UPDATE: please feel free to click around and leave a comment if you find something still broken I may not have caught.

By popular demand, the Social Media Breakfast NH (SMBNH) is taking a departure from the traditional “play hooky in the morning on the way in to work for breakfast, networking and learning” model, and taking full advantage of summer to play hooky in the afternoon for networking, learning and BBQ. Summer here in New England has been short this year, so why shouldn’t even the hard working have a little fun while they do business?

The SMBNH BBQ is on August 21, 2009 at Rick’s Pond View, #92 Route 125, Kingston, NH. Rick is giving us the run of the floating gazebo bar, the grassy lake side, the floating band area and more.  If it rains (let’s hope not) we can even move it all indoors.

Why an afternoon event?

1) You asked for one as a reward for all of those early morning commutes for SMBNH over the last few months
2) It’s summer. It’s just plain wrong to spend the entire short summer we have here in NH cooped up in a cubicle or slaving away at a coffee shop. We deserve our chance to network in broad daylight!
3) There is a band. Musicians don’t do early mornings, as a rule.

Why Kingston?

1) Rick is a client, and has generously offered his venue for free and the food and staff at a reasonable cost
2) Rick’s is 8 minutes off of I-495, 10 minutes off of Highway 101, and less than five minutes off of Routes 107, 108, and 111 where they meet Route 125. 30 Minutes from Manchester and Portsmouth, NH, 10 minutes from Haverhill, MA and 40 minutes from Nashua, NH – it’s hard to get more “central” than that!
3) Three words: Floating. Gazebo. Bar.
4) You can bring a canoe or paddle boat (no swimming, no motorized boats, it’s a reservoir)

Why isn’t it free?

With a tight economy, sponsor dollars are a little tight. We have partial sponsors this time that have donated either money or items to give away. Gold Sponsors are Custom Scoop and e-Forecasting. Their monetary donation is helping to keep the event cost low for you. Gift sponsors include Sullivan Tire (gift certificate), San Francisco Kitchen (Nashua, Gift Certificate) and Uptown Uncorked (Restaurant.com certificates to Rick’s A Cafe and Grill, Pesce Blue, Keys Grille, Gauchos Churrascaria). I will also give away a copy of Twitter for Dummies.

Sponsors:

Gold Sponsor: e-Forecasting

e-forecasting.com, an international economic research and consulting firm, offers forecasts of the economic environment using proprietary real-time economic indicators and produces company and industry-specific leading indicators for its clients. In cooperation with its affiliate, Infometrica, Inc., e-forecasting.com works with business publications and clients across the globe to provide industry, country and state-level economic content on a monthly and quarterly basis thus their predictive intelligence input is used by practitioners around the world.

Gold Sponsor: Custom Scoop

A pioneer in the online news monitoring industry, CustomScoop has been providing fast, accurate media monitoring to clients since 2000. Our proprietary technology keeps our clients informed about traditional and social media.

We customize each client account to deliver meaningful media intelligence to make our customers more effective and efficient. With a database that includes hundreds of thousands of newspapers, magazines, web sites, blogs, podcasts, and more, you can be confident in your results.

Theme for this Social Media Breakfast BBQ:

We’re Playing Hooky To Get To Know You, Because Real Life CONNECTIONS Are Key

This Social Media Breakfast NH (hashtag #smbnh) will be all about meeting each other, collaborating and forging alliances – networking in real time. In this struggling economy and shifting paradigm we need to be working together to be more successful and better weather the storm. We should be pulling in all aspects of technology, new media, old media and social media to succeed and more importantly to help the next generation succeed. This meeting will help us lay the foundation for a richer, better education, tech and new media community in NH. It will also give us a chance to spend one last (or first, if you’ve been that busy!) day to enjoy summer before the kids start going back to school in various districts and fall schedules take over.

In addition to myself, who will be your host and MC for the morning, you will have sponsor speakers giving three brief introductions on why they chose to sponsor this summer networking celebration.

Speakers:

• Opening Remarks by Leslie Poston, Uptown Uncorked and co-author, Twitter for Dummies

• Sponsor Speakers (Maria Simos of e-Forecasting, Steve Bracy from Custom Scoop, more TBA)

This is going to be a great breakfast BBQ!

