In days gone by, after meeting someone new, you’d probably have to wait to chat with them again until the next time you saw one another face to face or over the phone. Getting to know someone was a slow process. Now, you can add someone on Twitter or Facebook and casually interact with them for months in between. Then, next time you see them, you’ve already done a tremendous amount of “getting to know” the person, the “layers” have been broken down in between.

What’s more, there are countless sites where you can have profiles which explain every detail of your life. Who should you go see a movie with? Check Facebook. Who should you go to a concert with? Check Last.fm. Online dating is the same way. By the time you get together for a first date, you probably know much more about them than you would on a “normal” first date. My favorite is OkCupid. I wish everyone had an OkCupid profile because based on the questions you answer, it tells you (pretty accurately, in my experience) how compatible you are with that person.

Technology does give us a greater capacity to learn more about people quickly and maintain more casual friends. But let’s go a step further. Carrying Capacity is the maximum population size of the species that the environment can sustain. Given that people also have limited time and resources, I’ll wager that this holds true with interpersonal relationships, too. That is, there’s only a certain number of relationships we can sustain at one time, otherwise the health of those relationships are affected. If we’re not careful, having a huge network of “casual friends” may cut into the deep, meaningful, (often face to face) time we have with people we REALLY care about. Dunbar’s Number theorizes that because of the size of our brain and our limited time we can only maintain a “stable interpersonal relationship” with 150 people at a time.

Relating to social media, we talk about this a lot in terms of “if you follow 30,000 people, how much time can you really devote to any individual”.  Thus, many encourage following a reasonable amount you can actually interact with. Once I’d hit the following mark of about one thousand, I no longer saw even a fraction of my stream. Twitter has (as does Facebook) lists to help out.  so I added my very best friends, colleagues, and others whose tweets I simply did not want to miss to a private list. I didn’t want adding more followers to hurt my relationships with those people. If you believe Dunbar, your “private list” shouldn’t be much bigger than 150. In my case, it’s about 250, but of that, many rarely/never tweet.

While technology does change things, people compensate and we end up breaking even. This happens in two ways: 1) The more we can do, the more we’re expected to do. 2) The more something is done, the less meaningful it is.

A National Bureau of Economic Research study noted: “Average hours spent in “home production” – that is, cooking, cleaning, caring for children, and the like – are actually slightly higher now than they were in the early part of the last century. … ‘Having clean clothes, clean dishes, a clean house, and well-cared for children was just another luxury the poor could not afford.’ … Labor saving appliances were used to help bring about a revolution in sanitation, cleanliness, and better nutrition.” That means, despite how much easier it is to clean, we’re expected to be more clean, so we’re actually spending more time on it.

Dunbar’s theory relates to time and memory. We can’t (significantly) change either, but we can maximize them. In Beating Dunbars Number, Chris Brogan has some really interesting “hacks/techniques” to do just that. Chris uses a CRM software which acts as an assistant to help with the “memory” problem. From post-it notes to software, we all use tools to help us remember things. Discover Magazine’s How Google Is Making Us Smarter says “humans are ‘natural-born cyborgs,’ and the Internet is our giant ‘extended mind.’ Just keep in mind, we’re not actually remembering more, we’re remembering links or shortcuts to more things. And the more that’s possible, the more things are vying for a little patch of memory. No one remembers any one’s phone number any more, because they’re all stored safely in cell phones.

Facebook displays your friends’ upcoming birthdays on your homepage. Some consider posting a “Happy Birthday” to be part of the “social contract of using Facebook” and not doing so to be a “faux pas”. Since Facebook makes it so easy (it becomes almost a given) and/or there are so many cookie-cutter greetings that getting one means almost nothing. Any other means of communicating your well wishes means more. The truer the friend, the more likely they’ll text, call, make plans, send a card, get you a gift.

Conclusion: Technology, the internet and social media can allow you to: side-step some of the traditionally tedious “getting to know you” stage, better maximize your time with people, maintain causal relationships with more people. But, we all still have the same “bandwidth” we’ve always had. And with faster lives, and more things vying for our attention, having meaningful, long-lasting relationships is even harder now. Find ways to make to make technology work for your relationships in the deep sense (spending meaningful time with people), not just the broad (maintaining loose circles of hundreds or thousands).

