Vermont 3.0 Wrap Up

I don't know about you, but I'm still recovering from Saturday's Tech Jam at Champlain College.

I was there from 8 a.m. until 5:30 p.m. And I was sitting in front of an audiences (and, gasp! cameras) for six hours while moderating a series of panel discussions.

In other words, I didn't see much of the actual job expo, but I hear it went well.

Here's an initial round-up of reports on the day, in case you missed it:

• Some high tech companies are hiring, despite shaky economy (VPR, 10/24)
• High-tech firms continue growth (Burlington Free Press, 10/26)
• Career Jam Fights Back Recession (WCAX, 10/25)
• Seven Days videographer Eva Sollberger was at Vermont 3.0 last Saturday, and filed this video report.

I'll post more roundups and blog posts later in the week, and we'll be sending out a survey to participants, exhibitors and panelists to solicit more feedback.

In the meantime, please use the comments thread to share your thoughts.

What to do After VT 3.0? Check out the Film Fest!

Looking for something to do after schmoozing all day at Vermont 3.0? Check out the Vermont International Film Festival, going on all weekend at the Palace 9 in South Burlington, and at the Main Street Landing Performing Arts Center on the Burlington Waterfront (where we had the Tech Jam in January).

VIFF started as a human rights film fest — it grew out of the anti-nuke movement in the 1980s — but it's broadened its scope in recent years. They still show great social justice documentaries, but they also feature less serious and more local fare. On Saturday night, for example, you can watch a doc about Vermont's most outrageous drag queens, the Sisters LeMay.

Saturday's VIFF schedule starts at 12:30 p.m. Individual shows at the Palace are $8.50 each, but the films at the waterfront are free.

Vermont 3.0 Panel Previews

Earlier this week, I wrote about the first round of panels at this Saturday's Vermont 3.0 Creative Technology Career Jam. Today I want to preview the second round, which starts at 11 a.m. "So, You Wanna Get Into Games," and "So, You Wanna Green Up Our Energy Future." Click here for a complete schedule of the day.

The gaming panel features Chris Hancock of Tertl Studos (that's not a typo — it's just how they spell their name), Amanda Crispel of Champlain College's E-gaming program and Heather Kelley, a Montreal gamer who also works with Champlain.

I don't know much about Chris — his website is pretty sparse. Maybe his projects are top secret...? I met Amanda for the first time yesterday, at the grand opening of Champlain's Emergent Media Lab at the Champlain Mill in Winooski (which I've been meaning to blog about). Cool thing about her — she spent 19 years in the gaming industry, and worked on the Carmen Sandiego games!

As for Heather Kelley, she's also known as moboid. Here's an interesting line from her bio: "Her game concept Lapis won the 2006 MIGS Game Design Challenge on sex in games." Hmmm... something to ask her about on the panel. Heck, I'll be moderating. Maybe I'll bring it up.

As for the Green Up Our Energy Future panel, we've got Joan Richmond-Hall, a professor from Vermont Tech in Randolph, who's studying a manure and food-scrap digester that could power the VT Tech campus. Cool. There's also Scott Johnstone, the new CEO of the ever-expanding Vermont Energy Investment Corporation (Seven Days' neighbors — represent, Independent Block!). And Evan Osler, an employee at NRG. If you look closely, you can see him in this video that Eva Sollberger and Mike Ives produced this week.

I recommend asking Evan if everything at NRG is as hunky-dory as it seems in that video and the accompanying story. Looks like an awesome place to work. But just because their office is clean and energy efficient and beautiful, and just because they have amazing benefits, and just because they get healthy lunches every day at the company cafeteria doesn't mean they're happy. Right? Or am I just in denial?

You can talk to these fascinating people on Saturday at Champlain College in Burlington. Yep, for free.

Panel Preview: Write for the Web

How often do you get a chance to ask a national political pundit about his job and how he got it? Not bloody often. Not in Vermont, anyway.

But you'll have an opportunity to quiz a member of the chattering class this Saturday at the second Vermont 3.0 Creative Technology Career Jam. Washington Monthly blogger Steve Benen will be speaking on the "So, You Wanna Write for the Web" panel discussion, with EatingWell Web Producer Penelope Wall and St. Mike's Journalism Professor Marybeth Redmond.

