The next economic development disaster is brewing up in Tallahassee. FSU officials there have Incubator Envy and are hell bent on keeping up with the Joneses (Tampa, Boca Raton, Orlando, Gainesville, Sarasota, etc.). In the process, they no doubt will lobby for tens of millions of taxpayer dollars to put up a shiny new building and blow wads of cash on marketing a facility that will at best only benefit a small isolated slice of academia. Continue reading this post…

I found this excellent open source as a business model rant on the Luminotes wiki. This is not the typical “everything should be digital and everything digital should be free” rant, instead the poster makes the argument that customers should pay for the VALUE derived from software and not simply ACCESS to software. This makes sense to me, afterall, what are your salespeople actually delivering, a license or a solution to a customer problem.

Simplicity wins… !!!

Find out more at the web site for the Kauffman Foundation’s Global Entrepreneurship Week.

Congrats to Josh for his write up on Mashable. Josh did a rant on Twitter use and tracking at the recently completed and highly successful Tampa BarCamp. He made a great case for how better metrics can transform this emerging Web thingee into a usable community building communications platform.

This is nice recognition for this Tampa startup and the great tool Tweeple Twak for tracking metrics in your Twitter community.

Tampa hosted it first BarCamp and by all measures, it was a great success. The lobby at USF’s SoB Conference Center filled up early Saturday morning and the big Post-It Note schedules for three rooms was booked up 9:30-5:00 in short order. Sunday’s attendance was a little bit lower, but the schedule was just as packed with great topics and speakers.

I met a lot of campers and had some great discussions both in the sessions as well as sidebar chats in the hall. We appreciate the support from all of the out of town campers from Orlando and elsewhere. Thanks to everyone who signed-up to lead discussions, without you BC would be just another boring conference filled with suites and service providers.

If you attended, please take a moment to complete our quick feedback survey so our next event can be even better.
2008 Camper Survey

BarCamp is all about fostering discussions within the grass roots tech community and maintaining a positive buzz among the innovators and geek elite in the central Florida area. With this great event behind us, we can look ahead to other opportunities to highlight technology, innovation and entrepreneurial education in the Tampa area.

Thanks to all our great sponsors, especially Adobe, Dex Imaging and D+S Media Labs for stepping up to sponsor the speaking rooms. Keep watching StartupMonkey, The Weekly Tech Rant MeetUp and the BarCampTampaBay site for future event info.

We are nearing capacity for this event, so please register ASAP. The first 150 people in the door get T-Shirts, attendee #151+ gets to envy the people with the shirts the rest of the day - Don’t be that guy!

Show up early and sign up to speak - This is your chance to rant about all things Geeky to people that will actually listen.

Here’s the Map, so there is no excuse for getting lost: