and OtherInbox offices. Space is limited so reserve your spot today!

Austin on Rails meeting Tuesday July 22nd

On Tuesday, July 22nd we'll be hosting the Austin On Rails monthly meeting at the Datran Media and OtherInbox offices (fourth Tuesday of every month, 8th floor of the Omni Hotel at 7th and Brazos downtown). The meeting runs from 7pm - 9pm and then everyone heads to a bar for drinks after. Datran Media provides free drinks and pizza!

Topics for this month include...

Lightning Talks!
For our first segment this month, we are going to open up the floor for lightning talks, so please start thinking about what you would like to share now. We'll allow for 5 minutes or so per speaker, but no more than 10, and we'll fit in as many as we can. Good ideas for a talk might be a tool or technique you've learned recently, a new Rails project you've developed, a brief tutorial on a process or library you've found helpful. Etc! Should be fun.

Merb: The "Came for Rails, Stayed for Ruby" Framework
Merb is the pocket rocket framework that's creating buzz in the Rails community. Merb is fast. Merb is modular. Merb is efficient. And Merb might be the best choice for your next project. And it might not.

This presentation will provide an overview of the philosophy behind Merb, the 0.9 rewrite, where Merb is headed, and how it can compliment Rails. We will quickly dive into checking out Merb's internals, a few Merb plugins, and how you can get involved in the Merb project. Merb is a great example of a ruby project done right, and we'll highlight a few features that Merb knocks out of the park while helping your determine if merb is right for you.

Brian & Ben are partners in software consultancy specializing in Django, Rails, and Merb development. The team has closely followed the progress of both Merb and DataMapper since their respective 0.9 rewrites, contributing to the projects whenever possible. Since April 2008, they have been using Merb + DataMapper on new client applications.

Also, OtherInbox is hiring Ruby on Rails developers, so if you're interested in learning more please come to the meeting and find me!

Austin On Rails meeting Tuesday June 24th

On Tuesday, June 24th we'll be hosting the Austin On Rails monthly meeting at the Datran Media and OtherInbox offices (fourth Tuesday of every month, 8th floor of the Omni Hotel at 7th and Brazos downtown). The meeting runs from 7pm - 9pm and then everyone heads to a bar for drinks after. Datran Media provides free drinks and pizza!

Topics for this month include...

Client-Side Performance Measurement & Optimization
by Eric Falcao
Performance optimization tends to focus on topics like database tuning or server-side caching with the goal of getting response times as low as possible. A recent trend in client side optimization has been found to provide huge performance improvements to the user's experience.

In this talk, we will explore how to best measure the client-side download time and look at how to implement best practices (from O'Reilly's High Performance Web Sites) using a mongrel/rails/nginx stack.

Eric Falcao is a software developer at FiveRuns who has a passion for Internet startups and the business of software. Formerly of the .NET world, Eric is glad to be a part of the Ruby and Rails community and an advocate for the great startup climate in Austin. He blogs at http://austinentrepreneur.wordpress.com.

What's Coming in Rails 2.1?
by Steven Smith
Rails 2.1 was announced at this year's Rails Conference and had 1,400 contributors which resulted in 1,600+ patches. A lot has been done since the release of 2.0, which occurred approximately six months ago. This session will cover the major new features of Rails 2.1 including UTC-based migrations, better timezone support, and better caching.

Steven Smith is the Vice President of Engineering and co-founder at OtherInbox. He also founded FiveRuns, a venture-backed start up with the goal of bringing a simpler, smarter solution to the Ruby on Rails monitoring and management marketplace. Prior to FiveRuns, Steven was the CTO of Tonic Software and SVP of R&D at Neon Systems. He was also Founder and CEO of Relational Development, Inc., a software company specializing in System Management solutions from 1991 to 1998.

Also, OtherInbox is hiring Ruby on Rails developers, so if you're interested in learning more please come to the meeting and find me!

Austin on Rails meeting Tuesday May 27th

On Tuesday, May 27th we'll be hosting the Austin On Rails monthly meeting at the Datran Media and OtherInbox offices (fourth Tuesday of every month, 8th floor of the Omni Hotel at 7th and Brazos downtown). The meeting runs from 7pm - 9pm and then everyone heads to a bar for drinks after. Datran Media provides free drinks and pizza!

Topics for this month include...

ORM Deathmatch!
by Mike Perham
ActiveRecord isn't the only game in town when it comes time to access your database with Ruby. We'll take ActiveRecord, DataMapper and Sequel, put them in a steel cage match to the death and see who emerges victorious. Attendees in the first three rows might get bloody so bring a poncho.

Sinatra - a Tiny Ruby Web Framework
by Damon Clinkscales
There are times when Rails seems like massive overkill, but you would still like to use Ruby goodness. This is especially true when your entire web site idea can be contained inside one file. We'll take a look at the features of Sinatra and play around with a sample application based upon it.

Also, OtherInbox is hiring Ruby on Rails developers, so if you're interested in learning more please come to the meeting and find me!

Cloud solution for cross-browser testing - crossbrowsertesting.com

Jeff Hotz just sent me a link to CrossBrowserTesting.com that allows you to easily test your web application on any combination of operating system and web browser. We are developing OtherInbox on Macs, and although I have a PC laptop sitting around for testing I don't have every different combination of XP, Vista, IE, Firefox, etc.

This lets me log in for 5 minutes and try something out to reproduce a bug or just do proactive testing. It's actually free to try out for 5 minutes at a time and you can pay for priority access.

I got my invitation to try Google App Engine!

Well, I finally received my invitation to try Google App Engine.

If only I knew Python!

Jasmine On Rails

Since the beginning of the year we've been hosting the Austin On Rails monthly meetings at the Datran Media and OtherInbox offices (fourth Tuesday of every month, 8th floor of the Omni Hotel at 7th and Brazos downtown).

At our first meeting, the Statesman came by to learn more about Austin On Rails. In addition to the human group members, they were enthralled with my dog Jasmine. Apparently they didn't realize that ROR was so easy a dog can do it!