Tag: Community

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Primal Fusion sponsors Cory Doctorow at the Quantum To Cosmos Festival

I mentioned the Quantum To Cosmos Festival some time ago when it was first announced. I’m lucky enough to have secured tickets to a few events and I’m looking forward to taking them in.

More exciting for me is the news that Primal Fusion is sponsoring one of the events. Cory Doctorow will be speaking on Thursday October 22 at 4:00pm on the subject Copyright versus Universal Access to All Human Knowledge and Groups Without Cost: the state of play in the global copyfight.

We’re so excited at Primal Fusion, in fact, that our founder Peter Sweeney’s most recent blog post, Want to Build a Better Internet? Stop Searching for Solutions, takes a cue from an article that Doctorow wrote earlier in the summer. Have a look, and then let Pete know what you think. Is he on to something big? Is he way off-base? Is he somewhere else?

If you’re not able to get to Doctorow’s festival presentation in person, keep in mind that Q2C will be streaming events live over the Internet. Check it out and set aside some time to drink from the metaphorical cup of learning offered by Quantum to Cosmos.

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DemoCampGuelph11 coming up on Wednesday

The next DemoCampGuelph event is at 6:30pm on Wednesday September 30 at The Ebar in Guelph. As it says on the description:

Anyone in and around Guelph interested in software, the web and technology! Startup junkies, wage slaves, consultants, students, indie professionals, engineers, designers, money and marketing guys. If you want to see and talk about some interesting things, and get to know other people in the Guelph tech community, come on out! You don’t have to demo to attend.

Sound interesting? Of course it does! Get signed up and get to the Ebar. Beer and software demos make for an event that’s just too good to miss.

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IDEA2009 is in the rear view mirror

A presenter on stage at the Idea09 conference

IDEA2009 has come and gone and I’ve been reflecting upon my experience there. The event was well-organized and in a fine location in downtown Toronto (MaRS). There was a diverse set of presentations over the two days of the conference; it was mix of good and very good, with useful information nuggets in all. Highlights for me included Leisa Reichelt’s story of working with the Drupal open source community, Matthew Milan’s Innovation Parkour, Stephen Anderson’s take on Seductive Interactions, Christina Wodtke’s tour of great design ideas, and Mari Luangrath’s engaging tale of how she grew her business using Twitter.

Happily, the slide decks for the presentations are being made available online. I need to trawl through the Twitter feeds to find them!

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UX Group of Waterloo Region kicks off new season

A new season of UX Group of Waterloo Region fun starts this Thursday, September 17 at 5:30pm at the Accelerator Centre. This first event, inspired by Scott Berkun, will be a design interactionary, an evening of hands on design fun in which teams take solving on design challenges in a ridiculously short amount of time. It promises to be good fun, and it’s a great opportunity to get to know other designers in our community and get to work with them.

Check out the details, and note the RRSP. Sadly, I’ll have to miss this great event myself due to immovable commitments elsewhere.

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IDEA09 is practically here!

Boy, sometimes stuff just sneaks up on me!

I’ll be going to the IDEA2009 conference in Toronto next week. I’ve been registered for a while, and it was always on my radar, but it just felt like it was off over the horizon. Now it’s here and IDEA2009 should be a great event. My friend and Primal Fusion colleague Bob Barlow-Busch will be driving up together and and we’re looking forward to a stimulating couple of days of conversations, presentations, and general interaction design goodness.

Kudos to the organizers for putting together such an interesting program.

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Next BarCampWaterloo is this Saturday

The next edition of BarCampWaterloo is coming up on Saturday September 12 at the Accelerator Centre in Waterloo. It runs from 11:00am to 5:00pm. There aren’t a lot of details available online right now, but have a look at what there is, and then sign up here. Demos are always interesting, and the conversations ought to be as well; there may well be food and drink as well.

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Video of Scott Berkun speaking in Waterloo

I was inspired to start this blog after seeing Scott Berkun give a talk in Waterloo at the RIM Enterprise Theater last Feb 25 and having an opportunity to meet him afterward. Henry Chen has made a video of the talk available online and it’s worth spending a little time with it. About 28 minutes minutes in you’ll hear Berkun talk about the movie The Great Escape, which led directly to the first real post in this blog. As well, about an hour in Scott responds to my comment on the role of the critique in the design process. Of course, there’s much else of interest as well.

Thanks to Henry for making the video available.

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Welcome to Wozerloo

Steve Wozniak speaking at Communitech event in Waterloo

Well, today’s Communitech breakfast with Steve Wozniak and David Flynn was a great success by just about any measure. Woz was an engaging raconteur who was speaking to a crowd that was in large measure there to see the legend in person. His passion for users of technology products seems genuine. Flynn was a smooth and articulate speaker who walked us through their company’s product offering in some detail and with a great deal of clarity. 700+ people attended, apparently the largest attendance for a Communitech event by far.

Communitech’s president Iain Klugman wrote, in a tweet, after the event:

Spoke to the Woz afterwards #communitech — he was blown away — was expecting 50-100 people — not over 700. says he’s coming back

All in all, a fine day in Wozerloo.

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Woz speaking in town next week

Steve Wozniak, probably best known as co-founder of Apple, is coming to Waterloo Region. He’ll be speaking at a Communitech breakfast on August 17. He’s currently Chief Scientist at Fusion-io, and will be joined at the breakfast by David Flynn, the company’s CTO. It really feels superfluous for me to write much more about this, other than to say the event has generated a lot of buzz in town and that a large number of people are looking forward to hearing ‘Woz’ speak. I’m definitely one of them.