Details

Rick has generously offered his venue space for free and a reasonable price on the food and the use of his staff. He will be roasting a pig for real pulled pork BBQ, serving all the fixin’s and serving coffee, tea and water. There will be a cash bar if you’d like a summer brew or mixed drink to make your afternoon complete.

We will also have a band (Kryptonite Jones), and our sponsors will be available to tell you more about what they do and why they sponsored. FYI: there is a launch ramp. If you have a paddle boat or SMALL canoe/kayak, talk to me about possibly bringing it so you can row or paddle around the lake during the event – I’ll need to clear it with Rick for legal reasons. Note: this lake does not allow swimming or gas powered motors – it is a reservoir pond.

A made a quick QIK video of the venue for you. As you can see, I am not destined to be a film maker with this level of camera genius, but it gets the job done:

Eventbrite page is open for SPONSORS until later today, then tickets for all will open for sale. I need one more Friend or Gold level sponsor, also, for the band.  TELL YOUR FRIENDS! I hope to get a BUNCH of people coming to this fun, summer networking celebration.

Why all the fuss? Well, obviously this means that a much larger number of handsets around the world will have mobile access to a wide selection of mobile applications. RIM and WinMo phones make up the vast majority of handsets in the corporate world, and although the corporate world doesn’t revolve on having a wide range of apps for various tasks, it does mean this: all those business users who, for whatever reason, haven’t adopted handsets like the iPhone that already have apps stores, they will now have the access to apps they will want to use in their personal time.

And aside from those users that have chosen to sport two phones, one for professional use and one for personal use, most folks prefer to pack only one phone on a day to day basis. So most folks will now be able to download mobile apps to whatever phone they’re tied to.

Again, for many of you, so what? Application stores mean that users have access to a wide array of social applications; beyond that, developers compete aggressively to produce the most intuitive and powerful applications every day, and to offer them at the best price points. Right now there are certainly aren’t enough applications for the most popular social platforms, but we’re going in the right direction. With the added stores for Blackberry and Windows Mobile, even more developers will be drawn to projects for mobile platforms. I can almost taste the quality to come.

Also, one of my biggest problems with the nature of mobile social networking to date was that social media really can’t be mobile until every phone is able to partake in the community. Until now, that wasn’t possible; when you rule out Blackberrys and Windows Mobile phones, you’re left with just a piece of the pie. Now we can at least say that we’re at the right staging point from which developers can now start working on truly intuitive cross-platform apps that allow everyone to connect, regardless of their carrier or handset.

This is big. Get excited.

Ada Lovelace was one of the world’s first computer programmers, and one of the first people to see computers as more than just a machine for doing sums. She wrote programmes for Charles Babbage’s Analytical Engine, a general-purpose computing machine, despite the fact that it was never built.

What woman will I be honoring in her memory today? You. That’s right, all of the strong women I have met at events or had the pleasure of working with this year. I went to a Girls In Tech Boston event this evening and was surrounded by some of Boston’s best and brightest women in technology. I have been quietly working to build Strong Women in Tech, a project which should start to see real momentum for members this summer, helping mentor girls in school to stay on a path to a career in or around technology, math or science. I’ve talked about women’s issues in podcasts and at events in the past year. I also recently spoke at Geek Girl Camp on Blogging 101, Managing Work Flow In Social Media and ROI Is Not Money.

Through all of these events and all of these big plans, I have been floored at the number of women who are out there, in the trenches, forging a path. Women like Shireen Mitchell, down in DC, a good friend and constant crusader for women’s rights in general, and in tech specifically. Women like Meg Fowler, who lead by example. Women like Leslie Bradshaw and Jen Nedeau, who stay focused on specific goals and niches to make ways for women to succeed. All of the women I know who have started their own tech-based companies in the last few years, leading the way for the next generation. Women I don’t have space to name who touch my work and life, offering guidance and friendship. Our grandmothers, and their grandmothers, who lent us their strength and their stories.

I don’t believe that there is a gender gap holding us back. Not anymore. I believe that we are a tide of powerful women, always moving forward, erasing the rigid marks of the past and writing a new future. We are doing it at our own pace, and in our own times, and each ripple forms our shore for future generations to play. To the women of tech: I salute you.