Mobile Monday Silicon Valley

Our BOF meeting last night was awesome! A lot more people turned out than I expected, and there were a lot of new faces. It’s hard to know exactly how many people were there over the course of the evening, some people had to leave early and others ended up arriving late. I just made up a list and I would estimate about 35 people all together. Marc Brown from Buzznet set the overall tone for the meeting (thanks for coming by Marc!) We spoke a lot about connecting people together, and the kinds of applications that explore and blur the line between producer and consumer. Lots of people had interesting ideas about the social side of mobility and the value of allowing people to communicate, connect, and form bonds. A number were working on applications and had a lot to share. It was just a fantastic group. Everyone came with their best face on, wanting to share and connect. Everyone was floating around between the sets of discussions, mixing things up, generating new ideas, forming new relationships. Thank you everyone!!

There were some people for whom the unstructured format wasn’t their preference. Normally our meetings have more of a formal presentation component, with some socializing afterwards. This one was all networking. For those who like the formal bits better, we’re going to keep going with the normal meetings. We’re planning one for mid-November, hopefully. It’s going to be a bit tight trying to get all the plans lined up. And of course we’ll post as soon as we have more info. But we’re also planning to do the Bird of a Feather unstructured meetings every now and again as well. This one was too good, we simply have to try it again and see if it works out! If you have good ideas or suggestions, please let us know.

On that note, we’ve also created a mailing list so that everyone can talk outside of the meetings as well. So if you have ideas for meeting subjects or want to leave comments or suggestions you can either do it through the blog comments or send to the mailing list.

The CTIA show is going to be in San Francisco from Oct 25th to 27th, and along with it lots of people who we don’t get to visit with on a regular basis. We’re planning a BAMF Bird of a Feather meeting during CTIA so that we can get a chance to meet with some of those out-of-towners. For those who might not be familiar with it, “Bird of a Feather” is a term used to describe a smaller break out session occurring during a larger meeting. In general the meeting focuses in more detail on particular characteristics or interests than the larger gathering. Our topic is going to be consumer facing connected mobile apps. Think social networking, location based multiplayer games, context sensitive notifications, etc. Do you have to be working in these areas to attend? Of course not, the meeting is open to all. Here are the details:

If you’re going to be in from out of town for CTIA please join us. If you’re from town and want to hobnob please join us. Pass the message along too. If you’re working on an interesting mobile project there are few places better than BAMF to find like minded individuals willing to share ideas.