If you’re looking for another great Salt Lake area event check out the Utah Tech Spotlight tomorrow, May 18th. The spotlight company will be Control 4. Control 4 makes home automation gizmos that make turning your lights on from your driveway (or someone’s on the other side of the world) as easy as possible. For more information and to RSVP go to Utah Tech Spotlight:

Date: Friday, May 18th Time: 3:00 – 4:00 Location: Bohemian Brewery And Grill (94 East and 7200 South, right off of State Street, SLC)

I hope to stick around after the event and grab a bratwurst so come for the networking, stay for the Czech.

Steve Spencer from Twelve Horses (a ‘relationship marketing’ company focusing on web design) contacted me last week about Utah Tech Spotlight. It’s a new networking opportunity that is hoping to build a solid community for the tech-centric in Utah. The first meeting is March 30th at the Murry location of Rumbi Island Grill. Things get started at 3pm. You can read more and RSVP on their website.

Hope to see you there!

If you happened to be in the Utah County area Phil Burns is restarting his series of Geek Dinners.

The event will be February 8th, 6pm at Los Hermanos in Lindon, Utah.

Jeff Bar from Amazon.com will be the speaker and, as always, geek networking over meal time is sure to ensue. Bring your business cards and your appetite.

From Om Malik’s BroadBand Blog:

The third edition of the Mashup Camp unconference started today in Boston, as a group of developers, mashup enablers, and observers gathered to share ideas and show demos of web applications that are mixed together from sites and services on the web. As with the prior two events, the camp includes a SpeedGeeking contest where attendees view and then vote on their favorite mashups.

While Mashups are tremendously cool I wonder if anything viable and sustainable with come from it? It seems like much of the mashups occuring today have little practical use beyond proof of concept. Are there examples of Mashups that have gone on to be viable livelihoods for their creators?

The news via the Open Culture blog:

Our next informal Portland BarCamp Meetup has been scheduled! We have also settled on the fourth Thursday of every month as a regular date for the event. Any local techies are welcome to attend. When: Thursday, January 25th Time: 6:00pm – 9:00 pm Where: Jive Software Office (317 SW Alder St Ste 500) Sponsored by: Jive Software

So if you’re in the Portland area check it out!

From Chris Messina’s blog comes word of two events happening this weekend:

In case you’ve not heard or been before, the fourteenth classic SHDH will be taking place this weekend (tomorrow) at David Weekly’s SuperHappyFunHouse in Hillsborough, CA. Geektivities start at 1pm and last post-BBQ to 1am.

Oh, and don’t forget! Sunday at the Open Source Application Foundation at 543 Howard St, Todd Davies is putting on Technology and Politics Camp, a BarCamp derivative, billed as “a hands-on day of networking, brainstorming, and planning for organizations working at the intersection of politics and the Internet (or media in general)â€?.

If you’re of the PodCasting persuasion and in the San Francisco area you might want to check out PodCamp West. It runs Saturday and Sunday, form 12PM-6PM. More information can be found on the PodCamp West website (if nothing else go and marvel at the big ticket sponsors that they’ve been able to line up).

Via SocialTwister.

One major difference that I’ve noticed between business and technical types is how they flock. Technical people need a purpose or a problem before they’ll commit to meeting. Business folks, however, seem to be hard wired to interact with others whether or not there is a tangible payout. There seems to be an intuition there that interacting with other people will lead to something worthwhile. From that perspective it was just a matter of time before the suits adopted the unconferencing model for themselves. Fred Wilson, a VC in NYC, has a recap of the Biz Dev 2.0 (yes, I shuddered too at the trite name). The following got my attention:

“I really like the format they used. They got a good group of “discussion leaders” who in most events would be panelists. But instead they put everyone in the audience and we just talked to each other. Much better.”

Now if we could just get the technical and business camps talking to each other… Or is that too much to ask?

There were a number of inspirations for CodeAway. I seemed to be reading a constant stream of exciting get togethers happening in Silicon Valley at the time and feeling extremely jealous that there wasn’t something similar for the Salt Lake area. Chief among the brew-ha-has was DevHouse. On Blogrium there’s a reflective piece on how those guys got started:

“The inspiration was partly from LAN parties I attended when I was younger, including the LGLAN’s in Los Gatos put on by Tom Harrison. Towards the end of my hardcore LAN party days, I started running into people that weren’t just interested in games, but also into programming, design, game modding, and other “devâ€? related stuff. I learned about new things. I saw what other people were doing (and for fun I might add). It was fun and inspirational. That combined with high tech pranks and a party-like atmosphere made it seem like the games were just an excuse to get together to do everything else we did. The LAN party thing eventually died off, but at some point I started inviting friends over to my office where I was working at the time for “devlans.â€? Essentially a LAN party without the games. Instead focusing on making cool stuff. Or working. Or whatever. It’s just fun to have your friends around when you work. It was fun. And productive.”

Some times I think holding the CodeAway events in a library puts a crimp on the social and party like atmosphere that could exist. But one has to start somewhere and libraries provide the free space.