Top Ten Tuesday: Words/ Topics That Instantly Make Me Buy/ Pick Up a Book

Taking a cue from my daughters blog Playing in the Pages.

She did a post on her book centric blog which covers reviews and reading, and I didn't want let my answered only appear there, so here are mine ...

What Will Make Me Pick Up a Book

1- Short Horror Stories: Quick scary, thrilling or laughable reads. Try the Stephen King collections.

2- Detective series: Began with Encyclopedia Brown, entered the Agatha Christie stage, moved on to Travis McGee and others. John D McDonald was the forefather so give Travis a chance.

3- Set in the Northwest: Still like Seattle settings, but the city has gotten a little full of itself. If set in Tacoma I will give it a read.

4- Energy Solutions: Maybe it is non-fiction, but it is still escapism to me cause I doubt I will ever build that solar powered, rain filtering, trash compacting solution. Still, read “The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind”.

5- Origami: Give me a model and I will fold it.

6- Trendy economic books: Call me a slave to the news cycle, but if everyone is freaking out about a flat world economy driven by a creative community, I will likely feel compelled to read it. Try Freakanomics and Collapse.

7- Books for kids: If there is a kid to read them to, I will want to read it. Mine are now too old, but I can babysit and someday I may have grandkids.

8- Near future science based Sci Fi: Michael Crichton is my go to author for this, with the Andromeda Strain, Jurassic Park and Coma being three great ones.

9- Cyber Punk: William Gibson inspired from Burning Chrome through Mona Lisa Overdrive.

10- Detailed historic work written like a novel: Tom Wolfe did it with The Right Stuff and The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test.

Program for SSTC 2013

Below is the Program for the South South Technology Conference 2013

Hope to see many of you there.

 

9 a.m.          Welcome

Andrew Fry, Assistant Director of Industy Partnerships and Lecturer, Institute of Technology
Bruce Kendall, CEO, Economic Development Board of Tacoma-Pierce County
Debra Friedman, UW Tacoma Chancellor
Congressman Adam Smith -- Video
Congressman Derek Kilmer

9:15 a.m.     Morning Keynote

Sharon Wong
Director of Business Incubation, Emerging Technologies Group
Cisco Systems

It's "game on" for businesses and industries worldwide to begin their evolution to the Internet of Everything (IoE)—the intelligent connection of people, process, data, and things. Today more than 99 percent of physical objects in the world are unconnected. By 2020, 50 billion devices will be connected. As the number of connections between people, processes, data, and things continue to grow; businesses will define new markets and refine others. Those connections serve to benefit people by enabling improved quality of life, richer experiences, and faster and better business decisions. Hear how Cisco is using disruptive innovation to fuel the emergence of the IoE and to create value and opportunities for its customer and partners.

10 a.m.         Panel Discussion: Big Data is a Big Deal

Moderator: Ankur Teredesai, Professor, Institute of Technology, UW Tacoma
Dr. Les Reed, Senior VP of Quality, Multicare
Bill Eklow, Research Scientist, Cisco Systems
Matt Tolentino, Research Scientist, Intel DuPont

11:15 a.m. - 12 p.m.        Morning Breakouts

Cybersecurity and your Big Data

Carwein Auditorium, Keystone Building
Moderator: DC Grant, ISSA
Darrel Bowman, CEO, Officeinanicon.com
Erik Stockwell, OpticFusion
Dave Vranizan, Benaroya Data Center

Healthcare and Technology

GWP 212
Moderator: Alexis Wilson, Faculty, Nursing and Healthcare Leadership
Kimberly Duffy, Multicare
Atif F. Mohammad, Internet Identity
Michael D. Ness, Virginia Mason

12:30 p.m.          Lunch Keynote

Michael Hamilton
Chief Information and Security Officer
City of  Seattle
Hamilton will discuss the Public Regional Information Security Event Management (PRISEM). The system is designed to offer an online early warning about everything from botnet incursions on compromised desktops to possible full-fledged cyber-attacks from terrorists. As Seattle's CISO, Michael Hamilton is responsible for governance and leadership in support of effective and consistently-applied technology security standards and methods across 20+ departments. Hamilton has more than 20 years as an information security professional, as a practitioner, entrepreneur, consultant, and in management. Formerly a NASA ocean scientist at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, his BS and MS degrees in Geochemistry and Oceanography are from the University of Southern California.

