If you didn't make it to this year's Consumer Electronics Show - or if you wouldn't touch the annual tech explosion with a 10-foot pole - live vicariously through ReadWrite, all from the relative comfort and sanity of your own home. We've been here in Las Vegas for the full pre-show, and now that Day 1 has come and gone, join us for a virtual stroll through the not-so-hallowed halls of the Las Vegas Convention Center? We're already so worn out and strung out that we might have hallucinated the whole thing, but the photographic evidence suggests otherwise.

CES is among the flashiest, most absurdly over the top tech events of its kind. The sheer scope of the thing is nearly impossible to convey with words - it's just absolutely massive. Spread across 1.9 million square feet are 3,250 exhibitors unveiling an estimated 20,000 brand new products. This year, Ultra HDTVs are the ostensible hot new thing, but new gadgets abound across every category imaginable.

From iPhone-controlled quadrocopters performing a synchronized in-flight dance to water-resistant cameras getting dunked in a pitcher of beer - you name it, it's lurking around here somewhere. And since this week's excitement has technically only just begun, we haven't even ferreted out the truly weird stuff yet. 

As the annual Consumer Electronics Show grows away from its humble roots as, you know, a consumer electronics show, its focus increasingly turns to things altogether unrelated to technology - like celebrities!

Last year I recall spending three hours chasing down Justin Bieber with my telephoto lens - he made a brief, grumpy appearance promoting some entirely forgettable robotics company that I have since entirely forgotten. This year, the celeb safari is back on.  Here's who is showing up to CES this year and why you should - or shouldn't - care.

Get your bingo cards ready. No really... why not make a bingo card? Fill one up, find me and I'll buy you a shot. (Just don't blame me for knowing more about smartphones than pop culture - this is who I think these people are, anyway.)   

Felicia Day

This year's "CES Celebrity Ambassador," you might know Felicia day from the World of Warcraft spoof web series The Guild, or just from being generally cool and having preternaturally perfect skin. She tends to appear at every geek-adjacent event known to man, and we imagine that she'll spend most of the week in a cocktail lounge in an ivory tower somewhere in the South Hall. She's the CES celeb bingo equivalent of a doubleword score.

Maroon 5

Qualcomm Incoporated Preshow Keynote / 6:30-7:30pm, Monday, January 7, The Venetian, Palazzo Ballroom

This is a band, I think. I'm honesty not totally sure. It sounds like a racecar. Or a craft beer.

will.i.am

The Next Generation of Innovators Keynote / 11am-12pm, Tuesday, January 8, LVH Theater

This dude is from The Black Eyed Peas and has the cojones to downstyle his name like an Apple product. He's A+ in my book.

Curtis "50 Cent" Jackson

SMS Audio (LVCC, South Hall 1, #20206) / 3pm, Wednesday, January 9

Isn't this guy blatantly sexist and homophobic? Surprise! He's at CES 2013 representing SMS Audio, a brand that I will now ardently choose to not give a shit about. 

Travis Barker

Pioneer Electronics (USA) Inc. (LVCC, North Hall Booth #1101) / 12-1pm and 1:30-2:30pm, Tuesday, January 8

The Blink 182 dude? Really? Don't make me make the "what's my age again" joke.

Dana Cohen

Haier America (LVCC, Central Hall, #10939)

I have zero idea who this woman is, but apparently she was dubbed the “Scallop Queen” on season 10 of Hell’s Kitchen, which is the best title I've ever heard of. All hail the bivalve queen!

I Fight Dragons

Bém Wireless / 7pm, Wednesday, January 9, Luxor, Flight Lounge

This is probably an indie band. Okay, yeah, I looked it up and it is definitely an indie band. I hated them at first based on their name alone, but apparently they are into the chiptune retro video game sound thing, so now I'm totally into it.

Lil Twist

Nikura (LVCC, South Hall 4, #37134) / 1pm, Thursday, January 10

A young rapper of sorts, I imagine. And apparently Justin Bieber's BFF.

