Geek Dinner: April 2007

These days it seems like not a single night goes by when some company is throwing a party for the tech masses to attend.  It sure makes San Francisco seem like a very lively place, I must say.  It also makes it a bit more tricky to try to get some top influencers to join you for dinner for the evening. 

By the way, those exact words could’ve been written in April of 1999 or 2000.

Anyhow, I did manage to convince 1615 of them to come to the latest Geek Dinner, and they are:

• Daniel Riveong
• Jamie Odell – in charge of product management at Jaman
• Nick Douglas
• Mehrshad Mansouri – freelance consumer tech/new media PR
• Andrew Kippen
• Robert Scoble
• Brad Kayton – in charge of marketing at 4homemedia
• Jeremy Toeman – spends way too much time on his couch
• Sam Levin
• Brian Curtis
• Christian Perry
• Karl Long – in charge of gaming and social media at Nokia 
• Dave Mathews
• Marjorie Kase
• Jim Schaff – domo arigato Mr Drobo-to (domo)
• Jason Vagner – head carnie at Big Tent

The ’round-the-horn’ topic of the evening was about digital cameras, and the upwardly spiraling ever-increasing megapixel count.  Personally, I feel we’re reach a bit of a ‘saturation point’ wherein consumers won’t be easily persuaded to strive for higher MP cameras.  This doesn’t include professionals or prosumers, of course.  It proved an interesting topic, as quite a few different opinions came to bear:

• Some agreed.
• Some thought it would just keep going up and up as the technology improves. 
• Some thought that the industry would follow the CPU industry, and focus less on the actual megapixel count and more on the features & benefits
• Some thought a technical “leap forward” would occur, and we’d get to a whole new plateau of digital camera technology

As is becoming the norm, I had a bag of gadgets to pass around for inspection.  My favorite remains: my quik-pod.  I also had Samsung’s NV10 digital camera (which sports a very interesting interface, worthy of a look!), my trio of bluetooth headsets, my Samsung SCH-u740 phone (now in black), and the NETGEAR SPH101 Skype phone.

No giveaways this time, but instead I gave the floor to Jim Schaff of Data Robotics to present the Drobo.  In interest of fairness and the fact that we’d drank a lot of wine, he had 2 minutes to present and the group was welcome to barrage him with questions.  Disclosure: I am now consulting for Data Robotics, but this specific activity was unrelated to the work I’m doing there – Jim just wanted (a) to come to dinner, and (b) asked if he could present the gadget.

I definitely don’t want Geek Dinner to get all commercialized or anything, but if there are other cool startups that have products they want to show off (or even giveaway), feel free to reach out.  No guarantees, and it’s going to be totally at my discretion.

We also had a short video shot at the dinner.  Next time, we may have even more…

Thanks again to all the attendees, I hope everyone had a great time!

ps – is it ironic that I picked the specific night based on the schedule of a friend who was in from out of town, and that friend didn’t show up?  I think that’s irony, but I’m not positive.