Mobile Monday Silicon Valley

Now that we’ve had couple days digest our great first Forum (pictures here , here, here and video here) I’m starting to get some ideas about how to make next month’s gathering even better! First we’ll definitely need another speaker like Bill - he was a great incentive everyone to come, gave a good presentation and provided lots of talking points for discussions afterwards. (Thanks Bill!) Please drop us a line in the comments if you have some ideas of a company who’d like to present.

Secondly, assuming that everyone will want to have a big group chat was probably a little too “Cub Scouts”. Next time, I think we should elect some “talk leaders” and have them divide up among the crowd. The topics could be as simple as “the business of mobiles” and “mobile development” or something as broad as that. There didn’t seem to be any want for discussion, but there were some people who left early who I think were more business and marketing focused who may have been drawn in a bit more by relevant discussions. Also, even though this seems very geeky, some name tags at the door would be very useful. I kept on having to ask people where they were from, etc.

Any ideas? Were you there? What did you think? Definitely drop your thoughts in the comments.

-Russ

My personal thanks to everyone who came out to make the first BAMF meeting a success. I’m very happy with the way it turned out. The spirit of the group as a whole was really invigorating. One really got the feeling that we’re at the start of something truly world changing. Bill’s presentation was great (thanks again Bill!!) and everyone was very lively and sociable. We were going to try a roundtable discussion after the presentation, but everyone was already engaged in conversation so we decided to not get in the way. That is the purpose of the group after all. We want to get all different sorts of people together and provide them a forum outside of their normal work contact where they can exchange ideas and explore some new possibilities. I think that happened. There were developers, service providers, consultants, analysts, entrepreneurs, and journalists. The conversations were great. There were conversations about everything from features in new phones to the price of data service to growth techniques for the mobile market as a whole. Based on that I would say that the forum was a smashing success. The success was entirely due to all of you who came out and contributed. Thank you.

Our overall plan for BAMF is to have a meeting about every month. The first few are going to be like the one we just had - a presentation for an hour or so, and then time to just meet other people and talk. After we have a few meetings under our collective belt, and we’ve ironed out some of the wrinkles and figured out who comes to the meetings and what they’re interested in, we would like to do a longer event with multiple speakers. We will have another meeting next month, but I want to get some feedback on this one first. Did everyone else enjoy the free form discussion at the end as much as I did? Or would you rather have something more of a directed discussion after the presentation? What did you think of the meeting in general? Comment away!

A few people have asked me about parking for the meeting tomorrow. Here’s some info from Michael O’Rourke about parking down by Dimension 7:

Other questions? Post them here in the comments area.

This is just a reminder of our first meeting:

The vague agenda is:

Sorry to be posting about this with such short notice, but those interested in BAMF might also be interested in a gathering tomorrow night at the W Hotel in San Francisco to discuss “rich media, audio/video as a personal journalism and entertainment tool, portable & streaming content”. Some info from Eric Rice’s post:

This is the first of the proposed LobbyCon events, which are informal events with little or no charge to attend. They’re meant to replicate that great environment that occurs in the lobby at tech conferences. But without the conference part :-)