Greetings,

Tony Karrer and I have been discussing ways in which we can get the community more engaged with the rest of Los Angeles. As part of that effort, I have put together a list of suggested networking events and why they might be of interest to you. This list is by no means complete, and has a definite Los Angeles slant to it, so please point out any interesting events that we may have missed

Here is the list of interesting technology-related events in Los Angeles for the month of April:

Digital LA – Digital Drinks @ La Vida – 4/6/2010 (Tuesday)
7-10pm Hollywood
If you are into video and entertainment, this could be good. Digital LA has a rep for being more marketing oriented, so be prepared.

LA Tech April Meetup – 4/6/2010 (1st Tuesday of month)
7pm Location TBD
It’s like a miniature, regular TechCrunch50 or Twiistup.

http://newtech.meetup.com/25/calendar/12765900/

Thursday Lunch on the Promenade – 4/8/2010
12-1:30pm Santa Monica
This is a fantastic meetup. Informal gathering of some super smart people. Highly recommended.

OCTANe/FIRSTY – OC Networking Event – 4/8/2010 (Thursday)
5:30 – 7:30pm Aliso Viejo
OC members, don’t miss it! Though I’ve never been…this event sounds great…especially as this is the big kick-off for the merger of 2 big OC networking groups.

http://www.octaneoc.org/calendar/view_event.asp?CalendarID=659

DigitalLA – Digital Music Panel: Artists Go Social – 4/12/2010 (Monday)
7-10pm Beverly Center
If you or your company are into music and social media, this looks to be good.

http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=377946387339

Los Angeles High Scalability Group April Meetup – 4/13/2010 (Tuesday)
7pm in Santa Monica
Also known as “the hadoop meetup”. High signal to noise ratio. Highly recommended.

http://www.meetup.com/scalela/

Los Angeles PHP Developers – 4/13/2010
7pm @ CoLoft in Santa Monica
Check out the new co-working space at CoLoft. I haven’t been, but Oleg is a new member to the group, and I have heard good things. Recommended.

Social Media Club LA – 4/14/2010 (Wednesday)
Left, Right and Twitter: Social Media and Its Impact on Politics
7-9pm Santa Monica
Network with the Social Media crowd. Be warned: saying you are a technologist is like throwing chum in shark infested waters. I like this event, have gotten work out of it, but you have to have some good people filters to make it a good use of time.

http://www.socialmediaclub.la/

Copyrights and Design Patents – Filling the Gaps in Your IP Strategy – 4/13/2010 (Tuesday)
7:30-9:30am San Diego
Purely educational.

http://www.commnexus.org/programs/special-interest-groups/event_20100315.php

Mindshare – 4/15/2010 (Thursday)
7pm+
Where art meets science. I still haven’t been…but this is #1 on my list of new events to attend.

http://www.mindshare.la/

CalTech/MIT Enterprise Forum – 4/17/2010 (Friday)
8am – noon Pasadena
The Business of Social Attraction and Aggregation – How Do Fast Growth and Fads Become Successful Ventures?
Still haven’t been yet (Pasadena, eh?), but the CalTech/MIT forum is great.

http://www.entforum.caltech.edu/

LAMPsig – 4/17/2010 (Saturday)
1-3pm mid-Wilshire
Haven’t been. Any feedback from the group?

http://lampsig.org/new/

LA C# – 4/20/2010 (Tuesday)
7-9pm Manhattan Beach
Haven’t been. Any feedback from the group?

http://lacsharp.org/

Los Angeles Web Application Developers – 4/20/2010 (Tuesday)
7pm Location TBD
Will Jessup’s meetup. Very popular. Haven’t been yet, but will check it out soon. Any feedback from the group?

http://web.meetup.com/34/

From CTO to CEO – 4/22/2010 (Tuesday)
Irvine
Self-explanatory!

http://www.tcvn.org

StartUp Venture Summit – 4/22/2010 (Thursday)
9-5pm Los Angeles
For Entrepreneurs and Investors to Grow a Successful Venture. Tech Supper Club/Tech Cost Angels – $195

http://techsupperclub.com/Startup_Venture_Home.html

LA Flash Users Group – 4/22/2010 (Tuesday)
7-9pm
Haven’t been. Any feedback from the group?

http://laflash.org

LA Games Conference – 4/29/2010 (Thursday)
9-5pm Hollywood
A conference on gaming…pretty obvious choice for gaming companies and technologists. I may be there.

http://www.lagamesconference.com/

LA CTO Forum – 4/9/2010 (Friday)
8-10am Santa Monica
Content Categorization

http://lactoforum.org/

The Israel Conference – 6/3/2010 (Thursday)
9-5pm Los Angeles
This is a couple months away, but I went last year and it was a great event. Currently $180, soon to $210 ($295 at door)

http://www.theisraelconference.org/

Here are a couple other events with no confirmed dates for April or May. These are fantastic events that I look forward to going back to.

Startups Uncensored – http://www.jasonnazar.com/
Dorkbot – http://dorkbot.org/
LA Web/Mobile Software Entrepreneurs – http://lawebmo.com

Happy networking!