LL Cool J

CNET (LVCC, South Hall 3, CNET Booth) / 4:30pm, Tuesday, January 8

This guy is kind of actually famous! All these years and he never changed his name to something more pretentious or with fewer vowels - props to you, Mr. J.

Rohan Marley

House of Marley (LVCC, Central Hall, #10544) / 11am-3pm, Tuesday, January 8 - Thursday, January 9

Bob Marley's son is here every year with his crazy bamboo headphones and a big smile on his face. He's a super nice guy and he'll take a picture with you and you can almost pretend you met the "real" Marley instead of Lauryn Hill's ex boyfriend.

Nicole "Snooki" Polizzi

Zeikos/iHip (LVCC, South Hall 1, #21142) / 1-3pm, Wednesday, January 9

Yep, Snooki.

Tim Tebow

SOUL Electronics (Venetian Tower, #31-234) / 9am, Thursday, January 10

Isn't this that sanctimonious football player guy who never actually gets to play? We geeks come to these events to get away from you people. Whatever.

Chris “Ludacris” Bridges

SOUL Electronics / 10pm, Thursday, January 10, TAO Nightclub

Rapper turned actor Ludacris seems like a nice dude. I count this as a real celeb.

Dr. Sanjay Gupta

Digital Health Summitt (LVCC, North Hall, Room N250) / 9-10:15am, Wednesday, January 9

CNN's overexposed rockstar doctor guy. If he had accepted the job as Surgeon General, that would be one thing.

Dr. Oz

Digital Health Summitt (LVCC, North Hall, Room N250) / 10-10:50am, Thursday, January 10

Maybe Dr. Oz can tell you what that weird growth is on your foot. If not, try Sanjay Gupta.

Carrot Top

Gibson Guitar Corp. (LVCC, CES Central Plaza, CP-30)

We all know that the obnoxious comedian Carrot Top is just hanging out here in Vegas anyway. I don't know what he brings to Gibson's brand, but now that CES celebs are like trading cards, you might as well collect 'em all.

Danny DeVito

Panasonic (LVCC, Central Hall, Booth #9406) / 2:30pm, Wednesday, January 9

Okay, Danny DeVito is actually kind of awesome. If he's anything like his character on It's Always Sunny In Philadelphia, I'd like to commit a misdemeanor or drink stale beer with him. 

Ryan Vogelsong

JVC Americas Corp. (LVCC, North Hall, Booth #1810) / 11am and 2pm, Wednesday, January 9

A pitcher for the World Series Champion San Francisco Giants. Who let all these athletes in here?!

Brian Singer

Private Event, Parnassus Group / 5:30-7:30pm, Thursday, January 10, Cili's at Bali Hai

Singer directed the first two X-Men movies, which were awesome. But I'm still mad that he bailed on the trilogy to make a Superman movie. If you see him, ask him about that.

Want to track down even more weirdo celebs? Check out the full list.

2013 is shaping up to be a strange year for the Consumer Electronics Show (CES), the annual tech fête that invades Las Vegas for one grueling week every January. In 2011, tablets were kings of the desert, as manufacturers scrambled to get viable iPad competitors on the scene after Apple went and dreamed up a whole new category of device. Last year wasn't quite as flashy - previews of Windows 8 trickled out, and we all pretended that ultrabooks were the hot new thing for the better part of a week. 

In 2013, it's looking like a free-for-all. It's anyone's guess what new devices will capture the hearts and minds of CES attendees.

To find out, ReadWrite will be right there on the show floor all week with our finger on the pulse. And while we don't know yet what devices will capture the attention of the more than 100,000 attendees and worldwide press, we can already tell a few things that won't be grabbing the headlines in 2013:

1. Tablets 

Following the launch of the original iPad, companies were desperate to get a proper rival in the game - and at CES 2011, it showed. Nobody had quite figured it out yet, but suddenly there were literally 80 tablets floating around, most of them running Android. But by 2012, the tablet frenzy had slowed to a crawl, with Ultrabooks taking the lion's share of the spotlight. With Amazon and Google driving small tablet prices to the absolute rock bottom, don't expect other companies to waste much time on tablets this year.

