Filling Out Your Fall Calendar: Events Worth Knowing About

Here are a couple events for September, October, and November that I think will be worth going to. I'm planning to be at each of them in some capacity (reporter, moderator, organizer, etc.)

9.23-9.25: Emerging Technologies Conference @ MIT
Werner Vogels from Amazon, Rich Miner from Google, and Craig Mundie from Microsoft top the list of interesting speakers (according to me, at least)

9.25: Tech @ The Movies
This is the first entertainment industry panel that Mass TLC has organized, focusing on the role Massachusetts tech companies are playing in the movie industry. I'm moderating a panel, and giving a short talk about the historical contributions our state has made to the movies, based on my new book Inventing the Movies.

10.2: Mass TLC's Innovation UnConference
Mass TLC is reinventing its big fall event this year (previously known as the investor conference), trying to make it more valuable for entrepreneurs.

10.21 New England Mobile Summit
Part of the Mobile Internet World 2008 trade show, organized by the Yankee Group.

10.30 Ideas Boston
A chance to meet big thinkers like IBM's Martin Wattenberg, Daniel Schrag from Harvard, and John Maeda, the new president of RISD.

11.12 Innovation in Hollywood: Past, Present & Future
I'm giving an illustrated book talk about Inventing the Movies at the Museum of Science... chock full of movie clips, photos, and trivia.

11.15 HBS Cyberposium
Last year's speaker roster included Walt Mossberg, Ray Kurzweil, and Curt Schilling.

11.19 Future Forward 08
A gathering of entrepreneurs, investors, and CIOs/CTOs to explore new directions in technology. Audience limited in size; invite only.

12.6 MIT Venture Capital Conference
No Web site up yet for this year's event... but last year's included Google exec Chris Sacca and VMWare CEO Diane Greene.

EO University in Boston

The Entrepreneurs' Organization (formerly the Young Entrepreneurs' Organization -- guess they were aging) is holding their annual gathering in Boston this month: EO University. Speakers include Ben Zander of the Boston Philharmonic, George Naddaff of Ufood Grill, Margaret Heffernan, and Jon Luther of Dunkin' Brands.

Advice From the Vineyard

I've been down at the annual Convergence Forum on Martha's Vineyard since Thursday (an event I help organize)... and the audience and the speakers have been great. Yesterday featured Mark Levin of Third Rock Ventures in conversation with Infinity Pharmaceuticals CEO Steve Holtzman (they worked together at Millennium); Alkermes chairman Richard Pops; and Oxford's Jonathan Fleming moderating a panel on "Exit Scenarios."

My favorite quote of the day, though, came from the opening panel. Dicerna CEO James Jenson had been talking about how he pitched 70 VCs on his previous company before getting funding.

"The most important thing for the entrepreneur is, don't die," he said.

Enterprise 2.0 and Enterprise 2Open

Two related events happen in Boston next week, at the Westin Waterfront.

The main show is Enterprise 2.0, which focuses on how Web 2.0 and social networking technologies are being used by companies. The three themes are cloud computing and software-as-a-service, search 2.0, and social networking in the enterprise. Speakers include Rob Carter, chief information officer at FedEx, Rishi Chandra, product manager for Google Enterprise, and local videoblogging guru Chris Brogan.

There's also a free unconference event on Tuesday, where anyone is welcome to present and participate (but you do have to pre-register.)

Ideas Boston / 10.30.08

Registration just opened for this fall's Ideas Boston conference, on October 30th.

Speakers this year include roboticist Joseph Ayers from Northeastern, information visualization guru Martin Wattenberg of IBM, digital artist John Maeda of MIT/RISD, and climate scientist Daniel Schrag from Harvard.

ROFLCon Round-Up

Kudos (!) to the MIT and Harvard students who organized ROFLCon, an exploration and celebration of Internet culture and contagious memes, last week. I dropped in Friday afternoon and Saturday morning... and especially enjoyed a ten-minute disquisition by Tron Guy about whether it is appropriate to wear underwear with a skin-tight white 'Tron' costume. (No, is the answer.)

Carolyn Johnson has a great wrap-up piece in the Globe this morning ... Chris Herot has a blog entry about it ... and David Weinberger, who delivered a keynote on Friday morning, has a number of posts, including one on the LOLcats panel. There's also coverage from Wired News, and photos from the excellent San Francisco-based blog Laughing Squid.

The big news, however, was a street fight between Firefox and the TripAdvisor owl, right outside the venerable Media Lab:

Dispatch From Venture Summit East: More Seed Funding in the Works from Kodiak?

Swung by the Four Seasons today to catch a bit of the AlwaysOn Venture Summit East, their first event in New England.

In the halls, I ran into David Andonian from DACE Ventures (who told me his two most recent investments were Howcast in NY and EveryScape here in Mass.) ... Flybridge Capital Partners blogger Jeff Bussgang ... M&A guy Paul Bowen ...former About.com CEO Scott Meyer ... Mr. Punchbowl Matt Douglas ... and Intel Capital's Lucy McQuilken.

My panel was titled "So You Want to be a VC." After a quick, poll, it turned out that only one person in the audience did....so we focused on what the panelists (all representing relatively new VC firms) are doing differently.

One interesting snippet that I wanted to share with you related to seed funding -- especially seed funding of unproven young entrepreneurs.

Bijan Sabet of Spark Capital said his firm had put money into Tumblr, an NYC start-up founded by 22 year-old David Karp. Sabet observed that "seed deals will inevitably have a high mortality rate...and we're not comfortable with that here." (Here presumably meaning Boston/New England.) He mentioned Y Combinator (based in Cambridge & Mountain View) and Tech Stars (Denver) as firms that are trying to build a model around very early, very small seed deals.

Chris Greendale of Kodiak Venture Partners said he thought it'd be smart for VC firms to take a million bucks, and put it into ten ideas. I asked him what would happen if he proposed that at his next Monday morning partners meeting. Greendale said "we're talking about it," and he told me afterward that some news could be forthcoming in the next 90 days. "Why is it such a bloody long process to give away $100,000 to a new company? We can give $100,000 to our existing portfolio companies at the drop of a hat," he mused.

The biggest (and only) applause line of the panel came from Drew Lipsher from Greycroft LLC. Someone in the audience asked about entrepreneurs moving west to find money. Lipsher said something to the effect of, if the entrepreneur doesn't believe in his company enough to believe it can succeed here -- they need to move it to Silicon Valley -- then we don't need to invest.

Future Forward video scrapbook

Just posted the video snippets I shot at Future Forward last Thursday... including some shots from the stage, while I was interviewing Paul Sagan and Art Coviello. That was fun.

Schilling at the Podium

Curt Schilling is keynoting at the Consumer Technology Innovations conference next month, in Silicon Valley. He'll be talking about 38 Studios, his gaming start-up.

My big question: will he be sporting any new jewelry by then?

In Portsmouth Tomorrow: Northeast Regional Angel Investor Conf.

Just learning about this today, but if you're free on Wednesday and interested in the dynamics of angel investing in our region, here's the event for you: The Northeast Regional Angel Investing Conference, at the Sheraton Harborside in Portsmouth, NH.

Speakers include Jeff Sohl from UNH, David Cohen from TechStars, and Tech Coast Angels founder Luis Villalobos. Tickets are $50.