Jamillah over at BBC Radio 5 contacted me last week and asked if I could talk about BIL for a few minutes. Below is the podcast version cropped to just my part. Here’s the show page, Pods and Blogs.

If you’re interested in finding out more about BIL, here’s the 2010 Speakers, the BIL website that features all the events and talks from past one’s, and BIL:UK.

Here’s what I’m doing right now:

• Events
  • BarCampTX – We’re having BarCamp Texas in Downtown Bryan tomorrow. There’s still a lot of work that needs to be done. Someone needs to drive down to Houston to grab the shirts, and we need to build 2 walls tonight! We’re in a huge room that we want to break up into three rooms, and just this week found out we’d need to build these walls.
  • BIL – aka, “The Other TED.” We’re reaching critical mass with this one. We have some amazing speakers already lined up and word is spreading throughout the science and technology community about it. Two days ago we finally confirmed the location – we have a conference center reserved for March 1 & 2. I’m working on promotion mostly right now. Getting interesting people to actually commit to a topic and add themselves to the wiki. We have a little over a month until BIL happens!
  • Trip to California – Cody and I are going to California for a week (two of those days being BIL). We’re setting up meetings with all the people and companies we know but haven’t met in person. If you’re interested in meeting up, send me an email.
• School
  • Two quizzes on Monday
  • Paper due on Tuesday
  • Still have work to do in moving my midterms around. I’ll be missing three midterms while I’m in California for BIL. I was able to get BIL considered a “University Sponsored Event” but I still have to work with my professors to move the midterms.
• Reading – some of this falls under school, some pleasure
  • Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace – I’ve heard great things about this book for years, and started reading over the Christmas break. I’m only about 150 pages into it (it’s over 1000 pages long), and it’s on the back burner now.
  • Utilitarianism by John Stuart Mill – for Philosophy 111
  • Grounding for the Metaphysics of Morals by Immanuel Kant – for Philosophy 111
  • The Little Book that Beats the Market by Joel Greenblatt – for Finance 421
  • The Game by Neil Strauss – This one is about the art of being a pickup artist, and “the community” behind it. One of my friends is friends with a leader in the community, and I thought I’d read up on it in case I run into him. Very interesting book about the psychology of social situations.
• Work
  • Still webmaster at Mays Business School. Working on some video stuff at the moment.
  • About to relaunch Coursevote, my facebook application.
  • We’re launching A blank site at BarCampTX.
  • Working on Activist Apparel, a clothing line owned by Always Creative and I.
  • Creative Space stuff. We’ve been doing a lot of networking and meetings in Houston recently.

So yeah, that’s a quick summary of what I’m up to. Busy Busy Busy

BIL is an open, self-organizing, and emergent science and technology conference. The best way to describe it is that BIL is to TED what BarCamp is to FooCamp.

Find out more on the website: http://bilconference.com

How did it get started? Cody and I wanted to go out to Monterey while TED was going on to hopefully interact with some of the attendees afterwards, and just spend some time catching up with all of our friends in California. I invited a few of my friends who might want to come, and Todd Huffman had the idea to hold our own conference while TED was going on so that we would have “something to do.”

While we haven’t officially announced it until now, a lot of people have expressed interest in the conference. I’m not going to name any names (I’ll wait until they add their names to the wiki), but believe me, it will be worth the trip out to Monterey.

The conference is going to be March 1-4. Cody and I will be in California a few days before and after the conference, so if you’re interested in meeting up send me an email.

Hope to see you there.

This Thursday we’ll be having Amazon come and talk about their Web Services. If you’re a developer or interested in building scalable web applications, you don’t want to miss this.

We’re doing it at Mays Business School, Room 182, 7 P.M. on Thursday. Seating is limited to about 70 people so get there early if you want a good seat.

More information here.

(more photos from me, or all photos of refreshbcs)

Tonight we had the biggest Refresh BCS ever. About 150 people came to Downtown Bryan to hear Noman Munif from Google discuss their different products. It was amazing to see so many people in Bryan/College Station interested in new technology. We’re definitely putting B/CS on the map.

We also officially announced Creative Space, an open creative office in Downtown Bryan based on the Coworking idea.
If you took photos at Refresh and use flickr, please use the tag “refreshbcs.”

Next month we have whurley coming to speak about the use of open source in a business environment. See you there!