2. Microsoft 

Microsoft announced that 2012 would be its last year at CES - for a while, at least. The company traditionally delivered a big CES keynote early in the week, but Steve Ballmer's appearance on stage in 2012 was the company's last - bizarre - hurrah. Gary Shapiro, president of the Consumers Electronics Association (CEA), the group that puts on the show, claims that the lapse is just a pause in the shared trajectory of Microsoft and CES, a relationship that dates back into Bill Gates's tenure at Microsoft's helm. We'll see. For now, the company has pulled its booth too, so Microsoft won't have a presence on the show floor either.

3. The Hottest New Smartphones

Smartphone makers are increasingly keeping their mobile secrets hidden at CES. With the Mobile World Congress show just around the corner, HTC, Motorola and the rest generally launch some new mid-level devices in Vegas, but don't reveal the most earth-shattering stuff until they get to Barcelona.  

4. TVs Anyone Would Ever Actually Buy 

CES is always jam-packed with TVs, but they're getting better - and vaguely affordable - at a snail's pace. Companies will continue jockeying for title of the biggest, more pixel-dense displays around, but the impact on consumers in 2013 will be negligible. Ultra HDTV is miles from affordable (who has $25,000 to blow on a TV set?), consumers still don't really care about 3D and awful proprietary software continues to hamstring most of the ballyhooed set-top devices designed to take over your living room. 

5. Apple (Duh)

If you're at all familiar with CES, Apple's absence is a no-brainer. Content to do things on its own terms, the company that's defined the cutting edge of consumer electronics routinely opts out of the biggest CE event of the year. (Heck, Apple doesn't even go to Macworld/iWorld any more!) The Las Vegas convention halls will be generously slathered with iPhone and iPad accessories, but CES just isn't the Cupertino company's style these days. Apple loves to casually announce news that just so happens to coincide with CES, but it certainly doesn't bother to visit the desert nowadays. It doesn't need to.

Don't call us cynical, though. We actually are looking forward to some CES innovations. It's just that we expect to dig up the really cool stuff in unlikely places, from smart homes and car tech to things we haven't thought of yet.

You never know what to expect when geeks invade Vegas, so stay tuned for plenty of highlights next week.  

Failure gets a lot of praise in the tech world. It’s a great learning experience, it’s a vital growth opportunity, etc. But nobody celebrates the actual event. Recently several entrepreneurs in New York City got together to do just that, holding the inaugural Startup Funeral to honor the memory of three dead technology companies.

“Every startup has a launch party, but what happens when a startup dies?” asks event co-organizer Leo Newball Jr. “No one is around to commemorate the life of that startup. There are launch parties but never any funerals, so we wanted to have an event that celebrates startups that don’t make it and what was learned from that.”

Joining Newball to organize the event were four of his colleagues at New Work City, a coworking space in New York's Chinatown: Kevin Galligan, Jason Kende, Valerie Lisyansky and Jason Nadaf. They had people dressed as priests, mourners, urns full of hard candy, a bagpiper and lots of alcohol, which is almost always a good idea on occasions like this. (The alcohol, not the bagpiper.) They thought about a casket but caskets are expensive, even to rent.

Addieu, Get-A-Game, Kozmo.com

The dead startups honored were mobile social-networking company Addieu, mobile game and activity locator Get-a-Game and the late, seldom-lamented but often-derided Kozmo.com, which failed way back in 2001 but to this day is held up as the embodiment of dotcom-era foolhardiness. Three ex-execs spoke and 100 or so in the audience listened and commemorated.

“These people never got the opportunity to say goodbye properly to the startup they founded or worked for,” Newball says. “So it felt like a real goodbye for them. It was cathartic on a certain level but it was all done tongue in cheek, so there was a spirit of fun and many people just enjoyed the ridiculousness of it. The event was different things to different people.” 

