BarcampLA follow-up — Geek Dinner at Electric Lotus

Went to dinner with the BarcampLA gang last night at Electric Lotus in Los Feliz.  It was great to see that the energy from BarcampLA (March 4-5) hadn’t really died out.  We had probably 30ish people at dinner and it was really nice to catch up with folks.

A few interesting notes from the evening:  Michael Goff was in attendence fresh off completing the sale of Bayosphere to Backfence (link and link).  He seemed in great spirits about the whole thing and I enjoyed chatting with him about it and about the general state of traditional media going online.  The evening culminated with Adam Bain, EVP of Fox Interactive — who came to the event with BarcampLA co-organizer Kareem Mayan, looking for opinions from the group as to how to promote innovation from within.  There were many interesting suggestions from the crowd (Hack Days; 20% work time for personal projects; get external people excited about helping you innovate; get standard platforms built first then innovate; let newly acquired employees work solo for awhile; create venture capital for internal groups to apply for; etc) and I left the event feeling that Fox is definitely continuing to move forward into the web and new media with guns blazing.  They don’t intend MySpace to be their one trick pony by any means.  He made it sound as though they were really looking to rebuild the way incentives are doled out within his entire organization.  And he even gave away an xBox 360 (via a drawing) to someone in the group as a result of all of the good feedback (which was a good indicator of their willingness to pay for good new ideas!).

Thanks to Heather for organizing the event.  Looking forward to another one soon!

Technorati Tags: geekdinner, barcampla, losangeles, losfeliz, la, heathervescent, reemer, barcamp, 

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