Opportunity and growth is all around us and glimmers of it are appearing in the web, mobile and other tech spaces. But are you willing to take the risks, explore and deal with all the obstacles in the way of you seeking riches?
In the movie The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, Humphrey Bogart’s character Dobbs, and two other gringos, embark in to Mexico to find gold in the Sierra Madres, an area in great flux and riddled with banditos, but policed by the Federales. In one of the signature lines in the movie the banditos, trying to convince Dobbs and his cronies that they’re Federales, say, “Badges? We ain’t got no badges! We don’t need no badges! I don’t have to show you any stinking badges!” (usually misquoted as “We don’t need no stinkin’ badges!“). There are several moral and philosophical questions in the movie and Dobbs dies, the banditos are killed by the Federales, the gold is lost and thus the analogy might as clear as mud: chasing opportunities won’t be easy but they’re out there; barriers and obstacles (and bandits) stand in your way; but we thought exploring opportunistic thoughts in this podcast was worthwhile.
Special Guest: For part of the podcast, Meg Canada joins us to talk about libraries, the iPad and more. Meg is a senior librarian for Web Services and Training at Hennepin County Library and currently coordinates public training and social media efforts for the library. She volunteers helping with the Unsummit, recently presented at MinneWebCon, and is a regular contributor to Social Media Breakfast.
Hosts: Steve Borsch, Tim Elliott, Graeme Thickins and Phil Wilson.
Music: “Santa Maria” by Will Kriski from Music Alley, purveyor of podsafe tunes.
The Podcast
Podcast: Download (Duration: 56:44 — 32.9MB)
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Discussed during the show:
+ Past Events: CloudCampMSP (see Minnov8’s coverage here); IgniteMPLS; Social Media Breakfast;
+ Upcoming Events: Mobile March; MIMA; DEMO; SxSWi; MinneWebCon
+ Mobile: MixMobi; WordPress mobile plugins (Mobile Edition; WPTouch); Square (mobile commerce)
+ Devices: Apple iPad; Microsoft Courier; Dell Slate
+ Other: Google pagerank to require speedier websites?; Hacker News.
The only “clouds” in sight were the proponents and would-be adopters of the latest, new hotness in enterprise computing. Two events, on Wednesday and Saturday, attracted a wide array of these IT professionals, some 350 all told, who were hungry to learn more about… well, “the orange that’s the new pink,” as Larry Ellison would say. It was beyond impressive that so many people would give up being outdoors last week after the winter we’ve had in these parts! Goes to show how deep our IT roots run in this state. Geeks are everywhere here and, doggone it, we’re proud of it! We still have many old-school enterprise IT folks who remember the days of time-sharing on mainframes, and way more than our per-capita share of Fortune 500 headquarters in this state, all with huge (well, getting leaner) IT departments. But, along with all that, Minnesota has a seemingly endless supply of boot-strapped Internet and software startup developers — folks that are finding they love what cloud computing is doing for them.
This Gang podcast is a short one with a focus on one, key thing startups need and care about: building awareness.
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