After Grieving, Starting Over

For Chris Siragusa, former CTO of Kozmo, it was a chance to talk about his new company, Max Delivery, which is a lot like his old company. Kozmo offered one-hour delivery of snacks, coffee, DVDs, magazines, tubes of toothpaste - pretty much whatever you wanted at a moment’s notice. Max Delivery does the same, with one big difference: Kozmo was free and was killed by its high-cost, low-revenue business model. (In 2000 its revenues were $30 million, delivery costs $35 million and net loss $120 million.) Max Delivery charges a fee and makes a profit.

“Startups are often an iterative process,” Newball says. “Even if one dies, the entrepreneur can go on and learn from the process. Life continues, even if the startup doesn’t. That’s the message of Startup Funeral. Not everyone is going to make a Twitter or a Facebook on their first try.”

More Funerals Coming

The team behind Startup Funeral is now planning its second event, which will take place early next year. They’re deciding between a marching band and a Viking funeral theme. The hardest part, says Newball - aside from getting a permit for a flaming Norse galleon - is finding startup founders willing to stand onstage and tell an audience what they did wrong.

“It takes a brave person to get up in a public forum and say, ‘Hey, I failed.’ But, honestly, we don’t care what you say when you get up to the podium. You can talk about your dog if you want. Or you can talk about the lessons you learned. We won’t judge you one way or another. We’re just happy to have you at the event.”

Two people who did not attend the Startup Funeral were Kozmo cofounders Joseph Park and Yong Kang, the guys who blew through $250 million in funding in three short years. Park is now president of BibleGateway.com. Kang went back to his former career, Wall Street investment banking… at Lehman Brothers. Some people never learn.

While some might question the sanity of an individual who decides to make Greek startups a cornerstone of a plan to spread entrepreneurship around the world, Gary Whitehill says the young, entrepreneurial tech startup economy taking hold there offers lessons for startups everywhere.

Inspired by Riots

Whitehill is founder of Entrepreneur Week, the Greek version of which was inspired by riots protesting the country’s austerity moves. Whitehill “saw a real resurgence of people in Greece who realize entrepreneurship is the way out of the [economic] challenges they were having.” He teamed up with a number of Greek organizations, associations and institutions, including CoLab Athens (Greece’s first co-working space), which offers workshops and accelerator programs to startups.

The Entrepreneur Week European kickoff was originally slated to be held in Belgium, but Whitehill was “intrigued that something so unstable [could present] the right time, right place and right opportunity to make entrepreneurship a pillar of solving the problem.”

Entrepreneurs as Outcasts

According to Whitehill, entrepreneurs are “viewed as outcasts in Greece.” Many nations “are light years behind” the U.S., he says, when it comes to supporting startups. In Greece, “Entrepreneurs don’t have a place to go - so many have left the country.”

These attitudes are widespread. At the recent DWEN (Dell Women’s Entrepreneur Network Conference) in Delhi, India, I talked to women entrepreneurs from around the world, hearing how they not only have to surmount the usual challenges of starting a business, but must often fight cultural norms as well.

I’ve had similar conversations about bringing entrepreneurship to Egypt, where starting a company is considered a low-class occupation.

Given those kinds of attitudes, it’s hard to argue with Whitehill’s contention that “it’s relatively easy in America to start a business.”

I’m not belittling the challenges American startups face. But it’s easy for Silicon Valley startup founders pitching venture capitalists to forget all the advantages we have in the United States.

Check the P-List

When times get tough, startup founders might want to check what I call the “P-List” that Whitehill and Stavros Messinis, the co-founder of CoLab Athens, put together of lessons American startups can learn from their Greek counterparts:

• Persevere. Ignore the odds; be a survivor. Stop being risk-averse; instead, embrace the risk. Remember, they can’t eat you.
• Proactiveness. Be agile. Try to know what’s to come, and address it beforehand.
• Partnerships. Think about gaining access to global markets, and how to build bridges internationally.
• Proficiency. Be humble. Seek the best team, skill sets or mentors.
• Possibilities. Fail fast, fail often, fail cheap.

