RefreshBCS

What is a BarCamp?
BarCamp is an international network of user generated conferences — open, participatory workshop-events, whose content is provided by participants — often focusing on early-stage web applications, and related open source technologies, social protocols, and open data formats.

Did we mention BarCampTexas is free?

BarCampTexas will be held at the FIBERTOWN campus in downtown Bryan/College Station. Centrally located between Austin, Houston, and Dallas, Bryan is a budding technology hub. BarCampTexas will be held on the last weekend in January (26/27).

BarCamp topics range from advice on starting a technology business, developing software with cutting edge technologies, and anything else passionate, technology oriented people love.

Everyone is encouraged to participate and present. You can find a list of planned presentations on the BarCampTexas wiki or just show up and present.

To find directions, hotel accommodations, etc. visit the BarCampTexas.com website.

Our Sponsors
Linux Journal *** FIBERTOWN *** Research Valley Partnership

Here are the notes taken at Ed Schipul’s talk. The URL to his actual slides are included in this document; I have URLs to all of the references he threw out during his talk (mostly books — I point to the Amazon entries for each).Notes on the Ed Schipul talk at RefreshBCS (MS Word format)

BIBA will be having a media kick-off event noon, Monday, Oct. 29^th in front of Carnegie Library in Downtown Bryan.

I myself am a board member that proudly serves to promote locally owned business. Buy Brazos, a website devoted to educating the public on shopping local and promoting locally-owned businesses, is growing rapidly with new members. Please take a second to review your local business options and keep them in mind on any future purchases. Look for a fancy pants redesign in the near future. THANKS!

Hey folks, we’re going to be holding our October Refresh at the First National Bank building, home of FIBERTOWN, in downtown Bryan on Wednesday, October 24th, at 7PM.

Join Ed Schipul, from Houston-based Schipul – the Web Marketing Company, as he discusses the highs, lows and in between bits of starting your own technology company. Learn the basic economics of a new business, phases of a Web business and rules of being a billionaire. Are you crazy enough to start your own tech company? Then you definitely need to be here!!!

To find out more about the speaker, see Ed’s CV here: http://www.schipul.com/edcv/

This should be a good talk from someone who’s been in the industry for quite some time.

And by the way, this meeting marks our first 1/2 year (I just did the math!)

Facebook Event

Date: Thursday, September 13, 2007
Time: 7:00 PM
Location: Mays Business School - Room 182
GMap: http://tinyurl.com/2cttfn
RSVP not required.

Amazon Web Services will be in town!

What’s cooking at Amazon these days?, What is Amazon Web Services?, Why Amazon Mechanical Turk is named so? What’s so “Elastic” about Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud? What’s the limit of bottom-less hard-drive in the sky (Amazon Simple Storage Service)? What are some of the 265,000+ registered developers of AWS Developer community building?

Let’s find answers to these questions and more.

It all started with Amazon E-Commerce Service (Amazon ECS), when Amazon.com opened its technology and product vault (2002) to developers by exposing the API and gave them the ability to construct powerful innovative applications using the resources the company has built over eleven years and over $2B developing. Since then, Amazon has launched ten new services that provide developers easy access to inexpensive, scalable web-based infrastructure.

In this session, Seattle-based Jinesh Varia, Evangelist for Amazon Web Services, will talk about these innovations from Amazon.com.

Specifically, Jinesh will talk about Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) that allows requisition of machines on-demand by simple web service call, Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) which is infinite storage in the sky and Amazon Mechanical Turk which is the Human Intelligence Web service and how these services can help local start-up companies to go live quickly. Also, we will see some exciting apps, built on AWS that have become profitable businesses and others that are just simply cool to see.

So bring your open minds fully charged, as this session will be interactive and might spur up your thought-liquid for the next ‘Eureka!’ moment.

Presenter
JINESH VARIA, EVANGELIST, AMAZON WEB SERVICES
As a Web Services Evangelist at Amazon, Jinesh Varia helps developers take advantage of disruptive technologies that are going to change the way we think about computer applications, and the way businesses compete. He is focused on furthering awareness of web services and often helps developers on 1:1 basis in implementing their own ideas using Amazon’s innovative services.
Jinesh has over 7 years experience in XML and Web services and has worked with standard working groups in XBRL. Prior to joining Amazon as an evangelist, he held several positions in UBmatrix including Solutions Architect, Enterprise Team Lead and Software engineer, working on various XBRL-based financial services projects including Call Modernization Project at FDIC. He was also lead developer at Penn State Data Center, Institute of Regional Affairs. Jinesh’s publications have been published in ACM and IEEE. Jinesh is originally from India and holds a Master’s degree in Information Systems from Penn State University. He plays tennis and loves to trek.

Last night was the RefreshBCS event we hosted at The Creative Space and it was a huge success. Around 40-50 (awesome) people showed up to check things out and show support. I just wanted to thank EVERYONE who took time out of their night to come and see what we are all about. I even met a couple of people from Austin and San Antonio who are out to make their own collaborative spaces. So, lets keep this amazing ball rolling and we look forward to seeing you all again!

Special thanks to Square One Bistro, Maddens and BuildingProcess.com for donating the food and drinks!