An Evening with Gary Vaynerchuk

An Evening with Gary VaynerchukI just wanted to let any Chicago area readers know that tommorow evening Gary Vaynerchuk is going to be in Woodstock, Illinois at the Woodstock Opera House doing “An Evening with Gary Vaynerchuk” which is a benefit for the Creative Living After Dark Series of the Woodstock Fine Arts Association.

Gary is a wine expert, author, entrepreneur, host of Wine Library TV, and has appeared on many national television shows.  Gary is an amazing personality in the online world and very passionate about people and wine which is completely evident from watching any episode of winelibrary.tv.

My friend Frank Gruber of Techcocktail will be emcee’ing the event and I will be there with my wife to show my support.    I had the chance to see Gary speak back in may of this year and he truly is an insperation to all no matter what kind of work you are in.

If you have nothing going on tommorow evening, Saturday Sept. 20th I recommend you come check the event out for an evening you will never forget. You can purchase tickets online here.

The Flip Ultra – A camcorder your mom would love

I purchased myself a Pure Digital Flip Ultra video camera yesterday. If you don’t know what this is, it is a cheap $150 video camera that looks more like a toy than a gadget. I have been a bit skeptical about this little device for some time, but recently I have been hearing rave reviews about this little device all over the web. So I had to see what all the fuss is about for myself.



People say that they shoot more video with this little camera now than they ever did with their bigger much more expensive MiniDV cameras. The great thing about this device: there are no settings, you just push a big red button and record. Once your done recording you plug it into a usb port on your computer and upload to your favorite video sharing site. This little camera lives up to the hype and the quality is actually pretty decent. This may be one of the best gadgets I’ve ever owned.

Granted, this device is not going to win any awards for quality of your video or sound, but does it really matter? Did you miss your kids first baby steps because you could get that big honking video camera settings correct?

Mmm Sushi
This video from our favorite sushi bar would have been longer, but I was getting a glare from jenny to put away the camera 🙁



Lack of Updates

The lack of updates here has been partly been my lack of anything interesting to say and partly because I have been working to get http://edmodo.com off the ground. We have also just launched a blog at http://blog.edmodo.com. Content is sparse at this time, but will be getting more content up shortly discussing technology, social networking, & new media in regards to education. We don’t want the blog to just be about marketing the Edmodo product.

Edmodo Logo

Edmodo is the brain child of Nic Borg (my partner) and I and we envision this company to be the premier provider of free web 2.0 tools (boy I hate that name) for Teachers, Students, Parents, and Schools. We have a vision of a multitude of tools that we would provide, but are currently concentrating on a social communication/notification site. I won’t get into specifics right now about the details as we are currently building the product and features may change or be added before we launch.

Nic & I both work for K-12 school districts in technology departments and were frustrated at the the overpriced and frankly not very good offerings of most of the Eduction Technology services that were being marketed and subscribed to by our school districts. We feel that the both of us have the background to make a decent product and make the lives of the education community better through the technology we build.