The Democratization of Entrepreneurship

Hoping to “democratize entrepreneurship globally,” Whitehill plans to take Entrepreneur Week to countries where there’s the “opportunity to make the most impact.” Currently he’s thinking Chile, Saudi Arabia, Australia, Portugal and Brazil.

At DWEN, the words of Lakshmi Pratury, the founder of Ixoraa Media, really struck me: “To the world you might be one person, but to one person you might be the world.”

That’s what Gary Whitehill was to the 600 Greek startup entrepreneurs who came to Entrepreneur Week in Athens earlier this year. And that’s the message he has for startups around the world. “It’s about helping create the future,” he says, “the right future.”

Images courtesy of Shutterstock.

San Diego fireworks watchers were treated to a unique light show last night when a technical error caused the Big Bay Boom's entire 18-minute display - some tens of thousands of explosions - to be launched in one awesome but short-lived 15-second display just before the show's scheduled start.

According to ABC News, "Garden State Fireworks, the firm hired by the city to produce the show, acknowledged the mistake." 

Here's an Instragram photo and another video:

Remember "swinging"? Two people in a committed relationship go to a party with a bunch of other people in committed relationships. They all separate, find new partners for the evening and get jiggy. It may sound lurid and gross, but it’s the cool new thing for startup founders.

Swapping Ideas, Not Spouses

First, let’s be clear. We’re not talking about sex. We’re talking about Founder Swap, a June 1 event in New York where teams from six different startups will get together, trade partners for a day and go home with an injection of fresh ideas. The tagline? “Like Wife Swap but for Founders. We want to get startups pregnant with new ideas.”

“Young teams who are working redline as hard as they can with just one or two other people, a little bit of fatigue can set in and you can get overfocused,” explains Jonathan Basker, VP of human resources at Betaworks and one of three people behind Founder Swap, along with Scroll Kit founders Kate Ray and Cody Brown. “Our goal is to disrupt that sequence and see what happens.”

Here’s what he hopes happens. Founders will soak up some objective perspective on their product and perhaps a little constructive criticism. And they’ll pick up practical advice - technical founders will glean tips from business-oriented founders and vice versa.

No Breakups Allowed

Here’s what he hopes doesn’t happen. Founders meet new people and fire their current partners. “That would be a horrifying result,” Basker says. “The idea is not to reformulate your team but to inform yourself about how you’re working. We’re not trying to be home wreckers here.”

The inaugural event will focus on software companies, to ensure participants have something in common. All six startups must have at least a product idea. Ideally, each team will consist of two or three people and will be pre-series-A, so no parental guidance from meddlesome VCs.

Founder Swap will decide who pairs off with whom. Couples will meet Thursday and spend Friday together. There will be no filming (though it’s easy to imagine how this might someday evolve into a reality show on Bravo).

“I would be ecstatic," Basker says, "if at the end of this, each team gets back together and says, ‘Wow, this was really cool,’ and feels energized by the event, if each one of these companies walks away with a new perspective or just one kernel of useful information they didn’t have before.”

There's a notion, one you're no doubt all too familiar with, that America is in need of an economic refresh. The troubles are likely to intensify as millions of Millennials try to join the workforce, only to be met with what Scott Gerber, the founder of the Young Entrepreneur Council (YEC), calls, "America's youth unemployment epidemic." So Gerber's trying to get Stephen Colbert to help provide a cure.

Gerber decided to take action, and together with The National Society of Collegiate Scholars (NSCS), the largest honor society organization in the country, MTV Act, which celebrates young people taking action to make things better, and mtvU, MTV's college network, #FixYoung America rallies will be held on more than 300 college campuses this Thursday, April 19, reaching more than 1 million Americans.

The problem is profound. Even as the nation's unemployment rate edges down toward 8%, the youth unemployment rate still clocks in at about 23%! Gerber says he believes entrepreneurship is one important solution, and he predicts more Millennials will have to embrace some form of business ownership going forward. "The 'free agent' economy is a reality," Gerber says, "and the educational system needs to prepare for that."

