This is my first Tech Cocktail. I’ve been wanting to go for a while and I missed the last one. This one was held at John Barleycorn in Wrigleyville. A few startups showed their wares. I got there at 6 and it was pretty dead. However the place got packed pretty quick. By the time I left it was standing room packed. It was just insane. I’m glad I went though as I met some really cool people as well as ran into some old friends. The likemind crowd was there. My old buddy Jason Rexilius who owns HosteLABS and runs BARCamp Chicago was there and FINALLY introduced me to Harper and the other Threadless guys. I’ve been wanting to meet them for a while now. Threadless, in case you are not familiar with, is a brilliant company. On the surface, they sell t-shirts. The beauty of it is that they don’t design the t-shirts. The designs are crowd-sourced from designers and artists all over the world who submit their designs to Threadless. Visitors vote on which designs are cool and ultimately determine which designs will be printed. The winning designer gets a cash prize.

On to some of the cool people I’ve met:

• Andrew Huff, from Gapers Block, a web publication about Chicago
• Ars Technica - I met a few of the editors there. I didn’t realize these guys are from Chicago. It’s a technology blog so you know I am a big Ars Technica fan.

So here are some of the cool companies I saw:

• callpod - mobile device hub charger. Their product looked very stylish. It’s Chicago based, but they outsource the manufacturing to China and Malaysia.
• mocklinkr is an online mockup collaboration tool. They just launched today. I poked around their website before coming to the event but there wasn’t much there. They had a really cool video demoing the product at Tech Cocktail though. It looks very promising.

All in all, this excursion was a success unlike some of the other tech events I’ve been to. I’ll probably go again next time.

Time is just zipping by lately. I managed to squeeze in just 2 more blog posts than the previous month but that was because I got into a blogging frenzy towards the end. So last month I decided to do something different. I would post all (rather most) of my blog posts on all my social network account statuses. The results have been very positive and I will continue on with this experiment. Last month was also a very strong month for comments. As you can see, Facebook was a much more significant source of traffic that it ever was before. StumbleUpon continues to bring it traffic so I’ll keep stumbling my own posts and getting my stumble friends to stumble them as well.

Looking at the traffic report and comparing it to last month’s, you’ll see that I actually got LESS traffic. Last month my blog got picked up by Jason Fried of 37signals when I blogged about his talk. Also, I had peaks from stumbleupon from old posts. However this month, there were no such spikes, but average traffic improved overall. Good times.

If any of you readers have any tips, I’m all ears.

Every six months or so I usually tape myself to see how I am doing. It helps me see where I need work and clearly see my mistakes. Lately though I’ve been super busy and haven’t had nearly as much time to train as I’d like. As a result, I’ve lost my 720 jump inside crescent kick. My outside 720 has held up pretty well, but I can’t say the same about my butterfly twist. I’ve also put on 7 more pounds - ugh. In an effort to get back into training and into shape, I’ve decided to tape myself even more often and upload the videos for all to see. This way I shame myself into training harder. We’ll see if this works.

Analysis of my jumpkicks:

• I lose my balance on my double aerial
• My second jump inside crescent of my double jump inside is not as crisp as the first one and the rotation is not complete
• My 720 jump inside crescent is a 630
• I lose my balance on my butterfly kicks
• My butterfly twist is crooked. It’s been crooked for a while.
• 540 standing jump outside is OK. I need to work on getting extra rotation for 720s.

I just occurred to me as I was looking at my Google Reader friends’ blogs subscriptions that I have quite a few friends who blog. I was thinking it would be cool to share all these blogs as some of you might be interested in some of these blogs.

