Ignite Tulsa 3!

It’s hard to believe that we’re already gearing up for our third Ignite in Tulsa.  It was nearly a year ago when we had the idea to bring this crazy little event to Tulsa.  A handful of speakers get on stage with five mintes and twenty auto-advancing slides to share something they are passionate about.  Intimidating? Yes! A fun evening? Yes!  Ignite Tulsa #3 is coming up on September 16th at Downtown Tulsa’s Blue Dome Diner.  For more details check out the facebook page and be sure to RSVP!

Oh, here’s a few of my favorite presentations from our first two Ignites!

New Year, New Goals…

Turn off your smartphone’s email notification feature and discover enlightenment.

For years I’ve been glued to a mobile device. I got my first cellphone in 1995, before I was in high school. After circumventing my mothers opposition to such an idea, I got a job and the mobile store. Having a cool new gadget that let me keep in touch with my friends, at the same time, was too good to be true. In 2003 I jumped on the BlackBerry bandwagon, before the days of the expected instant email reply. The thing looked like a video game with a pager built in.

So the addiction started young. I was even scared to migrate to the iPhone because I didn’t think I could live without the instant email.

Two months ago that all changed. Emails’ constant push against my normal life caused me to hit a wall. I had to make a change.

I hit rock bottom while enjoying a few after work pints with friends at the neighborhood pup. I subconsciously and instinctively checked my email. It was nothing special, just your average overly emotional message from an overly emotional business connection. Yet, it was all but instinct for me to go into response mode. How do I put this fire out? What’s the best time to send a response.. etc, etc…

It was not till later that evening, in a burst of post happy hour genius, that I realized even having read that email was pointless. I’m not managing a presidential campaign, Matt Lauer won’t be asking me questions in the morning. Merely wasting the brain power to read that email, let alone think about it while I should be relaxing and focusing on having some downtime was horrendous.

Later that evening it all came to me, the obvious, that this instinct to check email, to stay on top of things, was causing me to do anything but. In a fit of frustration I turned my iPhone’s notification sound off and sent the thing to only check email every hour. Aside from having a battery that lasted through noon I slowly began to work away from my addiction. I didn’t have that worry of what was happening with work, when I wasn’t working.

Effectiveness is not constant, it comes in bursts. I don’t think they are completely controllable. But, if you no longer realize that your A-game is won’t happen all the time, you will lose understanding of where the bar is. You can train yourself for instinct, how to defend yourself, how to respond to a crisis. You can’t have your creative, business best all the time, and all to often that is what email is about.

So, stop, slow down. Check the email twice a day, not constantly and I think you will see that you ability to convey your thoughts goes up.

Ignite Tulsa

After much work and preparation next week is Ignite Tulsa! Be sure to sign up!

If you had five minutes on stage what would you say? What if you only got 20 slides and they rotated automatically after 15 seconds? Around the world geeks have been putting together Ignite nights to show their answers.

Ignite was started in Seattle in 2006 by Brady Forrest and Bre Pettis. Since then 100s of 5 minute talks have been given across the world. There are thriving Ignite communities in Seattle, Portland, Paris, and NYC.

Clouds or Fogs

The cloud has had an amazing impact on the growth of web based businesses. The likes of companies from 37Signals to Gmail have accomplished amazing things. Yet, yesterdays Gmail outage coupled with other issues (my label feature has not worked with a month) are beginning to make me wonder.

It is a bit of a fog… not having control of your corporate email with Google Apps. While I will continue to use cloud apps in my businesses and personally yesterday certainly reminded that you still have to be prepared for that 1% failure rate.

Great TV Ads

I’ve been working a few production products lately that have led me to so some research on great TV ads. I though I would share a few that I like.

It’s a random mix, but they all stuck out to me and I thought I would share.

Don’t bitch about where you live.

We spend a lot time talking about community in our field of work. It came up multiple times at SXSW, it’s a legit concern for those who run business, and something that is on my mind a lot as we grow. Are the cost advantages of operating in Tulsa greater then being in the VC/media/tech savvy Valley. There’s an interesting new book
about what city is best for an individual.

I’ll be the first to talk about the advantages of one city over another. I’ve had friends who have had to move their whole companies because of the business implications of one city over another. Yeah, it drives me nuts that Tulsa does not have more direct flights, I wish we had mass transit and less red necks, etc… But you know what, who cares… I love the things we do have and in particular that I’m close to my family.

I’m sitting on a flight back to Tulsa with a lady seated in front of me who has been flat out bitching about living in Tulsa for the last 30 minutes. In the row back, I am sitting next to a soldier. (Who after talking to, told me he was flying back from his base to meet his then in labor wife!) All I can think of is how totally pathetic this woman is right now. Be happy you don’t live in a desert hut worrying about being shot.

As American’s we take for granted so much. Even if she lives in Tulsa’s slums (she doesn’t) her quality of life is better then most everyone in the world. Appreciate that.

While this woman is an extreme example of my point, she has left me with the question of how much brain power and time is wasted worrying about crap like this. I have to stay aware of our corporate presence in multiple markets and its implications, but I am left asking myself if I’ve put more time into worrying about that then connecting through O’hare.

Something to ponder.

Viral Virus

So I’m on a business trip in Nashville busy working, networking, etc…

About 1:51pm I get a text message from a friend who happens to be a Tulsa Police office (Trusted Source) with info about an Amber Alert. Text had details including a local Tulsa park and had a license plate number. I quickly forwarded the text, posted a tweet, and shot out a bunch of emails before going back to work…

My tweet got RT’ed probably 100 times even someone in NYC actually retweeted it.

Few minutes later I start getting texts and tweets from people in the media asking where the heck I’m getting this info… So then I start digging… My cop friend heard it from another cop, who heard it from another cop… etc..

I checked with some media sources I have here in Tulsa and its totally false. At this point no one knows where it all actually started, though the same thing happened up in Utah the other day.

I’ll update later when I get back to the hotel…

Update Check out this Twitter feed for updated Amber Alerts.

Welcome to the new blog/portfolio!

Hey everyone, I’ll be setting up my new blog and portfolio over the holiday!  Hold tight, it’s going to be a great site.

-Happy Holidays

Ice Storm [life in the dark]

So you may or may not have heard about the big news last week in the fly-over state of Oklahoma. It’s been nothing short of an Ice Crisis. Last Saturday night we were hit with the biggest Ice storm I have ever seen.

Over 600,000 Oklahomans were left without power, it took us more then a week to get back online and I still do not have internet access from home. (hence why I have been camped out in an internet cafe for over 6 hours today).

I was going to write a post about what I am calling the “Ice Storm Idiots,” and I still might, but I think for the most part people know this is nothing even close to Katrina and the power company is not racist.

I do have some interesting posts on the way… Including… Core to Shore [OKC’s kicking our ass again] and How to survive in the dark[life w/o a flashlight sucks]. Also note the new feature of our blog, cool comments in [these things]. It’s totally stolen from Vallenwag, the Silicon Valley gossip rag.

Below are some images form the crisis of the last few weeks.