big omaha/girls in tech

Posted on 11. May, 2009 by admin in business

The Big Omaha event on Friday went absolutely swimmingly. The intellectual capital in Omaha and the midwest is real cause for excitement, and I was impressed by how many people made the trip to Omaha from other parts of the country! I had breakfast with an design startup from St. Louis and met the developers at an application firm (female!) at the launch party. Everyone was so open talking about their projects and I must say that I’ve never been in a room of people with such a high concentration of skill and passion. So many people living the dream.

This is a video montage of some photos from Big Omaha put together by Malone & CO, the official photographer of Big Omaha. It opens up with a look at the speakers of Big Omaha, and then other people at the conference. Peep me on the left in the last shot.

Big Omaha from Mike Malone on Vimeo.

The purpose of Big Omaha was to bring together forward-thinking creatives and entrepreneurs to share their success stories, failures, and give advice and support to each other as we navigate through the world of business basically without a map. The vision that many of us have are things that haven’t been done before in a conventional business model, which Big Omaha matched with a new conference model.

Photo by Nick Stankus

Some of the speakers included Gary Vaynerchuk, owner of Wine Library TV, Jeffrey Kalmikoff, CCO of SkinnyCorp which is the parent company of Threadless, Adriana Gascoigne, founder of Girls in Tech, Jason Fried, founder of 37Signals, Micah Laaker who is in charge of the Yahoo! Open Strategy project, as well as some other very inspiring speakers like Micah Baldwin and Ben Rattray.

One thing I loved about the conference was the attention to detail in the design–everywhere I looked, I saw branding…

Photos by Malone & Co and Nick Stankus.

Another cool thing that was highlighted is Omaha’s Empty Room project, a six-month long experiment that allows artists/musicians/entrepreneurs/chefs/whoever is interesting in sharing a new idea to use an empty loft space for one month rent free.

Big Omaha provided a little Empty Room installment where we could all put up our own ideas of what we’d do if we could use the room for a month.

After Big Omaha was the Omaha Girls in Tech chapter launch and we were SO happy with the turnout! You can read more about Girls in Tech on the official website or you can just check out the super huge post I made about it last week.

We were filled to capacity at the Urban Wine Company and I think we were able to sign up over 100 new female members and dozens of male supporters.

Photos by Andy Peters

So what’s next? When we have this much momentum it’s important not to let it die. As my friend Matt said after Big Omaha, “I now understand why really successful people don’t sleep very much. It’s because they are so inspired during their waking life that there’s no need to dream about. There is so much to get done – sleep just gets in the way it.”

Look out Wednesday for for a big awesome giveaway. You will be bummed if you miss it!