Gerber is attacking the Gen Y workforce problem with 21st-century solutions. The #FixYoungAmerica campaign was launched with a crowdfunding initiative on Indiegogo. And one of the goals of Thursday's 50-state, 300-campuses, 1 million-person rally is to recruit faux TV pundit and comedian Stephen Colbert to their cause.

Gerber, who calls Colbert the "Oprah of Gen Y" because "his voice resonates with us, and he's a hero to many Millennials," hopes Colbert Nation will take on the youth un- and under-employment crisis, much the way he brought attention to problems with presidential campaign fundraising (the Super PACs).

"We're not trying to change the world overnight," Geber says, "we know we're in for a long slog." But we need to "spotlight the proven solutions already working to propel young workers, including young unemployed veterans," because these "solutions [are] rarely talked about in the public square, the political arena or the American mainstream media."

Gerber was even more energized by watching the Occupy Wall Street movement spread across the country last year. He wants to "take the frustration of the [Occupiers], and turn it into tangible action." People are listening; on Wednesday, Gerber will testify before the Senate Committee on Small Business and Entrepreneurship.

The Great Recession took a lot out of all of us, both financially and psychologically. But Gerber says he believes America's youth are particularly affected by the "new harsh realities." He cites a recent survey commissioned by Junior Achievement and Allstate Insurance, which shows barely half (56 percent) of American teenagers think they'll be as financially well-off or better off than their parents, a huge 37 percent decline in confidence from 2011.

Will this work? Can our inherent entrepreneurial spirit save the day? Gerber certainly thinks so - but not without help. Sure the stated goal of Thursday's rally is "to give our nation's students and recent graduates a much-needed 'Colbert Bump.' " But it's also to get your attention. So what do you think? Can we fix America?

Infographic courtesy of YEC and InfographicWorld.com

Colbert baby image courtesy of FixYoungAmerica.com

The second event was the annual Invest Midwest conference on Thursday. Here more than 40 companies presented to about 50 investors. Tech ventures, some of whom were presenters at the earlier Demo Day, joined ventures in green energy and the life sciences. This is the 13th year the conference has been in business, which alternates each year between Kansas City and St. Louis. Both events drew small and large investors from all over the country. It was nice to see so many people in town to look at the new offerings.

Capital Innovators announced that it is now accepting applications for its third class of ventures. Those who are accepted will receive an investment of $50,000 in return for some equity in their companies and intensive mentoring at its downtown offices, as we wrote about last year here. Applications are due by June 15th.

At both events, the pitches covered several common themes:

• Hyperlocal business focus. What makes these ventures interesting to me is how focused they are on their particular audiences of either potential users or customers. Lockerdome.com focuses on bringing together sports-addicted fans and amateur players to share their content. Bonfyreapp.com is aimed at college kids to geo-locate what they are doing on or near campus. BusyEvent.com manages what sessions conferences-goers want to attend and records their vendor-booth encounters. DiningCircle.com is aimed at handling real-time Web-enabled restaurant reservations. Aisle411.com takes this to a new level: They have a way to locate a particular product in a store's shelves. To be successful, a venture needs this laser focus.

• It is all about the Web. Most of the firms had some critical component that had something to do with using Web protocols or the cloud. Dining Circle runs in the cloud rather than the dedicated PCs that OpenTable.com provides to their restaurant customers. JBara.com complements and extends traditional CRM software such as Salesforce to improve customer retention and satisfaction. Adjudica.com sells its group-medical-cost monitoring tool as a Web-based service to large health plan operators.

• I have a platform to sell you. Now that everything is in the cloud, many ventures are looking toward building their own Something as a Service to leverage their expertise and get third parties to adopt their frameworks. YoJoe.com is the premier site for people who collect GI Joe action figures and, as a result, is looking to build a platform to support other collectable management websites. Norse-Corp.com developed a fraud-detection system using distributed Internet-monitoring tools, and now is looking to sell this to credit card payment networks for their antifraud programs. Gremln.com built a social media monitoring program that it is extending into compliance management for financial services and health care providers.