What's so great about Steve? Click here to read more about this dude, pictured here in a Matt Thorsen photo from 2006. Here's a link to his home on the Washington Monthly website.

And here's a link to Penelope's stylish blog, Penelope Post.

Their panel starts at 10 a.m. and they've only got about 45 minutes, so don't be late. I'm the moderator, and I'm all about the schedule.

Click here for more info about Vermont 3.0, or pick up a copy of Seven Days tomorrow. The program is part of the paper. Check out the Vermont 3.0-related stories while you're at it. There are a bunch of 'em.

Panel Preview: Be the CTO

CTO = "Chief Technology Officer." We were going to call this panel "Be the IT Guy," but I argued that we should include the geekettes of the world (like, for example, me).

The 45-minute panel is part of the Vermont 3.0 Creative Technology Career Jam, happening this Saturday at Champlain College. You should come if you're wondering what the IT person does all day, and how one gets an IT manager job. Panelists include Ali Rafieymehr, (Dean, Division of Info Technology, Champlain College), Tim Keefe (Senior Technology Consultant, Gallagher, Flynn & Company LLP) and JDK Information Systems Director Nate Herzog (pictured).

Nate spoke at the Vermont 3.0 Tech Jam in January, and was a big hit, mainly because he delivered an impressive PowerPoint presentation. What do you expect — the guy works for JDK. He won't be able to mezmerize us with his PowerPoint prowess this time, though — the panel is set up as a Q&A with the audience. So come ready to ask questions. It starts at 10 a.m. in Champlain's Alumni Auditorium.

Nate has been contributing to this blog, too. He's writing a series of profiles of local companies finding creative solutions to IT challenges.

Vermont 3.0 Panel: Entrepreneurship and Raising Capital

In addition to blogging about Vermont 3.0, I'm also hosting a panel during the event called “So you wanna be your own boss?” The content will focus on Entrepreneurship and raising equity capital, and we’ll use Draker Laboratories (pictured) as a case study. Draker designs hardware and software monitoring systems for renewable energy installations, such as solar photovoltaic arrays and wind turbines.  The Burlington-based company’s story provides and interesting narrative on the ecosystem of resources available to companies  here in Vermont, and will include:

• · AJ Rossman- CEO and founder of Draker Labs
• · Eli Moulton- Director of Merritt, Merritt & Moulton
• · David Bradbury- President of VCET
• · Mark Taylor- Member of the North Country Angels
• · Lee Bouyea- Managing Director of FreshTracks Capital

Draker was founded in 1999,  and has been through many business cycles in its 9 year life. AJ Rossman founded the company while attending UVM, and began by designing and building renewable energy systems for friends, family and clients. The company matched up with the law firm Merritt, Merritt & Moulton when it was first founded.  Merritt works with many early stage companies who are just getting off the ground, and helps startup entrepreneurs put the legal pieces in place for their new businesses, including forming partnerships and raising capital.  We will have Eli Moulton of Merritt, Merritt & Moulton who is Draker’s current corporate counsel on the panel at Vermont 3.0. 

Champlain's New Emergent Media Lab

Champlain College has moved its Emergent Media Lab to Winooski. It's been up and running since September in the Champlain Mill.

Champlain student and What's Good blogger James Kleimann took a tour on Thursday with Emergent Media Center director Ann DeMarle. I just published his blog post. Check it out on What's Good.

If you think the biggest social message in video games is to sit around on the couch, eating Doritos and “pwning n00bz,” you need to check out Champlain College’s Emergent Media Lab at the Champlain Mill in Winooski. The staff and students there will eject those notions. There may be no restart button in real life but the Champlain Emergent Media Center is resetting the idea of what video games can be.

The Tech Behind Green Mountain Coffee

Ed. Note: This is the second in Nate Herzog's series of posts about Vermont companies and their creative solutions to technical challenges.

I met with Jim Prevo, the CIO of Green Mountain Coffee Roasters, at his office in Waterbury. I explained my mission — when people think of Vermont businesses they frequently think of successful brands or products. Snowboards. Ice Cream. Coffee. Ski Resorts. But I knew that any large successful brand in 2008 can only be successful if they had a kickin' IT department working behind the brand. Jim smiled widely at that, so I tossed him a nice slow ball across the plate:

"What does IT have to do with making coffee?" I asked.