If you find all this interesting, definitely check out the book (don’t faint) The Tipping Point. You can also watch a great video by Robin Dunbar “How Many Friends Does One Person Need“.

Our startup ecosystem continues to grow and evolve. Each and every one of you can help in this process. How? Consider the following:

• Attend events – Remember, these are organized for your benefit. Even though it sometime seems like a pain at the end of a long day, do your best to attend some of these startup events.
• Connect – Take the opportunity to connect with fellow entrepreneurs and startup aficionados. Several of you have recently arranged via Twitter or email to meet me at events. I encourage all of you to do this (with me and, more importantly, your fellow entrepreneurs).
• Participate – Many groups regularly seek out pitchers and presenters, offer yourself and your company. It can be daunting to pitch or present, but both you and the community will benefit.
• Evangelize – Tell others about startup events (better yet, encourage them to subscribe to StartupDigest Miami) and encourage event organizers to submit events to me for listing. I hope to see you soon at one of the events throughout the region.

-Seth Elliott

This is sort of a follow up to my blog post: Tech & Creativity in Tampa Bay: Problems and Solutions

It also feels like a great time to make an announcement!

Startup Weekend is coming to Tampa July 8th-11th!

Follow along at @startuptampa. Like Startup Weekend Tampa on Facebook. Interested in helping organize? Drop us a line.

Michael Bishop wrote a great post awhile back called Beyond Barcamp Tampa Bay which inspired me to finally get some of my thoughts down on paper (or page, as the case may be). Since poking my head into Tampa’s tech scene, I’ve talked to a lot of people who share some of my own frustration with the state of community in Tampa. A lot of you have been here for years… I haven’t, but I’ll go ahead and put my thoughts out there…

1. We need centralized place(s) to find each other!

(A) Events

I’ve been maintaining a Google Calendar with tech (and related) events in Tampa for about a year now and recently put it on it’s very own page: TampaBayTechEvents.com

I think GCal is the only smart way to list events because:

1. Otherwise they have to be entered by hand. For most events, I’ve clicked “Add to My Calendar” and Voila. It’s added. With Meetup.com, you can even create a feed of all your Meetups, and click Add to XYZ Calendar, Voila! I encourage everyone to help add and update events to this calendar.
2. Using GCal is awesome because people can subscribe with iCal and GCal, copy/export individual events to their calendar, or embed the calendar anywhere.

(B) Groups

There are quite a few technology-related groups and organizations in Tampa Bay. Meetup.com has a number of them… Tampa Web Technology Meetup Group and Tampa Graphic Design Meetup are two of the largest, but there are lots more, poke around… I’ve been working on a Twitter List of Tech Organizations in Tampa.

(C) Individuals/Jobs

The TMPBY.com site is amazing and has tons of potential! I hope everyone who reads this adds themselves there. If you’re looking to hire or be hired, check there first! Follow some folks on Twitter two have similar or complimentary skills to you. I would love to see some more development on that site.

(D) Workspaces/Coworking

A number of people all over Tampa Bay have been working on places where they can work together. Whether one rises to the top or there are several, it is key to creative Tampa Bay. If you’re looking to improve the state of the tech and creative community in Tampa, you would do well to heed these words:

One of the most important things about a great coworking space is the safe atmosphere it creates for collaboration and mentoring. At a coffee shop, I can’t turn to the person next to me and ask their opinion on something, or brainstorm an idea for my project – they would look at me funny. At many shared desk environments, it’s dog-eat-dog, and if two people are in the same business, they’d be in direct competition, and likely stealing clients from each other. Since the coworking space is more collegial, you can share that project with your potential competition, or hand it to him when you get too busy, and he might be inclined to hand the next one to you. Also, the vibe of a great coworking space is hard to match, even at most places that use the term “Co-Working” somewhere in their sales pitch. The collected energy, passion, and raw talent is often dripping from the walls. There are many spaces where people are not just getting started, they’re putting down roots.

