As some of you may know, ActionsTalk has been evolving. Two months ago, we set out to create a conference in the Milwaukee area that brought together three key pieces of successful tech companies: 1. Tech saavy developers/engineers, 2. business minded entrepreneurs, and 3. venture capital. Ryan Graves and I saw the potential for the idea when we realized that such a conference didn’t exist in Milwaukee, even with the obvious potential of the community. So what did we do? We outlined a plan (loosely) and took action. We called our first ActionsTalk meeting at Alterra and it felt like the idea really had legs. Since then we’ve spoken before three local organizations (thank you!), picking up supports as we moved forward. As we began to speak to people, to hear what they wanted, it became obvious that this would be no small under-taking.
After some serious deliberation, we finally came to the conclusion that the time might not be right for us to organize such a conference. We revisted our goals. We want to seek out, promote, and educate local startups and future entrepreneurs. We want to meet the best and brightest this city (and the Midwest) has to offer. We’ve come up with a new plan…
We believe we can make a more immediate impact, and reach our collective goals by making ActionsTalk a site dedicated to highlighting the successes and struggles of the local entrepreneur. We’re both obviously very interested in technology, but we aren’t limiting our scope there. No startup is off limits. By meeting the people and telling these stories, we will bring the community together. We see this as a venue for you to check out what’s new, who’s making moves, and to learn the tricks of the trade.
A Call to Action!
* If you’re involved with a startup in Milwaukee (or know someone who is), send us your story. If we think it makes sense, we’ll interview you, do a write-up, and bring new attention to your business.
* If you can write decently, and you’ve got a passion for this, like we do, let us know. We’re looking for a few more contributors to energize this movement. As a contributor, you can cover the local businesses or write relevant education pieces for our readers.
We’re excited for the new direction, and we’ll be publishing our first batch of content soon… stay tuned.
The summer in MKE will now truly be that much sweeter. Check out my new ride… I went with the Specialized “Allez” (French for “Go!”). I’m counting on a lot less of this.
Do yourself a favor and watch Eclectic 2.0 by Ross Ching. What a great thing to wake up to! And if you’re interested, here’s how he made it. I’m already looking for this equipment…
I did a little stop-action film project with my friend Tad today. I’m mostly behind the camera and only make a short cameo as a stunt double — can you see where? And now, without further ado, I give you the Brady Street Skate vid…
Two new applications I’ve been impressed with are Piclens and Animoto.
Piclens is a plugin for Firefox that lets you view photos on the web in a new, completely immersive way. Once you have it installed, it integrates with all the major photo sharing sites: Flickr, Facebook, Google Images, Smugmug, etc. With Piclens you can view sets of photos on a virtual wall, and fly through them with a drag of the mouse. It can make the most boring Facebook album seem interesting.
Animoto is a new site that lets you create amazing videos by combining a group of your photos with some music. I’ve never seen an auto-generated slide show come out so well! You can make the videos for free if you go with a length of 30 seconds, and it’s cheap to make a longer one (~$4). After your video is complete, you can embed it on your website, Facebook, etc. As I sift through 1000’s of pictures from my time in Europe and try to put a video together, I’m thinking it makes a lot more sense to have Animoto do it for me. I would be very surprised if Animoto doesn’t get bought up by Google or Yahoo (think Flickr integration…) in the near future.
