Hey, techies from Tampa Bay and beyond — are you interested in any of the following:
StartupBus
The Metaverse
Web3
We’re holding an online meetup, Meet Me in the Metaverse, on Thursday, July 14th from 7:00 p.m. to 8:00 p.m. in a web-based virtual reality space to discuss the topics above, and you’re all invited to join us! Register here to attend the event.
This isn’t going to be a Zoom or Teams meeting, but a VR meeting. And don’t worry — you won’t need VR gear — any computer with a browser will do. I took the meetup’s VR environment for a test drive, and it presented itself like a first-person shooter, minus the shooting, where you use the W, A, S, and D keys to move and the mouse to change the direction you’re facing.
Here are a couple of screenshots of what I saw during my quick exploratory run:
My first view of the Metaverse venue. Tap to view at full size.
Walking into the lobby. Tap to view at full size.
The view from the top floor. Tap to view at full size.
I’ll be there — join me! Once again, that’s Thursday, July 14th, from 7:00 p.m. to 8:00 p.m., and you can register here.
StartupBus Florida departs Tampa on Wednesday, July 27, and it’s not too late to get in on the opportunities it presents!
Opportunity #1: Get away from your day-to-day and go on an adventure!
Whether you go to an office, work from home, some combo of the previous two, or are looking for work, StartupBus Florida offers a chance to break away from your daily routine and spend a few unpredictable, exciting, and challenging days on the road building a startup and the application that supports it.
Opportunity #2: Try new tools or use familiar ones in completely new ways!
Have you been looking for an opportunity to try out a new tool, programming language, framework, API or service, but haven’t been able to because you’ve been bogged down with your day-to-day work? StartupBus Florida is your chance!
…or…
Have you been looking for an opportunity to stretch by taking a tool, programming language, framework, API or service that you’re quite familiar with, and using it in new ways or for new purposes? Again, StartupBus Florida is your chance!
The map below shows StartupBus Florida’s 2019 route from Tampa that year’s destination city, New Orleans:
Among other things, it provided us buspreneurs with a chance to see parts of the country that many of us normally don’t get to see and meet people that we normally wouldn’t get to meet.
This’s year’s destination city is Austin, Texas! Since it’s a different destination city, we’re going to take a different route, with different stops in different places with different people. But the opportunity to see different places and people will still be there.
Opportunity #4: Road trip to the delightfully weird city of Austin, Texas!
Austin is just plain fun. It’s a mishmash of alternative, Latino, Texan, and college cultures that combine to make it a great place to get great food and drink in a lively party atmosphere, catch some great live music, see some stunning sights, and meet some great people. It’s also where the semi-finals and finals will take place (remember, you’ll spend the Wednesday, July 27th through Friday, July 29th on the bus to Austin, followed by 2 days in Austin: the semi-finals on Saturday, July 30th and the finals on Sunday, July 31st).
Every resume lists experience working in an office, whether in a traditional office space, a coworking space, or someone’s home. Only a select few list the experience of working on a bus to create a startup and its supporting application in an handful of days. This is the kind of experience that speaks to your skills, resilience, creativity, positivity, and ambition. A ride on StartupBus supercharged my resume, and it can supercharge yours, too!
Opportunity #6: Boost your company profile with a sponsorship!
StartupBus is a crazy idea — what person in their right mind would build a business and its supporting technology in three days on a bus?
StartupBus has also created a number of advances, from Instacart to the advances in careers for many of its participants (Yours Truly included), and it can also advance your company’s profile if you decide to be a sponsor. You too can be part of this crazy idea, and we’ll make sure that your praises are sung if you sponsor us!
(Want to be a StartupBus Florida sponsor and get praise from the entire StartupBus organization as well as Tampa Bay’s number one tech blog? Drop me a line and find out more.)
Do you want in on these opportunities? Register now!
Here’s an excerpt from the current version of my resume (yes, my resume’s under version control). Note the highlighted entry:
The entry is for Hyve, the startup and application that my StartupBus team built when I rode in 2019. Hyve was a service that let you create “burner” email addresses that relayed email to and from your real email address, allowing you to safely subscribe to services and avoid getting marketing spam or safely communicate with people whom you might not completely trust.
Team Hyve. From left to right: Tracy Ingram, David Castañeda, me, Rina Bane, Justin Linn.
…but the real wins came a little bit afterward when I was interviewing for developer and developer relations jobs a couple of weeks afterward. StartupBus makes for a good story, and in a job interview, it’s the story that “sells” you.
After all, StartupBus is a hackathon where you’re challenged to come up with:
A startup business
and an application that supports that business
on a bus
in three days.
This intrigued the people who interviewed me, which led me to talk about the decisions that shaped the business, which in turn shaped the software. I detailed the challenges of writing business plans and software on a bus, a rumbling, rolling office space with spotty internet access, unreliable power, and the occasional engine breakdown. I also talked about dealing with the compressed timeframe and a few of the tricks we used to get around the limited time, which included getting help from our professional network, taking advantage of crowdsourcing services, and using our media contacts. My StartupBus story played a key part in convincing prospective employers that they wanted to hire me.
StartupBus Florida will depart Tampa, Florida on Wednesday, July 27 and make a 3-day trip with interesting stops and challenges along the way. It will arrive in Austin, Texas on the evening of Friday, July 29, where it will meet with teams from 6 other buses:
On Saturday, July 30, all the teams will assemble at a venue in Austin for the semifinals. Every team will pitch in front of a set of semifinals judges. By the end of the day, a handful of finalists will emerge (Hyve was one of six finalists in 2019).