Also, today I had a chance to meet with Steve Bourque, owner of Bourque Data Systems

(more photos here)

Bourque Data Systems is the 37signals of the railroad industry. They have a suite of software solutions to manage every aspect of the transportation of goods by rail (and truck, and barge). He’s also from The Woodlands, my home town. It’s funny that I meet all these interesting people from the Woodlands now that I don’t live there anymore.

We also talked a little about the role of software patents. My opinion falls towards the side of Brad Feld (Abolish Software Patents). As part of winning the Ideas Challenge, I was offered the services of a patent attorney. Of course I am going through the motions – free patent! – if I actually do get the patent I’m considering releasing it immediately into the public domain. Why? What good is a patent to me; it gives the privilege to engage in a multi-million dollar lawsuit if someone else infringes on it. I don’t have that kind of money, so I’m not going to be able to defend it anyway. I’ll get much more value out of the good press from releasing my patent to the public than I ever would holding onto it.

I never want to be in a software business where I have to hide behind a patent to keep competitors from taking customers. I want my product to speak for itself – I took the obvious technology (which almost all software is) and built the best service. Microsoft is making a lot of noise about how all these open-source projects infringe on their patents. If Microsoft were smart, they’d release their patents into public domain (not like they’ll get any money suing open-source projects) in return for good press and hopefully start a movement where companies are encouraged to do so. Until we can stop the USPTO from giving software patents, software companies should show their support by releasing their patents.

(more photos)

I got a chance to meet with Kelly Williams, Director of Milestone Venture Group, after he talked to a class this morning. His talk was much more interesting than most I’ve seen because he used Q&A throughout – as opposed to the more common hour-long lecture.

He’s working in private equity, but the way he discussed it was much different from how I had viewed PE. He finds small companies (where $5-10MM will get a majority stake) with great management teams which are having trouble growing the company. My only knowledge of PE groups were the ones taking public companies private with billion dollar buyouts, which seems to happen every day now.

An over-simplification of my view was that VC’s bring private companies to the public market, and PE’s take them back private. While I’d still prefer to be a VC – I find going from $0 to $5MM much more exciting than $5MM to $50MM – this just shows that there’s a lot more to private equity that I don’t know.

He was a great guy and I hope to meet him again soon.

[Update:] Ah, one of my favorite VC’s, James Chen of CXO Ventures helps me out with the difference between VC’s and Buyouts. Thanks!

(from photo shoot for 372 Media and Activist Apparel, more here)

Our next Refresh BCS is June 13, and it’s titled “Service Oriented Architecture: A Mashup Culture:”

Ben Floyd (Texas A&M) will be talking about the move to Service Oriented Architecture, and software as a service. Mashups are becoming very popular in high tech society today as a way to lower development costs and leverage social intelligence. Talk of the semantic web has fueled a new generation of thinkers to combine silos of information into much more powerful networks of software systems.

For the presentation I will talk about some of the more popular web service providers such as Google, Yahoo, and Amazon, and describe how they and others are using their services. I will also talk about SOA in corporate environments such as HP, IBM and Dell. Ben will also cover things like Flickr, YouTube, blogs, wikis, RSS, etc. Some of them are coming up with ways to link their information together in a SOA-ish way.

More details at refreshbcs.org

We’re also planning to start Photowalking next month. I’m sorry to everyone who’s been waiting for me to get this started. I’ve been really busy recently with Coursevote and other projects. But me and Roby are planning to do a pre-photowalk next week to put online as an example, then sometime after that we’ll have the first official one. So all you photographers out there, come to Refresh BCS and we’ll talk about where we should do the first photowalk!

(more photos here)

Roby gave a great presentation tonight titled “Design is…”

I’ve been a graphic designer for about 6 years now, and Roby’s presentation put into words a lot of things that I always just felt were right. Like the four basic principles of CRAP:

• Contrast
• Repetition
• Alignment
• Proximity

I can usually recognize when something I’m designing finally works, but his presentation showed WHY it works. So now I actually know what I should do to fix things, instead of just messing around till it ends up fixed. Roby’s an amazing designer and I hope I’ll be able to hire him on a future project. When you talk to him you can see he just gets it, and he’s one of the people you want working on your project.

Refresh BCS//Photowalking

We need to get this photowalking thing in College Station started. Now that school’s done I’ll have some time for it. We’re setting up http://photowalking.refreshbcs.org to be the home for Refresh BCS//Photowalking (or any name someone else comes up for it). So, if you’re interested in joining a photowalk, leave a message here with some ideas on what we should shoot and when. I’m up for anything.

Art and Jazz in Downtown Bryan