- Ryan Price

Co-working space currently in Tampa:
http://www.ideafield.org/
http://twitter.com/ideafield/

This one will apparently be opening soon:
http://www.cocreativ.com/
http://twitter.com/CoCreativ

Creative office space, but not co-working:
http://www.sanctuarylofts.com/suites.php

Closed for now:
http://www.tampacreativespace.com/

2. Groups/organizers who don’t seem to play together nicely.

I don’t know if it’s because Billy broke Johnny’s little sister’s heart or if 5 years ago Billy’s event conflicted with Johnny or whatever the hell else, but it seems silly. We need more people supporting each others’ events and groups!

3. People don’t get involved.

I’ve seen organizers try to plan everything from a last minute tweetup to a huge conference (and everything in between), and they all struggle with the same thing… Getting people to show up! Peter Radizeski posed questions to members of the Tampa Web Technology Meetup Group recently asking why the group “has 391 members, yet we can only get less than 20 at a meeting”.
I think these issues boil down to three things:

1. People having prior conflicting commitments which get in the way. (Not much we can do about this one…)
2. People not knowing why the tech community in Tampa is important/ not knowing there is one. (Tell your friends, invite your co-workers!)
3. Laziness and a feeling that if you don’t come this time, you’ll make the next one/ no one will miss you. (I wrote the book on this one!)

The reality is, there are tons of cheap and free events happening all over Tampa Bay… But we need each other to make the community here better… One of my New Years Resolutions this year was to help make that happen. Some ideas:

• Find a group that appeals to you and commit to attending as many of their events as possible.
• Give the organizers feedback and offer to help do something.
• Step outside your comfort zone and hit up some events that you normally wouldn’t.
• Work at a coworking space this week, or open your office up to others.
• Brainstorm ways you can help!
• Check out The 10/100/1000 Challenge: Can you help make Tampa Bay a better place to live? Submit some ideas!
• Check out the survey: Tampa Bay Tech / Creative Community Needs Survey
• Come to the Web Tech/Barcamp Meetup Group 2011 Kick-off Meeting on Jan 19th where we’ll be working on planning events throughout 2011.

For more reading: Creative Tampa Bay – Engage in YOUR Community!

Who they are in their own words:

“Neer is an app, currently in beta for android, that lets users automatically and selectively share their location. Notifications are customizable, and based on user-defined lists of people and places.

Neer allows you to privately and automatically share your location with the people you care about. Not everywhere you go, just the places that really matter.

Neer works in the background so you don’t have to. Go ahead, leave work and leave your phone in your pocket. We’ll let your loved ones know you’re on your way!”

TechCrunch explains: “With Neer, you create a geo-fence around certain places like home, work, or school simply by marking them on your phone when you are there. Entering or leaving the location triggers an update message to your inner circle.”

Reasons I love this:

1. Privacy is explicit! You hand pick a few people who will see exactly the places you hand pick.
2. It’s ballpark-esque. Other users don’t see the actual name or address of the location, or see your physical location on a map, they see the name you give the place, such as “Home” or “Work”, and that’s all within a radius.
3. … And the icing on the cake: It’s automatic! And because you know exactly what you’re sharing and who you’re sharing with, it doesn’t have to be perfect. (I would NEVER let Foursquare check me in automatically. Nope, nope, nope.)

Complaints/ Concerns about Neer:

1. They have no Twitter on their website and when I went looking, the only one I found has 2 followers, no updates, and not even a profile picture.
2. There’s no way to sign up for email updates… So for all the iPhone users out there (like me) who stop by their site eager (or willing) to be reminded of the launch of an app that they can use, they’re SOL.
3. They have no forum for users to submit questions, ideas, etc. ala GetSatisfaction.

Their FAQ says:

“Q: You need notifications, a widget, ability to delete a group, etc…

A: We totally agree. Stay tuned.”

Umm… How? In all fairness, they do have a blog. But listening to your users and enabling them to communicate with you in the best and easiest way possible is absolutely a requirement. If someone ever made a Launchlist for tech start-ups all of the above should most definitely be on there.