(Full discloser here: While I don't work for GMCR, I am an IT Director and very interested in anything technical that might be hiding behind these Green Mountains of ours. I'm also a big coffee snob. The first thing Jim offered me after I met him was a cup of coffee and I got to pick from a dozen Green Mountain flavors. So after sipping a cup of the espresso blend, I was in pretty good spirits. Call it bribing the writer if you want. I call it research.)

"To start with," Jim began, "well, I was going to start with the roasting process. Really, to talk about coffee, you have to start with the Green..."

Front Porch Forum Wins More Awards

Burlington-based Front Porch Forum won two more awards this week. The Rural Telecom Congress recognized FPF with its "RTC People's Choice Award — Most Innovative," and its "RTC Champion Award." The honors came with cash prizes — $500 and $3000, respectively. They're just the latest in a string of accolades, documented here by FPF founder Michael Wood-Lewis.

FPF is a popular neighborhood email newsletter service, available only in Chittenden County, Vermont. It's decidedly low-tech. Subscribers go to the FPF website and sign up to receive free, text-only email newsletters filled with messages from their neighbors and local officials.

How do new subscribers know which neighborhood to sign up for? Easy. They enter their actual, physical home address, and are assigned to an FPF-designated neighborhood. Founder Wood-Lewis draws the neighborhood boundaries. Subscribers only receive emails from their neighborhood forum.

Everyone in the neighborhood can post items to the forum. The only catch is that whenever you post something, everyone in the forum can see your real name and the street where you live. It's a concept that flies in the face of most online communities, which allow anonymity. It's also part of the reason that FPF has been so successful. More than 11,000 households subscribe to FPF — in Chittenden County. Not bad for a local, online initiative.

The Secret to Web Success: Story.

I tell this to my film students all the time. You can have great special effects, great cinematography, dynamic action sequences, beautiful costumes, and big explosions, but your film will still be crap if you don't have a good story. In fact, the reverse is also true. All of those other elements can be sub par and if your story is compelling, your film will be good.

It turns out this same maxim holds true for all narrative media, including the web.

Jeff Simmermon, of the fantastic culture blog And I Am Not Lying (for real), recently attended the NYC O'Reilly Web 2.0 conference and shared some of his insights, which I found to be strikingly similar to what I am constantly telling my film students...

There were a lot of people asking “how can I leverage the power of Web 2.0 community to ‘go viral’ and drive traffic to my market share, incentivizing revenue generation through targeted content promotion?”

Nobody asked “how can I make content that’s actually good?”

I’d like to focus on that a little bit.

In the new social media landscape (that’s a triple word score on the jargon board) popularity beats quality every time. Popularity isn’t necessarily a bad thing. But popularity without quality is kind of pointless. It’s the difference between the Beatles and Milli Vanilli.

Jonah Peretti of Buzzfeed referred to the “Bored at Work Network” in his presentation about viral Internet hits this week. He’s right: the Internet exists to entertain people who are dicking around at work. We’ve all sleepwalked our way through a day, clicking for the thing that makes our brains squirt a little pleasure hormone and shoot us closer to quitting time. Sometimes we shop online, sometimes we look at our friends’ pictures. But mostly we’re looking for a vicarious thrill. The modern workplace has evolved way past the actual Wild West, and all that’s left is telling stories around the campfire.

Being the first person to retell a great story by someone else carries a certain thrill, sure. But coming up with the story yourself is a million times cooler. Almost every Internet mega-hit is an escapist thrill that tells a story we can identify with. It’s either something we wish we’d said, something we wish we’d done, or a story we wish we’d lived. Any bozo can bang out a bunch of geek-themed top ten lists and pay Diggers to promote them. Finding and telling a good story is really, really hard, but so much longer-lasting. If you’re doing it for yourself, for your own artistic benefit, it’s the only way to go. And if you’re doing it for a brand or for your company, it’s gonna stick a lot longer than some dumb Facebook app or agency-sponsored Digg promotion. People know the difference.