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!

(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.

(more photos here)

Tonight we had the first Refresh Bryan/College Station. It was much better than I expected, and I expected it to be pretty amazing. We had about 20 people there, and Erica gave a presentation on the rise of the creative class – very appropriate, as we’re trying to organize the creative class here in College Station. She went through the different things going on like Barcamp, Co-working, Refresh in other cities, and a bunch of other things.

We’ve been talking about starting a Co-Working here in College Station and this was the perfect way to jumpstart it. Now we’ve been able to connect with some more people around here who are interested in getting it started, and Erica’s talk was a much better explanation of it than we could ever do.

Oh and whurley, you gotta make it out here next time.