GA Technology Summit

by Jeff Haynie on February 28, 2007 · Comments

I attended the Technology Association of Georgia’s Technology Summit today, dubbed Innovation 2.0.

I was hoping to live blog but, well, no can do. No wireless at this type of conference. This was a “traditional conference”, nothing like SoCon. I didn’t see one laptop in the audience.

What was good:

  • Rich Demillo’s presentation – very thought provoking
  • Chris Anderson – yea, hard to beat this pro. And he gave away a free copy of the Long Tail to each attendee.
  • Some of the Top 10 (really 11) companies that did quick presentations

What was not so good:

  • The video breaks between speakers was way too long, hard to read and generally not of good quality. Cut them to 20 seconds or get rid of them. Also, don’t show the same person that just got done speaking in video.
  • It was really cold. I think they saw people dozing off and turned down the temperature to keep us awake.
  • The self-congratulatory remarks. I realize that you have to be politically correct, polite and thank your colleagues and sponsors. We don’t need every single person to thank each other between presentations and talk about how great TAG is. Yea, we get it. That’s why we’re there.
  • The schedule. We were really, really late and by the time lunch rolled around – we were about an hour off schedule and very hungry.
  • The cameras. Everyone was getting frustrated (including the presenters) because of the camera people would transition from the power point to the person on stage on the 2 big screens constantly – and then the speaker would be confused and ask them to put the presentation back up. It was very frustrating. Finally, Chris Anderson told them off the bat the first time they did it “please keep the power point up, I’ll be referencing it throughout the presentation” (our table almost clapped out loud).

All-in-all, I’m glad I was invited and made the time to go. I got lucky and Rob Ciampa’s group over at Trusted Network Technologies got me and several of my BigThinkr colleagues in at their table. Thanks to Sandy Tincher for coordinating that.

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  • Amani Channel has a nice video that summarizes the event.
  • There were at least three laptops in the audience because, I had one, you had one, and I saw one other. They wanted $250 for a morning of Wi-Fi access. That aside, it is interesting to access the social dynamics at play.

    Not to be high and mighty but it seems that the "late recognition of explosive changes in technology" that DeMillo mentioned during his presentation were omnipresent.

    The "command and control is over because there is no more control" comment by Anderson seemed to make a lot of people uncomfortable.

    Moving folks out of their comfort zones is good.
  • Coty
    Sorry I missed it, but I think your recent twitter on the subject says a lot about what TAG could do to make such events a bit more innovative and 2.0.
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