Friday, March 21, 2008

Network Solutions Small Business networking event with Guy Kawasaki in Miami

I was thrilled to be in Miami for work. I was there for the Network Solutions sponsored Small Business Event where Guy Kawasaki was speaking. It was great to meet Guy in real life after having seen him and known him online. I interviewed Guy Kawasaki and he was a genuine guy with no airs about him. The interview is posted on the Solutions are Power Blog.

Alex De Carvalho @alexdc was live tweeting Guy Kawasaki's talk and here are some of the highlights.

    • "every entrepreneur comes in with a great work of art"
    • D: innovation's Deep; I: intelligent products; C: complete experience; E: Elegance; E: great products create strong emotions"
    • If u're in software, change ur service often + experiment much" Also, "niche your product and make it the best in that niche"
    • Ask your customers *why* they're buying your product; this is not the same as asking non-users why they're not customers"
    • Don't let successful 'bozos' get you down when they say it can't be done ... rich and famous generally parses to 'lucky'!"
    • "Western Union should have become PayPal ... but it didn't. That's 'bozosity'!"
    • "A big enemy is a good thing, b/c they're entrenched and not innovative. Also, it motivates the heck out of your employees!"

Another Attendee Tony of EnragedAmigos.com wrote a post with a good summary from Guy Kawasaki's talk titled "Business and start-up advice from Guy Kawasaki

Guy as usual gave a great talk. It was help outside and the Florida weather was very nice.
A great group of Twitterati from the Miami area were at the event We continued the meet-up after the event. .The first one to arrive was Maria @vicequeenmaria and during our light hearted banter she said tat the 'Vice" In her name was like that in "VIce President" and not "Miami Vice" or any other Vice. She had a N95 which unfortunately ran out of charge .( btw she is looking for a QIK invite so anyone with influence please help). I met AlexDC met in Austin at SXSW and he rearranged his schedule to be here. He has a awesome camera and took some good pictures http://flickr.com/photos/adc/tags/networksolutionsmiami/show/. Brian Breslin was also in SXSW and we had lunch together with Alexdc and Liz Strauss. Brian is the man behind TwitBin the Firefox plugin for Twitter and his company infinimedia offers cool services like widgets and applications like Facebook Apps. Carlos Granier, (@cgranier) I was meeting for the first time. Carlosjust released a latin website directory called http://notilat.com/. Yvette @dearYvette is such a humorous person and between all the folks from Miami and Guy Kawasaki the table was laughing all the time.

Guy joined us and we had a great time exchanging notes and having a good conversation. In the words of @DearYvette " Funny thing about @guykawasaki. No matter what you think you know about him, he's 50 times more funny in real life"

@vicequeenmaria @Shashib @Alexdc @DearYvette @cgrainer @susanwade @brbreslin

Did you know that @vicequeenmaria is a writer, yoga instructor, has the knowledge of a concierge, small business consultant and one more thing that I had forgotten about. @dearyvette is a HR professional and is building a house all on her own. She knows more about the County school board minutes than the school board themselves and she has no kids ( she does have dogs)

Overheard at the dinner table :
- Advice to Guy - before talking about Horsemeat please make sure there are know Horse owners in the room .

- We need to find Moonbeam Lamaze instructor and corp. event planner

From Alexdc :

- Sarah Lacy is no longer Twitterati, she's Twirlerati" (ref to hair twirling)

- Twitter at times is like being in ER ... Twitt.ER"

-

DSCN0511

On the whole I think Network Solutions is happy to facilitate conversations between Small Business Experts and Small Business Owners as Alex later TWeeted

" Network Solutions chose So. Florida as one of three first locations for meetups; no product pitches were made, a pleasant evening had by all"

Network Solutions team at the imageMiami Small Business networking event.

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