Those finalists will then go on to the finals, which will take place on Sunday, July 31. They’ll pitch again (and if they’re smart, they’ll have spent the night before reworking their pitch and application) in front of the finals judges, who will select the winner and runners-up.
If you participate in StartupBus, you will come out of it a different person. You will pitch your startup at least a dozen times (and yes, everyone pitches — not just the marketing people, but the creatives and developers, too). You will work on product design. You will work on marketing. You will work on code. And you’ll do it all under far-from-ideal circumstances. StartupBus is a crash course in guerrilla entrepreneurship, and it’s an experience that will serve you well — especially during these economically upside-down times.
And you’d better believe that you’ll have stories to tell, and they’ll help you stand apart from the crowd.
Here’s the list of tech, entrepreneur, and nerd events for Tampa Bay and surrounding areas for the week of Monday, July 4 through Sunday, July 10, 2022.
Every week, with the assistance of a couple of Jupyter Notebooks that I put together, I compile this list for the Tampa Bay tech community.
As far as event types go, this list casts a rather wide net. It includes events that would be of interest to techies, nerds, and entrepreneurs. It includes (but isn’t limited to) events that fall under the category of:
Programming, DevOps, systems administration, and testing
Tech project management / agile processes
Video, board, and role-playing games
Book, philosophy, and discussion clubs
Tech, business, and entrepreneur networking events
Toastmasters (because nerds really need to up their presentation game)
Sci-fi, fantasy, and other genre fandoms
Anything I deem geeky
By “Tampa Bay and surrounding areas”, this list covers events that originate or are aimed at the area within 100 miles of the Port of Tampa. At the very least, that includes the cities of Tampa, St. Petersburg, and Clearwater, but as far north as Ocala, as far south as Fort Myers, and includes Orlando and its surrounding cities.
StartupBus 2022 will depart from Tampa Bay!
If you’re looking for an adventure, a chance to test your startup skills, and an experience that will make your résumé stand out, join me on StartupBus Florida, which departs Tampa Bay on July 27, when it sets course for Austin, Texas!
On this three-day journey, “buspreneurs” will form teams, create a business idea, build a software demo for that idea, and develop pitches for that idea. When they arrive in Austin, they’ll spend two days pitching their startups to a panel of judges.
I was a “buspreneur” on StartupBus Florida in 2019, the last time the event took place, and our team made it to the finals and got the runner-up position. This time, I’m a “conductor” — one of the coaches on the bus — and our team is here to help you rise to the challenge.
If you’d like to get this list in your email inbox every week, enter your email address below. You’ll only be emailed once a week, and the email will contain this list, plus links to any interesting news, upcoming events, and tech articles. Join the Tampa Bay Tech Events list and always be informed of what’s coming up in Tampa Bay!
Here’s the list of tech, entrepreneur, and nerd events for Tampa Bay and surrounding areas for the week of Monday, June 20 through Sunday, June 26, 2022.
Every week, with the assistance of a couple of Jupyter Notebooks that I put together, I compile this list for the Tampa Bay tech community.
As far as event types go, this list casts a rather wide net. It includes events that would be of interest to techies, nerds, and entrepreneurs. It includes (but isn’t limited to) events that fall under the category of:
Programming, DevOps, systems administration, and testing
Tech project management / agile processes
Video, board, and role-playing games
Book, philosophy, and discussion clubs
Tech, business, and entrepreneur networking events
Toastmasters (because nerds really need to up their presentation game)
Sci-fi, fantasy, and other genre fandoms
Anything I deem geeky
By “Tampa Bay and surrounding areas”, this list covers events that originate or are aimed at the area within 100 miles of the Port of Tampa. At the very least, that includes the cities of Tampa, St. Petersburg, and Clearwater, but as far north as Ocala, as far south as Fort Myers, and includes Orlando and its surrounding cities.
StartupBus 2022 will depart from Tampa Bay!
If you’re looking for an adventure, a chance to test your startup skills, and an experience that will make your résumé stand out, join me on StartupBus Florida, which departs Tampa Bay on July 27, when it sets course for Austin, Texas!
On this three-day journey, “buspreneurs” will form teams, create a business idea, build a software demo for that idea, and develop pitches for that idea. When they arrive in Austin, they’ll spend two days pitching their startups to a panel of judges.
I was a “buspreneur” on StartupBus Florida in 2019, the last time the event took place, and our team made it to the finals and got the runner-up position. This time, I’m a “conductor” — one of the coaches on the bus — and our team is here to help you rise to the challenge.
If you’d like to get this list in your email inbox every week, enter your email address below. You’ll only be emailed once a week, and the email will contain this list, plus links to any interesting news, upcoming events, and tech articles. Join the Tampa Bay Tech Events list and always be informed of what’s coming up in Tampa Bay!
Amazon SVP Rohit Prasad said that the feature can mimic any voice when given a less than a minute of audio samples, saying that it’s intended to “make the memories last” after “so many of us have lost someone we love,” in a reference to the pandemic as well (as another instance of the worst tech bros’ belief that death is optional.)
The “hear long-lost relatives speak again!” is a strange pitch, and it’s just as likely that Amazon’s simply responding to some demand for Alexa to feature celebrity voices. By providing this voice impersonation feature, they put the responsibility of capturing a famous person’s voice onto the user, and thus Amazon doesn’t have to pay any licensing/likeness fees.
If you watch Black Mirror, you’re probably remembering the episode Be Right Back, in which a woman recreates her dead boyfriend with readily-available technology:
