After the bubble burst most people were just trying to hold on and all that you had a choice between in the DC area were NVTC (Northern VA Tech Council) and Potomac Officer Club events. NVTC was very government focused and who mostly showed up were service providers (I have the 100′s of insurance and lawyer business cards to prove it). POC events were big events with well known people but not alot of good networking.

One good networking event I liked was the Tech Prayer breakfast but that was only once a year. What most of us were left with was going to conferences, usually not here, to get our networking on and find fellow entrepreneurs and real innovative thinkers.

Lately, there has been a change in the winds here in the DC area. With events like PodCampDC and Social Media Club’s events we are starting to see our cutting edge tech scene finally re-emerge. Last Thursday night it was totally confirmed with the TECH Cocktail DC event. It was held at MCCXXIII (1223) in DC. A swanky place that is over-priced for my usual weekend partying but this event had cheap drinks (thank you drink tickets) and about 300 people.

Below is a picture of the scene at the height of the evening.

While there have been many events that have drawn 400 people, this was different. Almost everyone was doing something startup related that was really cutting edge. There were social media people there (Technosailor and me included), innovative startups and actual investors looking to network.

There were also a great group of sponsors with great products to demo. Here is a great list from Jimmy over at EastCoastBlogging:

AwayFind – a product aimed at helping combat the email problem by letting your contacts get in touch with you via an online form.

iGala – a digital photo frame with a touchscreen interface that connects directly to Flickr and Gmail to stream photos to the frame like a slideshow.

Loladex – offers local recommendations from your trusted network of Facebook friends.

Odeo – launched a new beta verision which offers both search and personalized content (audio and video) recommendations.

Voxant – a free licensed content offering for publishers which offers a pageview based revenue share to anyone that embeds the content on a their site.

WhyGoSolo – a new social networking site aimed at helping you to create spontaneous new connections so, as its name implies, you won’t go solo any longer.

A huge amount of thanks go out to Frank Gruber and Eric Olson who do the TECH Cocktails around the country and they need to do it more than once a year here.

The vibe around this region is changing and since we will never will be Silicon Valley and never want to be, it is fantastic to see that there is a refreshed ecosystem of entrepreneurship here in the region.

Photo courtesy of jgarber

Editor’s Note: Some comments don’t seem to apply to this post as viewers of a show I was on were instructed to leave comments on this blog to get an invite to BrightKite. These comments will be approved but do not necessarily go with this post. Sorry!

Amazing people everywhere. That’s the summary, as simplistic as that sounds. The overlapping of all my various circles and networks of people: DC folks interacting with Canadian friends interacting with the PodCamp circle of friends interacting with b5media folks. Not to mention the vast presence of my Twitter friends everywhere I looked. As I said, it was truly amazing.

The past few days, if you’ve been keeping up with this blog, you know that I’ve interviewed six fantastic folks: Brian Solis, “Pistachio” Laura Fitton, Frank Gruber, “Copyblogger” Brian Clark, Christina Warren and Rainer Cvillink. Obviously a very productive day. Those were just the quick video sit downs that I did. We also did our regular weekly District of Corruption live from Austin, appeared on a variety of videos and podcasts by Chris Brogan, Scott Stead, and Kris Smith to name a few.

Though I met many, many new folks this week, I was very pleased to get the opportunity to meet (for the first time), Shel Israel, Erin Kotecki Vest, Micah Baldwin, Grant Robertson, Christina Warren, and Mark Cuban. Yes… I did just say I met Mark Cuban. It was only for a brief handshake as he breezed through the Washington VC sponsored Rock Band party Tuesday night.

Old friends reconnected include the inimitable Loren Feldman, Brian Clark, Darren “Problogger” Rowse, Scott Brooks, Alex Hillman and, as usual, many more.

On a light note, I’m a little miffed that the bulk of the coverage of the “Beacon Sucks” heckler moment during Mark Zuckerberg’s keynote wasn’t properly attributed. Christina did, but CNET, Valleywag and the rest of the coverage did not. It was me, of course, which makes me either the voice of the thoughts of all of us or just rude. Not sure which. You be the judge.

I want to thank the b5media crew that made the event a lot of fun for me. Thanks to Steph Agresta (aka, Internet Geek Girl) for being the face and voice of the Bloghaus. I know you’re wiped out from it, but it was great and I hope for you it was worth it. Lijit and Outbrain for sponsoring the “b5 ranch” – yes it was a real ranch. Grant and Christina for dinner, drinks and so much more with myself and the b5′ers. It’s a pretty cool dynamic to work for a competing blog network and still be some of the coolest people around.

Austin, I’m out. You were wonderful. Until SXSW ’09, stay weird Austin (that’s a tee shirt I saw today).

Email Solution

Currently, we run all our mail locally through sendmail/dovecot and while this is a workable solution, it’s time consuming to have to go in and edit

and

all the time. Not to mention trying to get spamassassin to actually deal with spam appropriately. On the surface, I’m a fan of Google Apps for Domains. It allows a nice interface for adding email accounts. Forwarders is a short step from there. And of course, Gmail’s spam filtering is next to none. Add to that the ability to have POP/IMAP/SMTP access via Gmail and it becomes the workaround solution for most of our users.

Then of course, we use Googlegroups for mailing lists.

But GAYD has reliability issues and there’s no guarantee that it won’t go away tomorrow.

We could of course get a dedicated mail server. In a Windows LAN/WAN/VPN environment, a dedicated Exchange server would be apropos – but that goes against a number of philisophical principles at b5media. One, we don’t run on Windows. Nothing runs on Windows, save Jeremy’s laptop. Oh and Christina uses Windows too. But that’s all client bits. For servers, we don’t use Windows and though it’s possible to make OSes work seamlessly, it’s not something we want to pursue. Secondly, it’s just too big of a solution for b5media. I come from the big old world of government contracting where there were 250+ users at a site. Using Exchange in that situation, in a homogenous Windows environment, makes sense. Using it in a virtual web-world does not.

Network Backup/Storage

A challenge we face as a virtual company where most everyone works from home, on laptops, is that all our data is subject to those dangers. Last week, a sprinkler system went off in a vacant apartment in our building sending the fire alarm off. I grabbed my laptop and went outside, knowing that if there truly were a fire, I had to have my laptop to make money for my family. Worse yet, what if the sprinkler had gone off in MY apartment and destroyed the computer? I backup my data to an external drive, but what if a fire, or a thief that had broken into my apartment, had taken it. Where would I be?

So we need an remote-storage/backup solution for our client machines. Some are Windows, some are Macs (actually, most are Macs). This should be a small client that simply runs a backup job via cron/Scheduled Tasks. Ideally, this service could double as a virtual shared drive accessible by all of our folks.

Finally…

We are not opposed to self-hosted or remote-hosted solutions, though remote-hosted would take some of the support burden off myself. These things need to be EASY. Not that we can’t do hard, but why should we? Plus, there’s too much else that I need to worry about than having to deal with learning how to deploy/maintain a solution on our servers. Everything should be accessible via a web interface as well. Add an email, click. Add a forwarder, click. Add user A to this mailing list and give him Admin rights, click.

So, does anyone have any recommendations. Better yet, can anyone give me a demo of your product?