Jules Bartow

Speed-Tech Meetup @ TEQCorner in McLean

You’ve heard of speed dating, right?  Never done it myself.  However, I did my first Speed Teching: where developers, entrepreneurs, graphic artists, people with ideas, and venture capitalists hook up.

The leader, Tony Bray wore an umpire jersey and blew his whistle every 5 minutes.  The whistle, appropriate for a collegiate or NFL football stadium, was way, way, way too loud in the confines of the classroom defined by walls made of functional garage doors. Deafness aside, he’s looking for Ruby on Rails developers, hence the great pizza and sodas (pop, coke, carbonated beverages [no beer]).

Nikki Johnson, CEO of HQOSEO.com told me my start up’s business model reminded her of a book she just read ‘Pull: The Power of the Semantic Web to Transform Your Business‘  by David Siegel.  That was a real boost to my fragile male ego because she worked with Donald Trump as a runner up to become a contestant on The Apprentice.  I misunderstood her when she said, “He has such intense hair”.  Nikki corrected me, “No Jules.  …an intense stare, you know, when The Donald looks you right in the eyes from two feet away.”

“Saya” “Sayeh” “Sally” Behnam, principal for Design-Future is better looking in person than her Facebook picture.  Even more impressive is her Adobe Creative Suite graphics and art work.

Greg, a car salesman from the local area, and CJ from Atlanta are making good money with tipois.com –and the web site isn’t even functional!  I had no idea what the acronym TIPOIS or their logo stood for.  I stopped a few college kids at the grocery store on the way home and they all knew, laughing hilariously at the keyfob containing three finger cots.  If you don’t know, it’s OK, don’t look it up.  If you really have to know, urbandictionary.com explains why it doesn’t really mean Together In Peace, One in Spirit.

Greg and CJ are looking to sell online and accept credit card payments.

Merchant accounts…

• Amazon Seller
• Miva Merchant
•  Yahoo! Merchant Solutions
• Shopify – customizable with RoR.

Kyle Kaynak at xist.ly hooked me up with the local Co-founders Meetup venture accelerators/incubators group in Rockville MD and  The Founder Institute #startups and TechStars in New York.  Other incubator organizations include Y Combinator in Silicon Valley,  Seedcamp in Europe and Excelerate Labs in Chicago.

Start Ups

For those with concepts, but no code or revenue generation, Eric Ries’ Lean Startup Machine, based on Stanford’s Steve Blank chasing ideas, validation, and customers (not money), is doing an intense weekend boot camp from Friday, March 23, 2012 at 6:00 PM to Sunday, March 25, 2012 at 6:00 PM at

GeekEasy
1328 Florida Avenue NW
Suite 2025 (Second Floor)
Washington, DC 20009

The $250.00 cost will  help startups avoid lots of mistakes and expense developing something nobody will pay for. First find out if there’s a need, pain point, or something that keeps people up at night and create a Minimum Viable Product (MVP)

Business Cards, so Blasé

One of the recommendations for Speed Teching is to bring business cards. A better idea, IMHO, is to bring your laptop or iPad and have 3-4 slides of your offering/requirements as well as your smart phone.   Your compatriot can take a snapshot of your web site’s URL with their smartphone’s camera,

izigg.com screen shot

follow your Tweets @YourNameHere, RSS from your blog, favorite your SlideShare presentation, send a Facebook friend request, scan your QR code [I use QuickMarks], use bu.mp Technologies
or download your virtual business card file (.vcf) [export from Microsoft Outlook].

To minimize the effort of typing info from business cards, use CardMunch to scan their business card into LinkedIn while they watch. This demonstrates you’re technologically savvy, but only if you have an iPhone.  It’s not available on any other mobile platform yet.

Perhaps the easiest, quickest, and least error prone way to digitally connect is via LinkedIn using your smart phone.

Adding LinkedIn connections is easy!

1. Download the LinkedIn mobile app to your iPhone, Crackberry, Windows, or Android phone
   • Just in case you were looking for the  “Android Marketplace”, it’s now called “Play Store”
2. Click/touch the  the magnifying glass in the upper right hand corner if you need to get your keyboard to show.
3. Make sure the focus is in the search
4. Hand your phone to the person
   • They know their  name and can enter it with fewer errors and quicker than you can, especially in a loud crowded convention hall, restaurant or bar.
   • I have a water proof Casio G’Z One, so this works in the hot tub and naked in the shower at Gold’s Gym.
     1. Don’t accidentally hit the camera function and Twitter your Wiener
     2. Keep the screen away from warm water spray –the phone thinks the water drops is you giving it commands. See #4.1 above.
     3. No. I have not done this.
5. Ask them to enter their First  space Last name.
6. Scroll through picture and job titles until they find themselves. It may take a few scrolls to find somebody with the last name Smith or Williams…
7. Click/touch the blue   Invite to Connect   bar at the bottom.
8. They’ll receive your invitation to connect. Once they accept you’ve now got more info than any business card could possibly construe using both sides of 2″ x 3″ of card stock.