"Some conference that wants to sell me stuff" has a webcasted talk by David Temkin, Founder and CTO of the Laszlo corporation. For a majority of the time, he talks about why they chose to develop the Laszlo Webtop. It is a philosophy, and like all great arguments in computing, it comes down to philosophy, not technology.
Lighter Footstep is a community site to learn about reducing your impact on the planet, and I recently noticed on their Twitter feed that they’re considering switching to Movable Type from Joomla.
In an unconference like BlogOrlando (September 27-29, 2007 Rollins College), there aren't attendees and speakers, but simply participants and discussion leaders. This means that collectively, the people sitting in the audience, or even just one person from the audience, might know more about podcasting than myself. My session on podcasting falls into the "technology track". The other sessions include PR/Marketing, Media, Life/Local, and a keynote by Shel Israel.
Demonstrating customer interest jumps an entrepreneur ahead of all the idea-on-a-napkin entrepreneurs who just assume customers will flock to their big idea. However, when institutional investors ask questions about the size of the opportunity, including market size and scalability, referring to current customer interest really doesn't address the question.
If you don't know Dan Rua, know that he is a Venture Capitalist who invested in PayPerPost, an Orlando-based business. He's a Managing Partner of Inflexion Partners, "Florida's Venture Fund", and a part-time blogger. In addition to geeky stuff, he also posts about biotech and UF/Gainesville (his alma mater) quite often.
Bug Labs is developing BUG, an open, modular, consumer electronics web services hardware platform. Designed for the general audience, not just the technically inclined, BUG is intended to bring to the world of hardware gadgets what the Internet, open source, XML and web services have brought to the world of software and media.