So, wait.. Back up… What’s the deal with the geofencing? Sounds intriguing… At first, I mistakenly thought this geofencing thing was brand new.

I pride myself on being pretty “up” on tech news, so I was curious about how much buzz has been going on about this… Google only found about 54k mentions in the last year. Compared with Facebook’s 16 billion, I’m pretty sure most people have never heard of this… So here’s the deal…

A geo-fence is a virtually fenced-off geographic location. When this concept is applied to mobile phones, it refers to a device’s ability to receive automatic alerts or notifications when entering, leaving or moving within a specific geographic area. – RRW

Unsurprisingly, in the mobile world, an app utilizing geofencing draws on the battery quite a bit. Some superstar geeks are out there working on all kinds of things to improve and broaden the potential for this technology. But where does that leave the users?

Want more? Things I checked out while writing this:

• Geofence on Wikipedia
• Is Geofencing the Next Evolution for Location Apps? Location Labs Thinks So
• Geofencing: What’s Next For Location-Based Services?
• A Private, Anti-Foursquare To Geo-Fence Those Neer To You
• Location 2012: Death of the Information Silos

It’s that time of year again! In short, thousands of panel ideas were submitted to South by Southwest and now they take the public’s votes into consideration as they determine the programming for the 2011 event! (More info on how that works…)

Walter Elly of MicroArts thought a SXSW panel about Foursquare Day and the foursquare community would be really interesting and Dr. Nate and I agreed! We’d love your help getting there!

Foursquare Day: Realizing the Location-Based Services Revolution

Location-based services are here and are revolutionizing the way people experience the world. Events like Foursquare Day 2010 fueled the growth of this revolution, but we haven’t fully realized the future of what location-based services have to offer. See what the future holds for location-based services. Examine how Foursquare Day went from idea to grassroots international movement in 1 month and what its effects were on the growth of location-based services. Learn how to supercharge the growth of location-based services and realize their future by bringing Foursquare Day to your town or city on 4/16/11, Foursquare Day 2011.

In about three weeks, the core team from Tampa Bay started the first Social Media holiday and it was a hit! On 4/16 there were 550,000 checkins (9 checkins/sec at peak) and 20,000 new user signups. 14,330 Foursquare Day badges and 5, 566 Foursquare Swarm badges were awarded on 4/16 at over 45 different venues. By our count, about 290 cities in 35 different countries celebrated the holiday!

Some things that interest me about the topic that I think we can share:

• For the Tampa team, Foursquare Day wasn’t really about foursquare, it was about community! Why is this important? Why did people love the idea so much?
• Uniquely bridges the gap between the internet and real life connections… Besides tweet-ups, this is the only tool/day, etc (I can think of) that does this. Even came about before meetup.com/everywhere.
• It wasn’t just about getting together. We can talk about specials businesses offered, too. What unique ways did other communities celebrate? We did the Puzzle Hunt, etc. These are things communities could be doing all the time, for any reason. Think of the possibilities a Chamber of Commerce could come up with? Or a Neighborhood Association?
• The story of how we in Tampa created the event, and how others built up the event in their local community… what we learned… what went wrong and what went right…
• Creating an event for free from scratch in 3 weeks. Building a viral event in general.
• Social networking tools and the intersection of business and personal lives.

So what do you think? All you have to do is vote if you like the idea! What interests you the most? Did we forget something you’d like to see us talk about? Leave a comment here or on the panel topic!

How SXSWi describe themselves: “brightest minds in emerging technology”… “the best new digital works, video games and innovative ideas the international community has to offer.”

Quote from the SXSW site:

17. Do you have any specific programming needs for the 2011 event?
- SXSW Interactive is specifically looking for more advanced-level ideas, as well as more sessions that cover technical issues. We are also interested in seeing more solo and dual presentations.

Interesting! So… What are the topics which have been submitted? Surely some technical stuff, right?

Below is the top 10 submitted panel topics as taken from their site a few minutes ago:

You can also take a look at the full list sorted by # submissions per topic… Also, of the 2346 submitted, only 208 are listed as Advanced. (LOL-worthy?)

