I’ve helped with and organized a few events in my time; occasionally I get asked for my advice on doing so… as happened twice in the last week, so I thought a blog post was in order on some of the things I’ve learnt from Startup-meetup, BarCamp Bournemouth, Ignite Bomo, Meetdraw etc… and also from attending events.

1) Be specific if/when you ask for sponsorship, you get better results – When we asked sponsors for £340 to cover a meal at a conference, we got better responses than when we asked for £100 to be a “micro-sponsor”. I have to thank Mark Ng for this one when he handed Bar Camp Bomo over to us, by far the most useful thing anyone said to us.

2) Get EVERYTHING in a google doc (or similar)  for anyone involved to see: contact details, to do list, speaker contacts etc etc.

3) Don’t rely on committees, assign tasks clearly to specific people. It’s quite well documented that you have less chance that someone will volunteer to do something the more of you there are about. This is especially true of tasks “can someone…” means noone will (usually).

4) Allow people to do tasks their own way. It’s easy to micro-manage every little detail (or end up doing it yourself) – learn to accept that people do things in different ways and that most times this really doesn’t matter. I’ve even witnessed people working at an event say “I was going to do … but I know (the boss) will tell me I’ve done it the wrong way”.

5) Schedule EVERYTHING. Know when you need invoices paid, things booked, press releases sent… I’ve certainly got this wrong in the past on events and it’s on my “must try harder” list.

6) Be open, honest and transparent with your attendees. My pet peeve at events is when you get conflicting stories about why there is a delay / cock up etc… just be open n honest. Customer service 101: acknowledge what has happened, say what you’re doing to ensure it won’t happen again and what the next steps will be.

7) On the day… Don’t panic. Things WILL go wrong, kit will be lost, people will fail to show, someone will complain about something… So what? Try and enjoy your event, make sure you ask for help as soon as you need it and just roll with it.

As ever, I’d love to know your top tips in the comments.

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I’ve had a couple of small relapses of Reiters recently (see Reiters Syndrome for the history) and found something odd…

Surfing seems to make it better.

No, really.

My reiters causes swelling of the left knee and right ankle (that’s the worst affected parts anyway), previously a moderate does of steroids for a week kicks it back into touch… but on Thursday surfing did the job.

Now I thought this had been the case before, but I dismissed it as a co-incidence.

Wednesday I had a bad flare up while I was away with work, so I had no access to the emergency steroids my doctor left with me. Upon my return to Bournemouth I spotted some good swell, despite the pain (visible swelling and heat) in my knee I really wanted to go out.

I surfed for an 90 minutes or so and I’m sure the combo of restriction from the wetsuit plus the cold sea water sorted my knee.  Wow!

Is that even possible? Next time I get a flare up, I’ll be heading into the sea!

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This week I went to South Coast Connections at the Queens Hotel and spa, where the guest speaker was Bill Morrow, founder of Angels Den.

After hearing the story of how he came to set up Angels Den he set out the five questions start-ups have to answer to secure funding from Angels, perhaps interesting is to hear where most fail; I wanted to share it with you so here it is:

angels-den

Note: this recording was made off my phone so it’s not amazing… and yes, I did ask Bill if it was ok to post it online! (especially to share with the Startup-Meetup group on LinkedIn)

1. What do you do?
2. What is the pain in the marketplace that you solve?
3. How do you solve that pain?
4. How do you differentiate yourself from your competitors in the market place?
5. How much money do you need? (& does the money you ask for show a relation to the valuation I put on your company?)

I especially liked his openness about failure, one for a future Failure Swapshop perhaps?

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Yesterday I got to spend quite a bit of time playing with the new Blackberry Playbook, I know plenty of people who follow me on twitter were keen for me to write my thoughts about it after I sent a twtpic photo of it out…  so forgive me a slightly off topic blog post for once!

Disclosure: I was presenting at a Blackberry Sponsored o2 lunch event, talking Social Networking, Mobile Apps and Relevant legislation (ASA CAP Code etc) – that said, these opinions are entirely my own ( I did ask if it was ok to write a blog post).

So in no particular order, my thoughts:

1) “7 inches felt better in my hand than 10…”

Ok, I could of chosen my words better but hey it made my friends laugh… seriously though, it feels a much more natural size to hold and use with one hand. Which is annoying, I was sure I wanted a 10″ android tablet until using the playbook.

2) I like the way you use the bevel

Swiping from the top brings up a menu, from the bottom it goes to the tasks/launcher screen (as in the pic) and sideways switches between running apps. It’s intuitive and I really liked the fact this leaves the rest of the front of the device free of buttons.

