I have discovered that many of my friends have never heard of ConvergeSouth and there is a pretty good chance you haven’t either. This years conference will be focused on several areas including: Personal Branding, Internet Strategy for Small Business and Developing Outside the Box.
Register here. Register now. With a $10 ticket if that’s what you can afford, how can you miss it?
Sponsor ConvergeSouth. There’s no easier or bang-for-your-buck way to reach the most tech-savvy and upcoming small businesses in the Triad, Triangle and Charlotte area (with some Silicon Valley thrown in). Our audience is Boston-to-Atlanta and you can put your name, banner, products, URL, services and more in front of them.
ConvergeSouth is an all-volunteer conference. Join in as a sponsor and support the local community and reap the benefits of local sponsorship. Click here to Sponsor ConvergeSouth online.
Many thanks to Mark Tosczak for his ongoing sponsor seeking and successes.
ConvergeSouth registration is open, easy and low-cost. Do it 
today.
There are multiple levels and prices for registration – choose the one that suits you. You can opt in for the entire conference or opt-out of the new Saturday luncheon with US Congressmen Brad Miller and Howard Coble [Mr. Coble is tentative] and more NC Legislators on a panel about Internet Policy and Law (can’t imagine why you’d want to opt-out, but you can!). Pricing is multi-level and there’s a $10 ticket if that’s what you can afford – no questions asked. (You can make a donation on top of it if you can.) See the ever-growing ConvergeSouth schedule here.
With Brent D. Payne keynoting, and Kevin Briody’s ultra-creative brain doing amazing things with the Friday afternoon panel, and a host of talent you’d ordinarily have to pay 2-3x as much to enjoy, ConvergeSouth is the best tech conference deal around. Did I mention John Cass and PitchCamp? Or Tammy L. Colson’s Web-Tech Shoot-out? From the short write-up (more to come):
So many tweets – which platform to choose? The Twitter Tech Shootout pits 3 Twitter applications against each other. Each representative completes an assigned set of tasks – things we do every day – and then the audience decides which one works best. Which package of tweets will be the most complete? This session might not be as tasty as Iron Chef, but it’s a lot more useful than grilled octopus.
ConvergeSouth is bringing back Hosted Dinners on Friday evening, October 1, 2010, where you get to have a meal and one-on-eleven elbow rubbing with CS presenters from all over and who are experts in all sorts of geek-friendly topics. All you pay for is your own meal (click here to sponsor a hosted dinner as a Silver Sponsor) and enjoy dinner, talk, trade business cards and ideas. See the list of those presenters graciously hosting dinners (so far) and come back soon for online signup. Each dinner is limited to a total of 12 people and our own 5-years-and-counting JW will arrange for restaurants.
Hang around – there’s more. The good Mr. Hoggard is again throwing a community BBQ on Saturday night. I hear there might be banana pudding.
Much more about the BBQ later, but if you’re community-minded, contact David directly and offer to help.
John Cass (his day job is at Pace Communications) is one of those golden resources in Greensboro – you should seek him out and meet him. At 7 a.m., he was reveling in topics about experiences he’s had (name the city) and had a plan to run PitchCamp (along with Tim Janke from the Investment Micro Angel Fund), a new ConvergeSouth 2-hour, multi-week session where the applicants get practice in pitching their ideas to (real) venture capitalists. Think of it as a geeky “Next Food Network Star” mixed with “American Idol” and more. You get the “in” with VCs if you qualify. Learn more about PitchCamp here and darnit, if you’re a startup or entrepreneur, APPLY!
What is PitchCamp?
When you’re an entrepreneur you receive advice from every quarter, but what matters most when making your pitch? In this 2-hour PitchCamp session entrepreneurs will learn from Angels and VC’s what to do and what not to do when pitching their business model. Every start-up will have the chance to pitch, and prior to the event start-up teams will compete for the coveted two main dish spots, while the audience will have a chance to critique pitches.
It wouldn’t hurt if you registered for ConvergeSouth (it’s a requirement) but if you can’t afford the registration fee, there’s a $10 ticket (where else can you get a deal like that?) and you can make a donation you can afford above that.
Take a look at who’s keynoting ConvergeSouth 2010. Two links for your clicking pleasure.
You can register for ConvergeSouth now! We have a variety of ticket prices – and we are using the honor system – no questions asked.
