I’m getting ready to shift my location to Half Moon Bay for the summer. I leave at the end of next week, and stay until the day after Labor Day. While I am up there, I will be blogging, as well as planning the Third Annual Arizona Entrepreneurship Conference, which will be held at the Ritz in Phoenix on November 19. You can register early for a discount here. The reason I’m telling you all this so far in advance is because the conference will certainly sell out this year.
Here’s why:one of the keynote speakers is Matt Mullenweg, the youthful and brilliant founder of WordPress, probably the most famous blogging platform today. He will be joined by Andy Ehrlich, a fantastic and different leadership speaker, Howard Lindzon (founder of Wallstrip and Knightsbridge Capital), Allen Kaplan, co-founder of Limelight Networks (and man who raises big bucks for Arizona companies), iJustine, Chris Brogan
and a star-studded cast of Arizona startups and successes. If you want to get involved or stay informed as we progress through the planning process, the Google Group for the Conferences is here. We would love to broaden the base of participants.
Update: If the link to the Google Group is incorrect, just go to Google Groups and search for Arizona Entrepreneurship Conference.
My friend Brian Shaler gave me a great idea, which is to turn the conference into a sort of technology festival for Phoenix, similar to South by Southwest (SXSW) in Austin. So after this year, we will have to change locations, probably to downtown as we attempt to integrate three or four other events (RefreshPhoenix, Podcampaz, Phoenix Social Media Club, and anyone else who wants to participate, into GeekWeekAZ, a festival people will want to attend from all over the world.
So that’s the plan, Stan. And BTW, proceeds from the conference go to the Opportunity Through Entrepreneurship Foundation, which provides entrepreneurship training to disadvantaged communities.
This is part of my not-so-surreptitious plan to connect Arizona geeks with Bay Area geeks, so my two sets of friends can all meet each other (in Half Moon Bay, where @scobleizer can film it for FastCompany.tv)
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Good idea for a SXSW-like meeting in AZ. But get a new moniker. ‘GeekWeek’ sounds hackneyed and 2002. How about something like ‘New Tech Valley Week’ or ‘SW Social Media Summit’…?
Not wedded to the name :-) All a work in progress. I was just trying to think of something that conveyed the though of what the event was.