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.

We launched Edmodo…Finally!!!

Edmodo

I just wanted to let everybody know that we finally launched Edmodo!!! I can’t even begin to explain how excited I am about this.

Even though we’ve launched that doesn’t mean we can sit around. We have lots of documentation and how-to videos to produce. I am heading to to the Techcrunch 50 Conference in San Francisco next week to demo Edmodo in the demo pit. These are exciting times and hope my readers come along for the ride.

The launch went awesome and extremely smooth. I’m going to blog about the launch in more detail over at the Edmodo Blog soon. I just wanted to let my readers here know we are up and running at Edmodo. 🙂

Comcast, Twitter, & Support

Comcast has not had the best reputation as an Internet Service provider in regards to support, but all this negative publicity they have received may be coming to an end. Comcast has been heavily monitoring Twitter users having problems with Comcast and contacting the users directly to rectify any problems they are having.


I found out about Comcast using twitter from Michael Arrington of Techcrunch and his problems with his comcast account back in April of this year. Comcast contacting Michael eventually led Frank from comcast to create a comcast account on twitter for the sole purpose of helping twitter users and the comcast accounts.

This leads me to last week when I was having connection problems with comcast. The problems started occuring Tuesday evening and my service would go up and down, and persisted through thursday. Thursday was the last straw while I was working on Edmodo . I fired up twitter and sent a message off to @comcastcares and a few minutes later they got back to me asking for my phone number. They checked the line and noticed massive drop outs on my account and said they would have somebody call me to setup an appointment. First thing the next morning somebody called me from comcast and scheduled and appointment for that afternoon. The technician came out and was extremely thourough and ultimately determined it was the line outside which he replaced. After he replace the outside line we were back in business.

This is just one of many good instances I have heard about comcast and twitter over the last few months. I would just like to say thanks to Frank at Comcast for really caring about customers and customer service. I wish every company out there was using Twitter to provide excellent support to their customers.

Burgers in 60 seconds

Just a stupid little video I made today I posted on my flickr account. I figured I should try out the flickr video support since they were kind enough to add it. Flickr has a slightly different take on video sharing compared to other video sharing sites. They limit you to only a 1min 30sec of video, so you have to be a bit more creative with your video. This limitation makes you think about what kind of message you want to convey and how your are going to present it.

Hope you enjoy it.

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 🙁



April 3rd 2008 is “GOOD PEOPLE DAY” Pass it on

Gary Vaynerchuk from winelibrary.tv is declaring tomorrow “Good People Day”. On your blogs and social networks talk about people that do good things and promote them and their work. Tell everyone about this impromtu movement and let people know who you thing are “good people”. I will be participating on my blog & twitter. You should tag all your work towards this GPD08. BTW, Gary Vaynerchuk is “good people” 🙂

-Jeff