3) Video playback is MIND BLOWING

I watched an HD clip on the device and it really blew me away how sharp the picture was (HDMI out too) plus being a widescreen device it filled the screen. (1024×600)

4) Android apps?

I either missed, or the one I used didn’t have the android emulator – would of loved to try this.

5) Take it to the (Blackberry) bridge

Tethering to a Blackberry device was quick and seemed to work well, from what I saw on my limited play it uses the information from the phone – not syncs it. If I got this right, I think that’s pretty clever, you could give this to your kid, lose it, break it without compromising user details. Internet via 3G worked well.

6) The lag…

Some reports have said it was quite “laggy”, I didn’t really notice this, although I wasn’t specifically trying to run loads of apps (although when the video was running flicking to another app worked just as smoothly).

Overall what did I think?

I was honestly pleasantly surprised at how smooth it was and how good it looked. I LOVED the size, it’s made me re-evaluate which tablet I’ll get (I want one for presenting especially) .

Would I get a playbook? Probably not, but that said, if I was a Blackberry user I would definitely get this device.

For business use in a person to person (think being on a stand at a show or door-to-door) it’s much better to hold than an ipad being 7″ and lighter, with the Blackberry bridge a great combo.

Personally, I’m still set on an android tablet – I had decided on the Asus Eee Transformer… but now I’m looking at 7″ ones…

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I think it’s fair to say, we’ve finally managed to build a tech /web / creative community in and around Bournemouth, wooohooo!

Meetdraw

Coming in June Meetdraw X (10) – wow! From its humble beginnings in iBar to the 100+ regular attended quarterly events for all digital / creative animals.

Bar Camp Bournemouth
(Website not updated since #bcbomo3 though…)

3 successful bar camps done… attracting around 100 developers / coders and hackers to the (sunny) south coast for 2 days of self organising talks.

Ignite Bomo

In September there will be an ignite event as part of the Bournemouth business week aka Business on the Beach 2011. 5 min talks on tech / trend and cool things.

Bournemouth Creatives (formerly Bomo Creatives)

This networking / creative lobby type group has recently launched their micro-fund for local arts projects. Brilliant!

Dorset Digital

Pre-dating meetdraw, this tech get together at local pubs has restarted for 2011 (meeting 18th May in Dorchester)

Aside from these events, how about shared working spaces?

Yeah, we got those too:

Enterprise Pavilion

For startup creative businesses, based at the Arts University College Bournemouth.

Digital Workspaces

Based in the center of Bournemouth on Richmond hill, with a combination of hotdesk space and startup office space it’s fostered 2 new collaborative ventures I know of this year. (Plus we’re based there so it must be good… if you’d like to visit there’s an open evening on 27th May at 7pm too)

Anything I missed, leave me a comment? (I bet I have…)

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On a train journey yesterday I was reading the latest Wired magazine which has a very good set of articles/interviews on the culture of failure #1 (especially the difference between the US and EU attitudes to) and it got me thinking…

• In the same way that some banks were “too large to fail”, do we now have a set of tech companies too large too fail?

Let’s imagine all the lawsuit insanity around at the moment resulted in Google (I choose them merely as an example #2) owing more money than they could afford to pay (I know this is unlikely!), forcing them into bankruptcy/closure…

• Would they be allowed to fail?

Taking another example, the US government asked Twitter to postpone maintenance when #iran was going on; Imagine if they were declaring bankruptcy instead.

What about some of the other lesser known companies we rely on for internet architecture?

Whilst I’d feel fairly secure that our worldwide information superhighway could withstand the collapse of one or two tech giants, there are undoubtedly parallels with the way banks form a financial global infrastructure that we rely upon.

• Could we imagine a bail-out for tech companies?

Looking at the ridiculous (there I said it) over-valuations of certain group buying (and other) sites, is there evidence of a second bubble?

What would make a tech company too big too fail in an internet-dependent society that suffered a second dot com crash of sorts?

Granted, there are numerous anti-trust type lawsuits around the world, from WiFi location hoarding to monopolistic practices and everything in between which act as a kind of brake against this but is it enough?

Side note #1: I’d encourage any of you to run a failure swapshop at Bar Camp or other open format conferences you can, a wonderous exercise.

Side note #2: There is an interesting article from Linux Journal “EOF The Google Exposure” along the lines that Google as a search and advertising giant is too big too fail. I don’t agree entirely with that article as they have proven to be good at moving into many other areas (apps, android, video..) which are starting to generate returns.

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What a great bit of (chalk) graffiti

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