-=John

The Social Media Club panel on Google Analytics event that I participated in is now online. I had a great time speaking with Erica Fourette and the other panelists. I hope that everybody who attended (both offline and online) got at least one or two good bits of knowledge or science out of the discussion. 150+ people were in attendance at Mahalo. SMCLA also had a very large online viewing turnout, too. At one point before the event, I realized that I was trying to do 3 things at the same time: a) talking to Efren (TechZulu) about how he broadcasts the event b) setting up pizza and beverages and c) meeting my fellow panelists (I only knew the moderator) before panelizing together. I went with c), but I made sure to buy (later that week) the same Canopus encoder that Efren has for our own efforts and grab a slice and a soda on my way to the panelists meetup. The whole event was a most enjoyable – well done, SMCLA!

Here is TechZulu’s recording of the event:

Fast Company has a great article on why you should start a company in Los Angeles.

Since 1994, I have spent about half of my time in the Bay Area and the other half in Los Angeles. LA beats the Bay for a lot of reasons, but the biggest reason is that Los Angeles focuses on building viable businesses, whereas the Bay Area largely focuses solely on technology…for the sake of technology. Los Angeles has a lot more opportunities in a number of very large-scale verticals, which means a wider variety of work and types of work for tech workers than the Bay Area. Speaking of industry verticals – Entertainment, Advertising, Automotive, and Lead Generation (to name a mere few) are all based in the Southern California area. And of course, there is the weather!

Jeremy Allaire has a great article about the future of new technologies like HTML5 and it’s impact on the current ecosystem of delivery vehicles for content and applications.

Last Friday, the LA CTO Forum hosted a discussion on the various metrics used to measure ourselves and our companies. I was asked to participate, and eagerly dug into my archives. I found a bunch of old examples, sanitized them, and was struck by how much metrics evolve over the lifecycle of a company. I was inspired enough to put together a diagram that describes how the metrics for a product or startup company evolve over time. My files are here:

• The Evolution of Metrics
  
• Examples of Metrics for Startups
  

Here is a basic description of the contents of each report:

• Definitions – definitions of metrics
• Dashboard – dashboard view of key metrics
• Executive Summary – summary of key metrics
• BizDev Funnel Lite – early stage business development funnel
• BizDev Funnel – later stage business development funnel
• Marketing Funnel – early costs/revenue numbers
• Member Funnel – tracking and monetizing users
• Customer Satisfaction – customer satisfaction by product
• Customer Support Triage – large product defects, customer support in triage mode
• Customer Support Daily Recap – daily metric for support
• Customer Support Steady – later stage monitoring of support
• Operations – some simple operational metrics
• Engineering Triage – crisis-based tracking of engineering errors
• Human Resources – some basic hiring metrics
• Revenue – an early set of of metrics for revenue

You may have a different interpretation of how to measure things, so please feel free to change the parameters to suit your needs. Let me know what you think.

-=John

I just met up with Eric Hammond, Ken Weiner, and more for Thursday Lunch on the Third Street Promenade. If you haven’t been, I highly recommend it. I’m not sure how the crowd normally is, but it was pretty tech/developer heavy this time – and I loved it!

Tony Karrer has a great article on When to Use Facebook Connect – Twitter Oauth – Google Friend Connect for Authentication. If you have any questions about which companies to connect your authentication system to or how to choose which ones to work with, this is a must read.

I came across some more articles on cloud-based performance. Today, I am looking at the performance of EBS on Amazon and the use of RAID 10 for disk writes. If you have a lot of writes to disk, then seriously consider something other than RAID 10. Generally though, EBS on Amazon performs pretty well.

I’m so excited. We have an awesome speaker for January’s LA CTO Forum: Rick Parker of Fetch Technologies. Check it out:

Building Your Own Private Cloud

Rick Parker will present his experience and perspective in building a private cloud infrastructure from the bottom up for Fetch Technologies. Over the past three years, Rick has leveraged his experience in building cloud-based platforms to dramatically reduce operational costs by a factor of 4 or more. Rick will discuss analyzing, tracking, and sourcing different types of technologies and vendors in order to stay current with rapidly changing technologies. Rick also plans to address issues with the hardware infrastructure and software management systems as they relate to vendors, models, and services. Fault tolerance, monitoring, reporting, scalability, and deployment will be key components of his his presentation. Finally, Rick’ss assessment of the benefits and costs of developing a private cloud infrastructure should provide a substantial source of topics and ideas for a lively discussion.

Rick Parker (http://www.linkedin.com/pub/rick-parker/3/71b/aa5) has over 24 Years of IT experience. At Vendare Media, Rick built the company from an initial desktop environment to 7 datacenters with over 500 servers in them. After that, he went on to found Bedouin Networks, one of the first Cloud Service Providers in 2006. Currently, Rick is an IT Manager for Fetch Technologies, a company that offers cloud-based resources and services to enable organizations to extract, aggregate and use information from sites across the Internet.

In case you hadn’t heard, Google Apps is taking on government organizations. I found this on socaltech.com:

LA Goes Live With Google
—-
The City of Los Angeles has gone live with Google’s cloud software suite,
Google Apps, Google said Monday. Google won the a $7.2M contract with the
city back in October for email service. Google said that 34,000 Los
Angeles city employees will gain access to Google Apps for email and other
collaboration starting yesterday. The move to Google came after a intense
battle between Google and Microsoft for the contract.