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Tech Bubble? Nawwwww!

One of the most powerful stories I have heard in a long time. Jill Bolte Taylor from TED 2008 shares her experience during a left-brain hemisphere stroke one morning. Absolutely amazing story. I hope you enjoy it as much as I did.

What did you do to celebrate & contribute to Earth Day yesterday?  I went down to the beach and cleaned up the coast with dt and other San Diego peeps. 

Check out dt’s blog for the details & more pics! 

photo courtesy of @gemalynn

I know it’s been over a week since the Techcrunch/Popsugar party in LA - but I have seriously been so busy I haven’t until now been able to sit down to write a damn blog about it.

So here’s my recap of the event:

The drive up to LA SUCKED - nobody wants to sit in stop & go traffic for 3 hours on a hot day.

Service at The Standard gets an F  - @gemalynn and I waiting for nearly 2 hours waiting to get into our hotel room.  The staff was less than accomodating and extremely rude.  Screw you and your lobby’s shag rug ceilings! 

Make Sure to Not Have “Out-of-Towner” Written all over You ($30 for a 3 mile cab ride) - Yep totally got ripped off on that one.

Never Underestimate a Geek Party - The event was at the Vanguard in Hollywood. The Vanguard is an amazing venue which is a huge one room warehouse with neon lights, dj booth and upstairs VIP room.  Perry Ferrel ended up guest DJ’ing, Michael Arrington was especially friendly (remembered me from our first meeting atTechcrunch40) and there were a lot of familiar San Diego faces as well as newbies present.  Around the outer edge of the space were about a dozen companies demo-ing their products, networking and handing out schwag.  Featured companies included MediaTemple, ThisNext, Engage, and globalGrind.  MediaTemple guys were cool and Engage sucked.  Who hires 19 year olds to promote your product anyway?  Can they even be in a bar?

And what was up with the lack of dancing?  What, do geeks not dance? Either way a few of us got down on the dance floor - which may have been the reason it started clearing out around 11pm…or wait was that because Pete Cashmore from Mashable got kicked out and took half of the attendees with?  Either way it was a good time and a great networking opportunity for us NERRRDS. 

All in all the trip was amazing and I had the time of my life!  Even with a crappy drive, hotel & cab, Techcrunch made it all worth it.  Thank you TC.

Michael Arrington & Me

Perry Ferrel Guest DJ’ing

Crowd @ The Vanguard, Hollywood

@gemalynn and Me

To see more pics from the event visit @viss flickr stream.

We all know the housing economy is going to shit.  Massive amounts of foreclosures, the hurting economy and the rising percentage of business downfalls and losses.  The fascinating & yet very hilarious story from the L.A. Times  recollects the times of days full of friends, fine lunch dining in Beverly Hills, and botox - massive amounts of expensive botox. 

“Every six weeks or so, as a kind of personal morale booster, Goldy Anthony and a group of girlfriends would make appointments to see a Beverly Hills plastic surgeon for little touch-ups — getting lips plumped and frown lines on the forehead smoothed out. He was “an artist” with Botox and Juvederm, she said.

Afterward, in a carefree mood, the ladies would dine at a popular restaurant on the Sunset Strip.”

Now with the sagging (no pun intended) economy more and more people are feeling the pinch in the “recreational” areas of their lives - ie: body enhancements.  These appointments ran the women roughly $1,800 a session!  These sessions can no longer be combined with the extravagent lunches and shopping sprees the ‘ladies who botox’ are feeling the pinch and have to make a sacrafice - to sag or not to sag. That is the question.

Here is one woman’s story of her [painfully sagging] life:

“We used to make appointments together,” Anthony said. “Then they started saying, ‘I can’t go next week.’ People didn’t have the money, but they were ashamed to tell you.”

“I would rather have Botox than go out to dinner, but it’s just gotten so bad,” said Anthony, 41, who is looking for a job since her career in the mortgage business went sour. She has not had the facial treatments in months.

And what’s been happening in Beverly Hills is apparently happening around the country. After years of steady growth, the cosmetic surgery business seems to be going through a rough patch.”