1:15 p.m.      South Puget Sound Sampler -- New and Young Tech Companies

 

Robert Bunge, South Sound Cyber Sport
Kevin Armstrong, Rich Geographic Internet Applications, LLC
Jeff Goodwin, eDiscoveryCloud.net
Erik Hanberg, Side X Side Creative

 

2 p.m.         Afternoon Breakouts

Building a Cybersecurity Workforce

Carwein Auditorium
Bryan Goda, Professor, Institute of Technology, UW Tacoma
Jody Randall, Clover Park Technical College
Chris Richardson, Internet Identity
Dr. Jan Whittington, Center for Excellence in Cybersecurity

Entrepreneur Meet Up

Cherry Parkes 106
Graham Evans
Andrew Fry
Ryan Petty

3 p.m.          Closing Remarks

Conference Theme

Big Data is such a non-specific term that it may cause some confusion as to what it is and why it is important.
We are progressing further down the road as a data-driven society, so it is becoming imperative that everyone better understand the big picture of Big Data.  How is it emerging as a technological solution set for business, community and how we evolve as a society.
This will be the overarching theme of this year's South Sound Technology Conference. We will explore what big data means and how it affects healthcare, business, and our national infrastructure. Most importantly, we'll discuss what it means to you.

South Sound Tech Conference 2013

Here is the poster for the March 8th South Sound Technology Conference.  This is the one big chance during the year to meet with and talk technology with your fellow South Sounders.

Big Data a Big Deal

Big Data is such a non specific term that it may cause some confusion as to what it is and why it is important.

We are progressing further down the road as a data driven society, so it is becoming imperative that we better understand the big picture of Big Data.  How is it emerging as a technological solution set for business, community and how we evolve as a society.

Starting with the Wikipedia definition:

"In information technology, big data is a collection of data sets so large and complex that it becomes difficult to process using on-hand database management tools or traditional data processing applications. The challenges include capture, curation, storage, search, sharing, analysis, and visualization. The trend to larger data sets is due to the additional information derivable from analysis of a single large set of related data, as compared to separate smaller sets with the same total amount of data, allowing correlations to be found to "spot business trends, determine quality of research, prevent diseases, link legal citations, combat crime, and determine real-time roadway traffic conditions."

What does this mean to the South Puget Sound?

This will be the overarching them of this years South Sound Technology Conference.  We will explore what big data means and how it effects healthcare, business, protecting our national infrastructure and most importantly what it means to you.

March 8th in William Philip Hall.

End of the Quarter Colloquium Fall 2012

The end of the quarter colloquium comes a week earlier than it has in the past.  This means more students attending as it is the week before the end of classes instead of the Friday after classes end and finals week begins.

There are around 30 presentations on internships, readings and research, as well as graduate students presenting on their capstone projects.  As the number of students in the Information Technology and Systems, Computer Science and Systems and Computer and Engineering Systems programs grow, so does the event.  Likely it will be split in the future with research on one day and internships on another.

But for now, here is the unofficial schedule for presentations.

Institute of Technology

End of the Fall Quarter 2012 Colloquium

CP 108

9:00am
Michael Satran (Internship)

            Experience distributing code on a large scale production environment (Andrew Fry)

9:30am
Tom Rochat and Sambath Sok (Internship)

                Internship at Avanade (Bryan Goda)

10:00am
Alexander Kramer (Internship)

                Weyerhaeuser Intern EHS Support Function (Bryan Goda)

10:30am

Joseph Raymond Stout (Internship)

            Weyerhaeuser Internship (Bryan Goda)

11:00am
Dallas James Rosson (Internship)

             Automated Web Application Graphic User Interface Testing Utilizing Selenium (John Mayer)

11:30am

Wen-Chung Chen (Internship)

            Protective Coatings Inc. Internship (Bryan Goda)

12:00pm

Beth Morris (Internship)

            Information Services Security Intern (Andrew Fry)

12:40pm

Mikhail Moskvich (Internship)

                Internship with Vlink, All Project Solutions and Amazon (Andrew Fry)

1:00pm

 Young Choh (Internship) Museum of Glass Mobile Application Development (Andrew Fry)

1:20pm
Darrion Harris (Internship)

            Discovering the Software Developer Within – Mobile App Development (Bob Guttman)

1:40pm

Rodica Cladicov (Internship)

            Mobile Application Development with Pierce County IT (Andrew Fry)

2:00pm

Tyson Lewis and Paul Flores (Internship)

            White Pass Patrol Scheduling Mobile Application (Andrew Fry)

2:30pm

Fa (Jason) Tang (Internship)

            Web Development for Marketing Puget Sound (Andrew Fry)

3:00pm

Open Slot

CP 105

9:00am
Zehra Vajeeh (Independent Study)

            Gait Based Gender Recognition (Matthew Alden)

9:30am

Khanh-Hoa Luong and David Souphommanichanh (Internship)

                Internship at Callison Architecture (Yan Bai)

10:00am
Maggie Liao (Internship)

            Intern at UW Information Technology (Yan Bai)

10:20am

Long Pham (Internship)

            PACCAR Information Technology Division (Yan Bai)

10:40am
Benjamin Kim (Internship)

                Internship at BECU(Yan Bai)

 11:00am

Marissa Bower (Internship)

Security Information and Event Management at the Boeing Company (Yan Bai)

