CollectiveX talks and travels

Posted by Clarence Wooten Tue, 09 Oct 2007 00:24:00 GMT

Sorry for the hiatous. Last month was a busy month of travel and speaking engagements. Here is a round-up of CollectiveX talks and travels.

TerpAMA Talk

I started September with a speech to the University of Maryland’s TerpAMA chapter. If you’re wondering, AMA stands for the American Marketing Association. The audience was filled with a great group of approx. 100 University of Maryland students who are all about marketing. Although my talk was centered around CollectiveX, my speech also covered social networking in general. Specifically, I discussed how Groupsites powered by CollectiveX differ from non-group-centic social networks such as LinkedIn and Facebook. In doing so, it quickly became apparent that it wasn’t much I could tell a group of College students about Facebook, I’m pretty sure the entire room raised their hand when I asked who had a Facebook profile. The good news is… almost everyone in the room had a CollectiveX profile as well—TerpAMA uses a CollectiveX Groupsite to power their member network.

My talk was very well received and it was clear that in addition to the many CollectiveX champions within the TerpAMA group, we also have champions among many other campus groups at the University of Maryland. I’d like to thank Ryan Shain, President of TerpAMA, for putting together a great event.

TechCrunch40 Conference

Next, I travelled to San Francisco to the TechCrunch40 conference. It was a great time! It was good to catch up with a few old friends from the Bay area including Nivi, Janice, Jeff, and Sridhar from Zoho (see photo below) and meet new friends and CollectiveX users. I was particularly impressed with how well organized the conference was… especially considering it was the first conference ever put on by TechCrunch. I have to give kudos to Mike Arrington for what he’s done with TechCrunch. Some of you may know that Mike and I go back to the late 90s when Mike was our attorney at ImageCafe.com, my previous Internet startup. It seems like yesterday that I was sitting in Mike’s backyard with a small group of others at the first TechCrunch gathering. It’s clear that TechCrunch has come a long, long way since that barbecue in Mike’s back yard back in 2005.

(Sridhar and I origionally met when we both presented at Under the Radar last year.)