Past Events

While managers often believe that it is not possible to innovate on a timeline, this is not true. This talk will draw material from the new book Innovate Products Faster, which includes powerful tools and infographics to help teams and their managers come up with better ideas and find ways to deliver them faster to market. This is a dinner meeting, with attendance requiring pre-payment.

A panel of three consultants - two of whom are also serial entrepreneurs who have founded technology startups - will offer their perspective on the practical realities of working for startups. This program will include important tips and issues to consider if you are exploring investing your time working as a consultant for a startup.

This Grand Unified Theory of Internet Marketing is based on Steve Leibson's personal experiences coupled with years of research into what does and does not work on the Internet. This presentation will give you the foundation to more effectively market your consulting services and your products in very professional ways.

This talk is about the second. What is it, who defines it, how is it measured, what is its relationship to the rotation of the earth? Who first defined a day as 24 hours? Why is John Harrison a hero to timekeepers? Why is the world's most accurate clock made of paper? What does Einstein say about time? How is time used in media systems? These topics and more, such as the Roswell Clock, will be considered during this interactive talk with demos.

Consultants regularly require review of contracts and other legal documents whose language can have a substantial impact on the financial health and well-being of a consultant's business. This talk will address the key contract language and clauses that should be included in numerous documents, including consulting agreements, NDAs and licensing agreements for patents, trademarks or copyrights.

This talk will describe the origins and evolution of Super Happy Dev House, its spread across the world (and Mexico in particular), and its evolution into Hacker Dojo. This story includes 2012's struggles with the City of Mountain View and the institution's ultimate move to a larger facility, its fundraising efforts, and its ongoing experiments in community management.

This talk will show how networking for a consultant can be easy, even for introverts. To get what you need, you need to give first - the terms "pay it forward," "boomerang effect" and "reciprocity principle" are all important in effective networking. This talk will also teach you five easy steps for networking, building on LinkedIn and other social media. You will learn how to boost your productivity 30% in 2013, and you will also learn a few networking tips for the holidays.

This talk will provide an overview of Swift, an open source object storage system that came out of the OpenStack project. Specific examples of how OpenStack Swift is being used today will be described, including high-volume websites, mobile application development, custom file-sharing applications, data analytics, and operations teams providing private storage infrastructure-as-a-service. Also included will be a detailed overview of the design of the Swift architecture, including its components and its hardware failure recovery mechanisms.

A lot of work is required to realize the potential of Software-Defined Networking (SDN), where we can enjoy the benefits derived from software automating software. This talk will examine some of the history that led us to the point where current networking architectures are no longer viable for cloud computing at mega-scale. Well take a look at the basics of SDN and some of its key elements  OpenFlow, network virtualization and orchestration  along with some of the initiatives and companies that are setting the stage for the next generation of networking.

Famed embedded software pioneer Jim Ready will illustrate the limits of virtualization (at least as currently available) and describe some new operating system approaches that look to provide a better fit between advanced System on a Chip (SoC) hardware and application software.