What do you think? Will you be going this year? For all you techies who say no, where will you be going instead?

Love this! I really need to break out my sewing machine..

I recently needed the ability to export data from my application in CSV format in my CakePHP application. It didn’t need to be anything fancy, mostly just a dump from a given model, which the customer could open in Excel. I’ve written it in an abstracted way. This fairly simple function takes a model name and an array of fields which should be excluded from the output, and delivers a CSV file.

Rather than allow the function to be accessed directly, I’ve made the function private, and written a public function which accesses it. This has the added benefit of reducing the need for input validation.

Here is the function call:

public function export_orders() {
$this->export_model('Order');
}

and the function itself:

private function export_model($model, $exclude = array() ) {
$records = $this->$model->find('all');
$headings = array_diff(array_keys($records[0][$model]), $exclude);

$filename = strtolower($model) . '-export-' . date('m-d-Y') . '.csv';
header("Content-type: application/text/csv");
header("Content-Disposition: attachment; filename=\"$filename\"");

$h = fopen('php://output', 'w');

fputcsv($h, $headings);

foreach ($records as $record) {
foreach($exclude as $ex) unset($record[$model][$ex]);
fputcsv($h, $record[$model]);

}

fclose($h);
exit();
}

Canonical recently unveiled a new version of Ubuntu, dubbed Unity (Ubuntu Light), built specifically with netbooks in mind, featuring super short boot times, and a whole slew of interface enhancements. It is still incomplete, but early versions of it are available to OEMs and to adventurous tinkerers.

It is quite easy to get up and running if you’re using Ubuntu already. I have an Ubuntu desktop at home but decided to try this setup on my laptop via VirtualBox, which is sporting a relatively fresh install of Ubuntu 10.04 with Guest Additions installed. Follow the instructions below to try out Ubuntu Unity. It shouldn’t take you more than 5 to 10 minutes in total and only takes a few steps, don’t let the liberal set of screen shots fool you!

1. The first step is to add the repository where Unity is being held as a Software Source. Click System > Administration > Software Sources, and select the “Other Software” tab. You should something similar to the image below:

2. At the “Other Software” screen of the Software Sources window, click Add, and then Click “Add Source” after entering : ppa:canonical-dx-team/une

3. After adding this new source, it will notify you that information about available software is out of date (we just added a new source afterall, let’s find out what is available in it!) So click “Reload” and let it do it’s thing.

4. Next we are going to install Unity by going to Applications > Ubuntu Software Center, and then searching for “Unity”. Among the results, select “Launcher” and click “Install”. This will install the Unity launcher and all of it’s dependencies.

5. Once the install is complete, close the Software Center window, and log out. This will bring you back to the Ubuntu login screen. You should see a new Session type at the bottom right, which may be selected by default (it was for me), called “Ubuntu: Unity Netbook Edition”. Ensure it is selected and log in as usual.

6. Congrats, that is it! You should be loaded into the default (albeit incomplete) Unity environment. Most noticeable is the new dock or app launcher to the left and the integrated search in the top panel.

The Ubuntu logo at the top right acts as an Expose-esque app switcher once you have a few windows open, give it a try.

There are a lot of exciting features that haven’t been implemented yet, but you can play around with the new dock, and for people who actually have netbooks, perhaps see about getting it to book up quickly. I am booting into it on a VM via the method you see in steps 5 and 6, which doesn’t take advantage of the new speedy shell. Checkout the Ars Technica article to get all the details on new features in Unity, and especially the comments for a lot of interesting concerns that people have for the new interface. Hope you enjoy!

You can find the official product page here:

http://www.canonical.com/products/unity

Ars Technica has already done a fairly good roundup of current and soon to be released features in Unity here:

http://arstechnica.com/open-source/reviews/2010/05/exclusive-hands-on-with-ubuntus-new-unity-netbook-shell.ars

We’ve created the Foursquare Day map so you can see where people are participating both near you and all over the world. See who’s throwing events where, and who is offering special deals for Friday only, so you can start planning your day now! As new events are listed to the website, they’ll automatically pop up on the map, so you can watch the movement grow. We hope you enjoy!

Check it out!