Mobile Monday Silicon Valley

How about a pre-pre-forum-forum?

Bill Day has organized a last-minute Mobile Meetup for this 6 p.m. this evening (Wednesday) at Thirsty Bear. (Actually, Bill called it the “Wireless Booze & Schmooze”). More info about Thirsty Bear here.

Bring your gadgets!

-Russ

From the number of comments to the last post, I’d say there is a healthy amount of interest in getting this started. Sorry that I have been distracted with other things and have not stepped in to organize. And now the 4th of July is upon us…

My proposal: the pre-forum forum for Triple Rock at 3:00 pm on Saturday, July 10th — Please comment to this post on whether or not you can come at that time and place.

Russell raises a set of good questions about the Forum in the prior post — I suggest that we have an organizing meeting, a sort of pre-forum-forum, amongst interested parties. Perhaps a few beers at Triple Rock to meet each other, discuss organizational details, and get commitments to work on the project? Comment on this post if you are interested and we can coordinate a time and place (let me know if coming to Berkeley is out of your travel orbit…)

Setting off, there’s lots of questions to be answered to get this thing organized. How big the Forum will be is still up in the air, as is the date, and the general format. Will it be a couple hours one night after work? Or will it be an all-day Saturday gathering? Who’s going to speak? What are we going to talk about? Why would anyone bother coming besides the free beer?

It seems that for now an “un-conference” where the participants are also the presenters is the best. So to me, the best idea for the inaugural gathering of BAMF would be to simply allow every one to show what they’re working on. Sort of a modern-day Mobile HomeBrew Computing Club. We’ve got a lot of companies here in the Valley who are doing some great things, so this would be a great chance to see what’s really happening below the radar. No powerpoint slides, just gadgets and running apps. It’d be great to see what’s happening here.

Though the WaveMarket offices may be a bit far of a trek for the guys way down in the Valley, we have a couple great “conference centers” (big classrooms basically) with everything we need to hold a gathering like this, as well as a large patio area (with afternoon sun) and a gas-fired barbecue ready to go. So unless someone volunteers something better, I’ll just plan on inviting everyone here.

I need some feedback on the day of the week and potential dates, first, then we can think about specifics for the forum. I’m thinking streaming MP3 or Quicktime would rock, but we’d need to set that up beforehand.

For something like this if you pick the wrong time, you could have 5 people show up. If you’re expecting 5 people, then cool. But if you make a bunch of effort for 50, then that sucks. So what I’d like to do is try to find the balance between the two extremes. Not have a “conference” that would takes weeks and weeks to organize, yet not have a “geek dinner” either, where everyone gathers, but nothing productive is accomplished. It’s a fine line, no?

-Russ

So despite the quite long and specific subtitle above, I wanted to re-stress that the focus of the forum is mobile phones and the technologies and busines opportunities surrounding them. The forum is not about “wireless” technologies like WiFi/WiMax, but only about cellular technologies.

Why? Well, mostly because there’s too much confusion in the American marketplace and specifically in The Valley about these markets. The term “wireless” is used for everything, but there needs to be a specific focus on mobile tech as that’s where the real worldwide growth in the next 5 years (at least) is going to be.

-Russ