Get more articles like this and Register for our Forum.

Gainesville Underground Technology Conference

Yesterday at GTEC something amazing happened!

Alright, let me back up for a moment. GTEC is the Gainesville Technology and Enterprise Center located in sunny Florida. Now, since we are the state known for having troubles involving closed spaces and hanging chads, you may not hold out much hope for our Tech culture. Fortunately, these days you would be wrong.

Like Palo Alto 20 years ago, Florida is growing hub and it wasn’t until yesterday that I realized what that meant. The conference (coined GUT by Todd Chase of Digi-Net) was organized by myself and Colin Hostert of the Orangeply team. In attendance were the CEO and CTO of everyone’s favorite peer-to-peer network Grooveshark, the COO of Digi-Net, Dan Rua of Inflexion Ventures and a score of other Entrepreneurs, Enthusiasts and Developers (even one from Louisiana). If there was one sentiment that ran throughout it was, “I didn’t even know you guys existed.”

That’s the point really, and it is probably the way a lot of people outside of the Technology corridor feel — disconnected from their “fellow travelers”.

The conversation was heated, including a keynotes on digital music from Sam Tarantino, a talk on Identity 2.0 from myself and panels on DRM and “The world after Digg”. All of these will be available here at some point in the near future. The biggest problem was that we just had too much to talk about, we used all of the time we had allotted to us and then some yet we barely scratched the surface of our itinerary.

For all of those who attended, thank you again. If you could not make it out, check out GainesvilleUnderground.com in about a week for your chance to learn more. For everyone else, take this as an object lesson. No matter where you might live and how disconnected you may feel, there is most probably a community out there just waiting to be tapped into.

It’s up to you to take the time to find it.

Projects “Discovered” at this quarter’s Conference

Orangeply
Grooveshark
BlueLite
Orgpoint
CampusOpenCourse
thingsthatwork
alacloud
PodBop
ArtificialStudios
Florida Venture Blog

  • del.icio.us
  • Digg
  • StumbleUpon
  • Reddit
  • Fark
  • Mixx
  • Propeller
  • TwitThis