• http://bradmaier.com/ Brad Maier is an Entrepreneur in Chicago by way of Philadelphia and he currently runs a design, development, and strategy consulting shop known as Uncharted Ventures.
• http://dangreenblatt.com/blog/ Dan Greenblatt is an Interaction Designer who works at Motorola. He blogs about user interfaces, user experience with various product designs (mostly bad), and his blog is just plain hilarious.
• http://blog.dawdle.com/ Sachin Agarwal, CEO of Dawdle.com, an online clearinghouse for used videogames, blogs on his company stuff here.
• http://www.flaggedforfollowup.com/ Ian Sohn, who works at Ogilvy Public Relations, blogs about technology, marketing, and other cool stuff.
• http://flyingcart.com/blog/ Rishi Shah, CEO of Flying Cart.com, an ecommerce solution for SMBs, educates small business owners on selling online.
• http://iamjosh.wordpress.com/ Josh Kahn is a Flex developer at Accenture Technology Labs. He blogs about some hard core Flex / RIA stuff.
• http://jorikadullips.blogspot.com/ Erika Dufour. She’s the wonderful photographer who’s responsible for many of the photos you see at the bottom of this blog as well as the Chicago Wushu website She and her husband Joe are some really cool folks who do some amazing work.
• http://www.kadavy.net/ David Kadavy is a designer and entrepreneur. His blog is just hilarious.
• http://shop.lucidnewyork.com/blog/ Anna Sabino is a NY jewelry designer. I think she totally gets it when it comes to promoting her business on the web. She’s even been featured in Entrepreneur magazine.
• http://musingsaboutinnovation.wordpress.com/ Sriram Thodla is currently a graduate student at the Illinois Institute of Design. He’s one bright kid and I value his thoughts on innovation and business.
• http://craigekerstiens.com/ Craig Kerstiens is a young entrepreneur living and working in the valley. He lives and breathes dotcom. I rely on him when it comes to keeping me in touch with startup pulse and various new startups and technologies.
• http://thelittleplum.blogspot.com/This is a diary of my friend Brandon Harvey’s son Elliot.
• http://blog.rhazes2119.com/Rhazes Spell is an RIA / Flex developer at Roundarch. We’re both Accenture Tech Labs alums and we’re on the same wavelength He blogs about tech and art. I often get good stuff from him.
• http://shanesbrain.net/Shane Vitarana has made quite an impressive living with iphone development. I’ve covered him before in this blog post.
• http://www.xanga.com/streetphotosAlan Kong is an avid amateur photographer. He’s one of my wushu buddies.
• http://tantannoodles.com/Joe Tan is a prolific Wordpress Plugin developer. I don’t even know how many he’s actually written, but he’s definitely the cats pajamas.
• http://www.thehotiron.com/index.php/site/index/Mike Maddaloni is founder of Dunkirk Systems and also runs the Chicago Likemind gatherings.
• http://www.usereffect.com/Dr Peter J Meyers’ consulting firm’s blog. He’s definitely got a pulse on technology and usability. The funny story with him is that I used to teach him and his wife wushu.
• http://www.vensonkuchipudi.com/Venson Kuchipudi - I can’t seem to get enough technology and social media
• http://pixelwelders.com/blog/Zack Jordan - is a superstar Flash developer. I am constantly in awe of his work.

Zappos.com is an online store that sells shoes and is slowly adding more and more products. That may not sound very impressive but they are on target for doing $1B in sales for 2008. For an 8 year old company, that’s not too shabby. I only first heard about Zappos.com at SXSW. Tony Hsieh the CEO gave a presentation on Top 10 Lessons Learned in E-Commerce. Below is the slide.

I was very impressed by his talk. It had nothing to do with technology or fads or tricks. Rather his talk was about good old customer service and treating the customer right. Very few companies go above and beyond the way Zappos does. Nowadays, companies want automated machines to be the first line of defense, with an actual human being the last thing they want their customer to interact with. He had many stories about Zappos customer service reps, who on their own, went out of their way to help customers. He’s instilled a culture of excellent service that has generated great word-of-mouth for Zappos.

Just to set the record, I have yet to actually BUY anything from Zappos. As much as I like shoes, I also enjoy the process of trying them on, touching and feeling my merchandise before I make a purchase. I know I can do that by ordering a whole bunch of shoes from Zappos and sending back the ones I don’t want for free. That just seems kinda wrong somehow.

Anyways, all I know from Zappos comes from my episode at SXSW and from various blogs and sites about startups and entrepreneurs. Which takes me to my story. I read somewhere that Zappos publishes an annual culture book for their employees. That book is available for purchase on their website. And since they had such happy customers as well as employees, I wanted to learn more about that by reading their book. Well, I spent a few minutes on the site and could not find it. Since I follow Tony on Twitter (cuz that’s how I roll), I decided to message him to ask where I could find his culture book. A couple hours later he messages me back asking my mailing address so he can mail me the book for free. We email each other back and forth for a bit and he invites me to take a tour of Zappos if I’m ever in Vegas. I was just in awe. This guy probably gets flooded with tweets and email all day, but he’s taking the time to personally respond to me. I’m not even a customer. I also get an email from Zappos saying that the book has been shipped with a tracking number. Having heard stories of their overnight deliveries, I was not suprised to see the book arrive at the office in the morning the next day.

I’ve briefly read bits of the Zappos 2008 Culture book which is basically a collection of every employee’s thoughts on the Zappos culture. It’s my impression that everyone sincerely loves being there. It’s both awe inspiring and contagious. With so many people working at jobs they either hate or have no feelings for, it’s refreshing to see a company that makes people excited to work there.

I want to end with a video that is currently featured on the bottom of the Zappos homepage. I’ll probably have to try buying something from Zappos.com now, but it probably won’t be shoes.