11:20am

Rodney Short (Internship)

                Trials and Tribulation of Vinkco LLC (Andrew Fry)

11:40am

12:00pm
Jayshree Agarwal  (GRADUATE  THESIS)

                Predicting Risk of Re-hospitalization for Congestive Heart Failure Patients

                (Ankur Teredesai, Senjuti Basu Roy)

12:30pm

Allison Jean Graham (Internship and Independent Study)

            Internship with Drugstore.com

            Directed Reading on Database studies and ASP.NET MVC (Senjuti Basu Roy)

1:00pm

Joseph Floyd (Internship)

                TBG (Bryan Goda)

1:20pm

Jeremiah D Miller (CAPSTONE PROJECT)

            An Online/Offline Cross-Platform Mobile Web App for Geolocation Field Data Collection:                             LocationSharpener

                (Sam Chung, Yan Bai, Barabara Endicott-Popovsky, and Jan Whittington

           

2:00pm

Fnu Swathi Balakrishna (CAPSTONE PROJECT)

            An Efficient Client Server Assignment for Internet Distributed Systems

Ideas for Companies Finding Some Footing

Now that I have caught my breath I just have to say that the inaugural South Sound Entrepreneurs Weekend rocked. Twenty three company ideas were presented on Friday Sept 14th  and nine well thought out business initiatives were presented on the afternoon of Sunday Sept 16th. I would not be surprised if several of those took serious root as companies in the future.  At the very least sixty participants enjoyed the enthusiasm that accompanies the pursuit of taking an idea and turning it into a product or service, then pursuing that as a business.

The News Tribune did an excellent article on the event and summed up the participation nicely. 

The participants included a wide range of entrepreneurs, from inexperienced students with just a glimmer of an idea, to those already in business but wondering how to take it to the next step.

Their ideas were heavy on high-tech applications but otherwise varied widely – from remotely controlled gardens set up in shipping containers, to a computer game design consortium and a national on-line debate forum that would lead to a final, hopefully compelling smackdown in what would be called “America’s Ring.”

Read more here: http://www.thenewstribune.com/2012/09/16/2298164/how-about-a-remote-controlled.html#storylink=misearch#storylink=cpy

During the course of the weekend several prizes were awarded through drawings, including domain name registration, Starbucks coffee cards, books on innovation and entrepreneurship (The $100 Dollar Startup) and more.

My favorite was the drawing for the RR Anderson provided "One (1) Hour Logo" which was won by Otis Anderson and the team behind BoxCrop.  What a perfect prize for that weekend. Someone has an idea, then 54 hours later they have a business concept, and now they have an awesome logo.  You can see it at the top of this post.

Several of the businesses that came out of the weekend, either newly or further formed are moving forward including the aforementioned logo winner.  Additionally, a solution for managing energy efficiency and code requirements, a social media management service and a game development collective are all still in play.

One company that was formed but participated in the weekend has recently opened shop a block up the street called FabLab which should be checked out.  I may write about that next.

Things worked out well enough that there will definitely be another SSEW come September 2013.

Two Innovative Events Over the Next Seven Days

Two years ago we held a dry run of what we hoped would be a Startup Weekend like event.  Held at Suite133 and free to anyone who wanted to give starting up a company ago, we had 12 people who wanted to give it a go and some spectators as well.  It gave some idea of what needed to be done to make it a success.

Flash forward to tonight.  The inaugural South Sound Entrepreneurs Weekend is kicking off at 5:30 in William Philip Hall on the University of Washington Campus. This three day event has nearly 60 people signed up so far.  Most are attendees, but many are mentors and technical help that will be on hand to register domains, put together quick web sites and maybe even build a mobile app or create a company logo.

The number of attendees is exciting, but when you consider that this time we have a registration fee to cover food, coffee and a T-Shirt, it is even more impressive.

What will the outcome be?  I don't know, but I hope that there is enough momentum from the weekend to make this into an annual event.

If you like your innovation conversation in a presentation format, with access to many of the states innovative forces, then plan on attending the Pacific Northwest Innovation Summit in Seattle, Washington September 17-19, 2012 as part of the 50th Anniversary Celebration of the Seattle World’s Fair. The Summit will focus on building dynamic collaborations in the Pacific Northwest, stimulating entrepreneurship, examining Washington state’s innovation ecosystem, and a look a financial resources in the region. The Pacific Northwest Economic Region (PNWER) and the Washington Economic Development Commission (WEDC) are the co-organizers of the innovation summit program.

Participants will include business, government and academic leaders in the states and provinces of the Pacific
Northwest interested in accelerating innovation and economic collaboration. The Summit will be held at Intiman Playhouse located at 201 Mercer St., Seattle, WA. The cost to attend the summit is $95, which includes meals.

For more information about the Summit, visit http://www.pacificnwinnovation.com.