If you like technology,  the arts, green initiatives,  and helping charity, you need to go to a BarCamp. 

If you hate stuffy, formal conferences that cost hundreds, or thousands of dollars, you need to go to a BarCamp.

This is a video of Bar Camp Charlotte III (BarCampCLT).  The generally informal nature of a BarCamp is what makes it so special.  At the start of the day, there is no schedule, there are no speakers, and entire day is driven by the participants.  The events are (usually) free, and breakfast and lunch are provided.  All paid for by sponsors who totally “get” the concept.   

People in the audience are encouraged to pitch ideas to discuss.  After 10-20 pitches are introduced, the audience goes and votes on the pitches they would like to attend.  The pitch topics with the highest number of votes are selected, the schedule is drawn up, and then multiple sessions commence for one hour long periods. 

You’ll usually have a choice of anywhere between 5-10 sessions to attend per hour depending on the size of the venue. 

It’s informal, its democratic, its fun, its progressive, its great networking, and it’s a great way to learn cutting edge stuff. 

So check out the video and leave a comment.  Tell me what you think.  If you liked the video, please let me know by sharing it on your favorite social networking sites (lots of share icons below). 

For more info on BarCamps go to http://www.barcamp.org/ For more info on Charlotte BarCamp go to http://www.barcampcharlotte.org/

I’ve never owned an Apple product in my life. I am as “PC” as you can be, so you can imagine my reluctance to venture into Steve Jobs world for the first time. But boy, am I glad I did.

What made me do it? One word, VIDEO. I’m in the video business and the iPhone 3G S “does video”. For me, that means hosting videos on the phone, not taking videos with the phone. It’s so often that I’m at a party, or networking event and people ask me what I do for a living. When I tell them I produce real estate video virtual tours, they are intrigued and want to see. I used to hand them a business card, but I know that after the initial interest of the conversation wore off, few of them ever made it to my website.

But now…… Now I can SHOW them, right then and there…. on my PHONE! It’s crystal clear, proper 16×9 format, and the audio is actually really good. It’s funny, I think they won’t be interested, and then they watch the video all the way through. If a picture is worth 1000 words, what’s a video worth? To me, it’s indispensable.

But the iPhone 3G S is about so much more. The new phone has made Twitter a reality for me. Even with TweetDeck on my laptop, I rarely made the effort to log in and see what the latest Tweets were about. But now, it’s a no brainer. I can keep up with the latest tweets, and I can tweet from anywhere. Same for Facebook.

The phone has enabled me to participate in Social Media like never before.

It has a decent camera and shoots video too – Facebook updates have never been so much fun. And the internet – the phone is light years beyond my old phone. It doesn’t just rely on the cell network for the internet. If you are anywhere near a Wi-Fi hotspot, it gives you the option of hooking in at Wi-Fi speeds, which at home and at the office (and Starbucks) is blazing fast.

You know the commercial, “yeah, we’ve got an app for that”, and it’s so true. From productivity to games to “wholly cr@p, it does THAT?” (check out Shazam). Occasionally, I have to pry it out of my wife’s hands because she’s playing Sudoku on it. And my kids ……The Fast & the Furious ….. forget-a-bout-it. “Hey – gimme back my phone, it’s NOT a toy” (snicker).

Want more? Email, weather, sports scores, stock quotes, maps with GPS, voice recognition, calculator, ipod, web browser …. I could go on and on and on, but I’ll spare you. For a busy professional, I think it’s a great tool – practically rendering your laptop obsolete.

Only one major drawback for Realtors, there’s no infrared so unlike Palm phones, this one won’t open lockboxes. That’s a major inconvenience, however, I still feel that the good far outweigh the bad for this new toy, I mean essential business device.

You can make calls on it too…… imagine that