How come we’re charging this year? It’s simple economics. We’ve had 4 years of guessing about how much food and tables/chairs we’d need. Some years, we over-bought food and to waste it is awful. One year, we under-bought (equally awful). If you can afford the full-price ticket, we hope you will purchase one but if you’re unable to do that, there is the best-value $10 ticket you’ve ever seen on that site! You can also donate any amount above whatever ticket price you choose and we hope you will do that. The ConvergeSouth Saturday lunch panel is included in the full-ticket price but can also be purchased separately.
We have been generously granted by local foundations but as well know, foundation resources are very tight. Our sponsorship maven is Mark Tosczak and he has done a great job of finding sponsors. The economics require that we charge a minimum of $10 to ensure we have an accurate count of attendees.
See the ConvergeSouth schedule here. Check the Facebook page Wednesday morning (6/9/2010) to see who our Keynoter will be. Follow ConvergeSouth on Twitter here. And thanks to 5-year volunteer Lauren Polinsky (yes, related) for managing all social networking for ConvergeSouth. Kudos to Brandon Burke for the easy-to-update website and Anthony Piraino for the outstanding logo.
Much much more to come. Stay tuned.
All this agonizing and charge-spewing over a group getting together to try to put together a proposal for the Google FiberFi. Slow down and take a breath, please. There’s a chasm of difference between “secret” and “getting organized.” There is work to be done before specifics can be shared (especially when the “specifics” aren’t specific yet.) I know very little more than I’ve already posted.
I did not organize this group; I’ve done a lot of volunteer civic stuff related to Internet downtown and, oh yeah, that almost annual ConvergeSouth conference. So I have no argument about asking me (among others) if I’d like to help (but I’m biased). I’ve encouraged the group to provide more information but please realize that group-organizing is not a warp-speed event and some Internet users believe sometimes that things should be online within minutes of thinking about them. I’m hoping for more sunlight today or at the worst, Monday.
Rockingham County is teaming up with Stokes County to get Internet service to up to 99% of its residents using a federal stimulus grant. That beats a hotel. By a mile. Hopefully, Greensboro can try to at least SEE the curve, if not get ahead of it (where we used to be until we, as a city, just stood still or worse, took steps backwards). One wonders if our Mayor or City Council members can tell their constituents what ConvergeSouth is. That’s all. Just what it is. If not, I may have no hope left for elected officials.
Be sure to vote on session topics for ConvergeSouth. The results so far (click to convergify):
While Brandon Burke gets the site polished and online and my new best friend @tlcolson works her cross-continental magic with logo designers and more, ConvergeSouth’ers had a meeting yesterday and in 2 hours came up with fabulous session topic ideas for the 3 tracks for #cs2010 (easy, short hashtag; please use). Vote for your top 5 session choices OR add your own idea at the ConvergeSouth site.
Tried very hard to post a meeting time, date and place on Twitter and then copied & pasted it several times – all of them incorrect. For those Tweeps who want to join us for an all-volunteer ConvergeSouth meeting, here are the details.
Apologies for the fat-fingering on Twitter.
ConvergeSouth unboxed is scheduled October 1-2, 2010. Calendar the dates. We’ll be in a new location with lots of parking and accessibility for everyone. We’re having a volunteer meeting on 12/5/09 at 10am in Greensboro (place TBD, but likely Panera’s) to do specifics. Please join us and visit the ConvergeSouth site for ongoing details. There is a topic and session leader nomination form there – please use it. (Nominating yourself is fine and desirable.)
Our tentative tracks are:
We’re getting website mockups for the CS site and hope to have the whole site online on 1/1/10 with better online registration this year. The ConvergeSouth blog is active but empty and will be filling up as things progress. Follow ConvergeSouth on Twitter.
After 4 years (and a year off), this is going to be the most all-community-led ConvergeSouth to date. (We already have one sponsor!) I’m in touch with local and far-away folks to help
If you don’t believe that social networking gets results and you’re not using Twitter, then you’re wrong and you need to start using these tools. After an out-of-town business had to turn down building the ConvergeSouth web site this year, I put it on Twitter (and FB) this morning. In an hour, we had 4+ volunteer businesses. I posted the initial mockups and a long text file about our conversations and asked each of the volunteers to mock something up. We’ll share them (out loud) and come to a consensus (might use this logo and those colors, etc.).
Heck, I even asked @Gedeon if the Icon Factory would help with custom social icons. (I’m not proud.)
Follow @convergesouth10 for figuring out what’s going on for ConvergeSouth 2010! We’re trying to use #convergesouth wherever possible for later thread reading.
Yes, Virginia, we’re planning ConvergeSouth 2010. If you don’t know about it, you’re likely not a Twitter user where the totally transparent conversation is happening. NB: this will likely be the most citizen-led ConvergeSouth ever.
