OpenBeta was the first un-conference for Internet professionals, entrepreneurs, and enthusiasts to be held in Oklahoma City. An un-conference is a participant-driven community event aimed at exposing ideas and creating opportunities by connecting smart, passionate and motivated people with different expertises. OpenBeta was a hugh success. 120 people from the Oklahoma City Internet technology community came together to network, share ideas, explore opportunities and start collaborations. OpenBeta was held at the IAO Gallery in Downtown Oklahoma City.
The evening began with an hour of networking over food and drinks during an open demonstration session where a dozen different groups had the opportunity to tell the community about their ideas, vision, work in progress, and services. Participants included Foamish.com, OkcCrime.com, KarmaHaggle.com, StopForwarding.Us, DriverChaser.com, DC405, Ad2OKC, MetroTech, and the OKC Developers Group.
Noah Everett, Founder of TwitPic an Oklahoma Internet Start-up, gave an outstanding keynote talk on his experiences building and deploying an Internet service that allows users to share photos taken with their mobile phone over Twitter, a social networking service. Twitpic has been a break-out success that in less than a year has established a world-wide base of users. They recently passed the 1 million photos shared mark. The talk and following question and answer session provided the community with a wealth of leasons learned and practical advice for Internet start-up companies. Click on the image below to watch the keynote talk.
The evening's networking activities continued with a Twitter Meet-up. Twitter is a social networking service that allows users to share with friends, colleagues and the community at large what they are doing, working on, or interested in, as well as providing a means to have online conversations and meet new people. Twitter has seen mass adoption because of its integration with a wide range of mobile phones, allowing people to use Twitter anytime, anywhere. The majority of the Oklahoma City Internet technology community uses Twitter. The Twitter Meet-up provided the opportunity for participants to meet people that they may have only previously known online. To facilitate new connections, we invented a structured networking activity called 'Meet, Greet and Tweet'. Those involved had to seek out and learn a bit about community members that had not previously connected with over Twitter. The person that made the most new connections in a set time, won an iPod shuffle. The face-to-face connections then could be continued online using Twitter.
The main venue of the event was a series of Lightning Talks. Each talk consisted of a short five minute presentation of 20 slides set to automatically advance every 15 seconds. The rapid-paced format kept the event lively and animated and allowed a variety of presentations in a short period time. All talks were given by passionate members of Central Oklahoma's Internet technology community. Talk topics included online companies in development, business ideas, and tutorials. Three of the presentations were presented with Best-of-Show awards and had the opportunity to present their projects on the Innotech Expo floor. Innotech sponsored OpenBeta. Awards were given out at the OpenBeta afterparty held at McNellies Pub. The afterparty continued late into the night and provided attendees the chance to discuss ideas, build teams, and make plans for collaboration. Each of the presentations can be viewed by clicking on the images below.
