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Sorry for the barrage of posts today!
It was just pointed out to me that our Facebook event was set for Labor Day weekend…2009. You can rest assured we’ll have a big party that weekend as well, but THIS YEAR’s event has been updated.
Our RSVPs are now available on Facebook and Upcoming:
Again, sorry about the confusion. See everyone this weekend!
We’re excited to announce that Strands, a people-powered discovery engine, has stepped up with our largest sponsorship so far of $3000, more than doubling our party funds!
Long time east coast tech supporter and lover of all things Philly, Drew Olanoff, recently began working with them as a community evanglist and came to us interested in working togther with Strands for our birthday party event.
In addition to participating in our party on Sunday night as a large-scale sponsor, Strands will be hosting a pre-party “StrandUp” event at IndyHall on Saturday night, from 6:30 to 7:30pm.
We’re expecting lots of people on Sunday Night, many of whom are around for the whole weekend.
After the first successful Strandup during Gomedex 8 in Seattle this past weekend, Drew is bringing the event to Philly as a mixer-style pre-party hangout. EVERYONE is invited! You don’t have to be an IndyHall member, you don’t even have to be a geek! Just come and hang out with the IndyHall/Philly crew. This is a great chance for our out-of-town guests to get acquainted. This is also a great chance to see IndyHall if you (somehow) haven’t yet!
There’s no strings attached. Only Strands! (sorry, I know that was bad).
We’ll bring the snacks (EPIC NOMS), all you need to do is bring your personality and interest in meeting a bunch of people and breaking out of the techie echo-chamber!
The artwork created by Johnny Bilotta for the IndyHall website has made the rounds: first, this website. Then, IndyHall business cards. Since then, we’ve had a few editions of the IndyHall t-shirt as well as the recent addtion of a batch of mugs! And while we LOVE Johnny’s design, we know that a year later, it may be time to incorporate the stylings of someone new!
The IndyHall birthday is a week away, and we thought that it’d be awesome to have a community-contributed birthday edition of our t-shirt. So between now and Wednesday night at midnight, we’re accepting submissions for ideas. You can download the current shirt design EPS for Illustrator, or PSD for Photoshop.
We need the back of the shirt available for sponsor logos, but any area of the shirt currently occupied by the current design in the template is fair game. We’d love to see your remix of our logo, to the tune of “Happy First Birthday” or something of that nature. Our favorite, both visually and creative concept, will be printed this weekend along with the sponsor logos on the back and will be handed out for free (thanks ChoiceShirts for donating the shirts!) to the first 50 people to arrive at the Party on Saturday Sunday, and the artist’s work will live on in this commemorative edition tee.
Upload your designs below, and we’ll see everyone this weekend!
Exciting news as we enter our second week of sponsorship drives: we’ve got our first major sponsor!
On Friday afternoon, I got a very nice email from Josh Kopelman of First Round Capital, an early stage VC firm here in Philadelphia. Josh is a Philly native, has been part of the founding of a number of successful Philly startups, including Infonautics Corporation, Half.com, and TurnTide. I was thrilled to hear from Josh, simply to read his note of congratulations on our first year at IndyHall. Reading on, I found that First Round was sponsoring the “first round of drinks” for our party: with a generous $1000 sponsorship!
Additional sponsors we’ve had join since the last update on Friday:
Rachel Sooy
Josh Aas
Anthony Mari/CasinoJobs
Philip Ives/syncDragon
Erica O’Grady
Thanks so much to ALL of our sponsors. We’re 2 weeks away from our goal, and we have made some good headway! This week we hope to announce a few more of our HUGE LOGO and FREAKING HUGE LOGO sponsors, so contact us if you are interested.
On Tuesday we announced the details for our 1 year birthday party. Much like the RipIt/iSepta launch party, we’re turning to the community with a whole slew of sponsorship levels.
We’ve had our first round of contributers, and we wanted to thank them! In chronological order of contributions:
Reed Gustow - $100
Dwight Miller - $10
Tony Bacigalupo - $25
Robert Hall/Feasible Impossibilities - $100
Maya McGee/Chimera Travel - $100
Blake Jennelle/Anthillz - $100
That puts a nice dent in our goal, but we’ve still got a ways to go! Check out our sponsorship levels, find one that fits for you, and help spread the word!
In our never-ending quest to conquer the beast protecting the gates of knowledge, we’ve added one a new member to our gang of warriors.
This month we begin the IndyHall Lecture series, and we’re kicking it off with something completely new: a discussion of video game artificial intelligence, specific to battlefield games.
That’s right. IndyHall member Chris Jurney, who works for Relic Entertainment, is going to talk to us about some of the underlying AI systems behind one of the games he’s worked on, Company of Heroes.
Upcoming.org saves you a seat in the lecture. Space is limited so please RSVP.
Thanks to Chris for kicking off this series with something we’re sure will be interesting to a whole new audience, and hopefully catch the eye of our friends over at Geekadelphia.
Thanks to everyone who sent in venue ideas for the IndyHall 1 year birthday party. We’re ready. Are you? Here it goes!
IndyHall’s office is almost 1 year old. We signed our lease on August 10th, 2007, began occupying the space on August 13th, and over the next 2 weeks, built out our intial office. At the end of August, we threw our inaugral party.
It’s August 2008. That means we’ve been at this for a year, which still blows my mind. It’s time to celebrate.
There are 31 days from today until the end of August. In the next 31 days, we’re going to put our birthday party together, but we’re not going to do it alone. Just like IndyHall came together as a community, so will our first birthday party.
So here to explain what we’re doing is…well…me!
OK! So you have 1 week from today to give us your best connections to the raddest venues in Philly.
The constraints are:
Send your venue connections/ideas to me or leave us comments here.
You have one week to complete this challenge, if you choose to accept it. Let’s make this the best birthday party ever by open sourcing it and powering it by the community that makes Philadelphia a place we love to call our home!
Huge thanks to Dan Short for dedicating an evening to the half-dozen or so attendees. After an hour long demo based around creating a logo, Dan fielded questions, both about best practice and technical tips. He even went so far as to provide some AfterEffects ideas/resources like motionographer.com.
At the request of the attendees, Dan has shared the source files for his demo. They’re freely downloadable below!
Also, based on the positive responses from the attendees, we’d love to get Dan back to run another workshop. What would you like to see? Leave us your ideas in the comments, and we’ll follow up with a poll!
Next Wednesday, July 30th Dan Short will be sharing his extensive knowledge of Adobe After Effects! This return of our workshop series from the spring is very exciting, and will be the first of lots of new events we’re getting fired up for this fall.
The event will run from 6:30-9pm. Please RSVP on Upcoming so we can have a headcount!
From Dan:
This tutorial is meant to introduce users who are already familiar with Adobe applications to After Effects, although I am sure that there will be elements that would be valuable to anyone interested in the program. I will be showing how to animate a logo over a background using 3D space, cameras, keyframing, with pixel and vector graphics. I know it sounds like a mouthful, but I’ll be breaking it down and doing my best to answer any questions you might have. If it sounds over complicated, don’t panic. I am a nerd at heart, and it is in our nature to make things seem more complicated than they actually are.
This “Logo” type of demonstration is a common introduction into After Effects because it incorporates so many of the programs abilities. If this session is received well, I will build more tutorials based on the specific needs and wants of the Indy Hall community. I look forward to seeing you there.
If anyone would like to get a familiarity with the program before the tutorial, or would like to work along with me, I will be supplying my files to anyone interested. You can also download a demo version of the program from the Adobe site.