At one side of the story it’s hard to feel bad for these vain people - superficial lives of the rich don’t exactly give me a reason to want to weep over their tough circumstances.  However, it does cause concern for me when I know the nurses, medical practicioners and doctors are now feeling the pinch of the slowing industry of face-lifts and augmentations.  2007 still showed growth for the most part, but the end of last year in some doctor’s offices showed declines - and that’s only the beginning of the slump.  What’s going to happen in 2008?

There is some light at the end of the tunnel.  With the weakening dollar and desperation of surgeons to cut prices - plastic surgery may start to look enticing to International travelers. 

“In Los Angeles, a world capital for plastic surgery, doctors are hoping that globalization will provide a cushion. Some are looking to European patients, who can capitalize on the weak dollar and combine their plastic surgery with a Hollywood vacation.

“This is a mecca,” said Dr. Stuart Linder, who specializes in breast augmentation. “I have women flying in from all over the world because this is Beverly Hills.”

Sounds like to me we’ll be seeing a flood of good-looking Europeans around our neck of the woods.

For the entire story check out the L.A. Times Article.

Heading up a conference is a tough job. Organizing a board of advisers, speakers, invites, venues, after-parties (my favorite part), and more. I’ve been to many conferences, volunteered at conferences and now I’m planning one. Who the hell put ME in charge??!

Freedom in Action - FinA - is a one-day conference that will bring together various entrepreneur types in design, community, technology and business to conceptualize an idea that will help to solve a world issue. Here’s how the format will be organized:

The FinA Conference will be split into four themes with a designated speaker to lead the conversation.

• Business
• Technology
• Design
• Community

Speakers will kick-off their designated 90 minute session by providing a 15 minute motivational intro speech with inspiring insights, exploring trends, realizing challenges, then posing a world issue & question to attendees. From there the attendees take over the session.

Attendees will collaborate in teams for the remainder of the session to brainstorm, organize, and present their concepts to the particular theme’s speaker. Each speaker will select the most innovative solution out of that theme and hand it off to the sponsor.

The sponsor takes the concepts derived at FinA as their own to plan, develop and launch within a predetermined time frame.

Since each theme will have a winning concept it will likely influence the other theme’s winners and ideas, thus creating a world changing concept that keeps all major business areas in mind.

The registration page is not currently live - but you can sign up on the homepage to receive updates and notifications as things progress. This conference is going to blow your mind - I’m SO excited to get things rolling!! Keep checking back for more info!

I love web conferences - especially the ones in a good location, with lots of great food, and most important awesome attendees. I attended the Web App Summit last week located in my good ole home of San Diego. The three day conference spanned over topics such as Mental Models, Web Form Best Practices, UX Design, and Web App Makeovers. The conference had a great, intimate set up which allowed for us all to network pretty extensively but also become familiar with and recognize our colleagues. We became a little WAS Family! *precious*

The format of WAS showed total organization and had a nice intro with a full day session on Wednesday. I participated in the Indi Young’s Mental Models session which was extremely insightful. She taught us how to solidify a foundation on user types so that we can create designs that help users find exactly what they want. I’m a marketer, so it was very interesting to hear what designers from other companies and backgrounds thought about target audience profiles and user types (which is a marketing tool I work with on a regular basis).

The other two days consisted of 90 minute sessions from 8-5pm. One of my favorite sessions was Jared Spool’s “Web Apps: The Collision of Design & Business”. He is a very funny guy (who apparently likes magic tricks) who brought up an interesting point about how some businesses have rules that ultimately ruin their business! One of his examples was the TSA and why passengers can only have liquids on the plane that are IN a plastic bag - “Oh that’s right, because placing your liquids in a plastic bag means you’re NOW totally safe from a terrorist threat.” - Jared Spool

Not only were the sessions great but the lunches were SO good - salmon, mahi mahi, the list goes on. Jealous? Some of people that I had lunch with were Jeremy Keith, Cindy Li and Hagan Rivers. Some great (and “interesting”) conversations rose out of those lunches.

Photo courtesy of Jeremy Keith’s iPhone.

Thanks again to UIE for hosting such a great conference and great meeting all of you last week! I’m bummed I missed the Karaokee session…especially after I found out Jeremy actually sang! wOOt!