I'm a little late sharing this but I just wanted to take moment to mention the very successful Bar Camp Charleston (www.BarCampChS.org).
There were dozens of interesting sessions covering everything from Linux to Web Design to Salsa dancing. There were 3 Drupal sessions. The first was 'Intro to Drupal' which was given by Nikolai Burton. Nikolai runs Charleston Drupal Users Group (http://chsdug.org/) and also presented a session called "A Whirlwind World Tour of Film." Nikolai was asked to do this session att the last minute and he filled in admirably. He presented to a packed classroom of more than forty people and it was a valuable session.
My second Drupal session was at 5 pm when most of us were approaching a brain-dead state after a full day of information consumption. The Topic for this session was 'Drupal Next Steps - an Introduction to Drush & Performance Tuning'. By this time the Drupal crowd had thinned considerably. It didn't help that the time slot put me in competition with he very popular 'How to Make Your Own Beer' session. All in all, it was a very productive day and I want to express congratulations and thanks to the team that made it happen.
I had the privilege Friday night to speak to the MBA Program at the KV Institute of Management and Information Studies in Combaitore, India. I was a guest speaker as part of their International Business Expert Series, and my subject was "From Small Business to Global Business in a Small Town." I did the presentation over live video using ooVoo software, which is similar to Skype.
There was a full classroom (pictured above) and the students were very attentive and very engaged. Coimbaitore is a city of 1.5 Million people, so I started by trying to explain just how small South Carolina is and how small Wagener is. I then spent time talking about two of my customers, Busbee Truck Parts and Tyler Brothers, as well as my own home-based business, Broadstreet Consulting.
When talking about Busbee's, I told how they started selling truck parts on eBay before I built their ProStores store and eventually ported them to Drupal. When I asked how many of the students had ever purchased something online, I was surprised that NONE raised their hand. This points to a great opportunity for online businesses in India. There are over a BILLION people there and a great number, even young people, have not yet made an online purchase. I talked about how Busbee's is now selling parts all over the world using the Internet.
I also talked about how Tyler Brothers has used their Facebook Page to expand their reach among existing and new customers, extending their personal relationship to the online environment. I then proceeded to talk about Broadstreet and how we have collaborated with eNova Technologies to provide reasonably priced Drupal development services for U.S. clients.
After my presentation, we opened the floor to questions and the group had many excellent questions. We discussed Internet business strategies for another 45 minutes. Many thanks to Kumar Gounder and his great staff at KVIMIS for a great experience.
I recently was informed of a site called Camospace.com, which is a social networking site for outdoorsmen. This is a protential place to advertise for TylerBrothers.net. In the p
I breakfast today with Kathy Harris, Vice-president and Distinguised Analyst for the Gartner Group. Kathy had more than 20 years experience in banking before joining Gartner 10 years ago.
I breakfast today with 
