July 27, 2007

Deep packet inspection at the Techcrunch party

Oh, where to start. First, if you don't know what an IDS or deep packet inspection is, nevermind the title.

I'm an avid reader of Techcrunch (many, many times a day) and welcomed the opportunity to attend the Techcrunch 2.0 party at August Capital tonight. Yes, my company was one of the sponsors, but I got the tixs over a month ago, before I knew we were sponsoring.

That said, however, I wore my Azureus shirt to promote the company--knowing this was one our key demographics. The minute I walked onto the back patio, I knew it was going to be an interesting night,

I had at least 20 guys stop to talk to me, giving me business cards, ad telling me how much they love the product (much to my fiance's chagrin). I did meet some great folks, one of them being the guy who ran sourceforge for the past 5 years before leaving for another company (splunk). I'll collect on my t-shirt next week :-)

I was amazed at the power of the t-shirt (thanks, Zazzle! met one of the guys from there, too--good luck on the funding). Also, everyone's eye balls were at chest level, reading "who's who", reading name badges and stuff (my friend Jon, who's very anti web 2.0 decided to "re-brand" and write "Jon xxx, not ajax enabled on his name badge). I talked to an editor from Wired, my past colleague Dan (who is now the CEO of pageflakes--should stay in touch more often), Guy Kawasaki (whom I worked with at an event when I was at CMU), the community person from a competitor that could come in handy later, Lawrence from the facebook api group, David from StumbleUpon (good luck in your new gig!), etc. Notice: everyone I talked to are men. Not one female stopped me to ask about my company or tell me how much they love the product. Must work harder on reaching out to the female demographic.

So, my pictures from the party are here.
We left early, but for all of the ladies looking to find a nice 2.0 guy, I'm sure the party is still going....