• Mobile is where the action is. No surprise there. TangibleHaptics.com is trying to improve the touch screen world by providing actual feedback as you slide your fingers across the screen. EyeVerify.com can biometrically ID who is holding your cell phone from the blood vessel pattern of your eye.

• Despite Groupon, other coupon alternatives are still being proposed. Aisle411 has the ability to deliver coupons to consumers shopping in stores, and BonFyreapp offers coupons based on its audience's movements. These smarter maps tied to particular locations combine the best aspects of geolocation and the immediate needs of the shopper.
  

My pick for oddest product pitched at Invest Midwest: a high-tech toothbrush from Tifinity Oral Care with bristles made out of titanium that duplicate the flossing process and a built-in microprocessor to tell you when it needs replacing.

Invest Midwest ended with a presentation by Jim McKelvey, cofounder of the mobile-payment company Square and a local St. Louis tech investor. He said that more than a million merchants are using the Square payment process, and now there are numerous competitors in the mobile credit-card payment space. He got the idea for the gizmo when he tried to process a credit-card payment at his other business, a retail glass factory in St. Louis.

When it comes to deciding on a location for a business, McKelvey had some incisive things to say. "Who cares about the taxes that are levied on you when you are rich? It isn't that big of a deal for a small company. It is more important to figure out if you can get the stuff done that you need to get done wherever you are located. We will shop the tax rate when we are moving 10,000 people into an area. For most business owners, that is so far down the list it is irrelevant."

He also noted that "St Louis has made some really good strides towards supporting entrepreneurship, and things are picking up here." He mentioned that the higher quality of life, and the attraction of good schools in many St. Louis areas, was another reason for starting up his engineering team there. However, "Our biggest surprise was that we couldn't scale the Square team here in St. Louis."

But attracting huge amounts of venture capital to the Midwest isn't easy: "The superrich VCs just don't want to get on a plane and don't want to physically travel anywhere." However, for lesser amounts, "money flows pretty fluidly anywhere now."

Do check out some of the companies mentioned if you are interested in their products and services. Many of them are already in business, and have lots of customers and activity.

Photo courtesy of Shutterstock.

Of course, right? But would you pay for the privilege of "renting" a tech company founder? OK, what if the money you spent went to charity? And what if the founders came from high-profile startups like Reddit, Hipmunk, Scribd, Parse, Sincerely, and Exec?

If your answer is "yes" to these somewhat unusual questions, here's your chance. San Francisco-based service site Exec, has lined up founders to talk to other entrepreneurs from 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. Pacific on April 7, either on the phone or via Skype. The promotion includes a number of execs, including ones from Exec, natch:

Alexis Ohanian (Reddit, Breadpig) for questions on Y Combinator, building brands and communities online, or combatting terrible legislation in Washington (e.g., SOPA/PIPA).

Steve Huffman (Reddit, Hipmunk) for help with Web applications.

Matt Brezina (Xobni, Sincerely) for advice on customer development, finding product/market fit and scaling user acquisition.

Tikhon Bernstam (Parse, Scribd) for insight into building out your product, team and company.

Justin Kan (Justin.tv, Exec) for advice on starting companies, recruiting talent, and management as well as online video and advertising.

According to Exec, you can ask the founders to give you "advice for your business, serve as a sounding board for your startup idea, or just to chat." You can even ask to pick the brain of specific founders. ("No promises though.")

So how much does it cost to talk to a founder? $100 per hour, with a half hour minimum. Cheaper than a psychiatrist, and not much more than a plumber. Better still, the money goes to DonorsChoose.org. So even if you don't learn the secret to making a fortune in Silicon Valley, you'll at least be helping out classrooms in need.

Click here to sign up. Or go to the [Exec blog] (http://blog.iamexec.com/post/20415502048/rent-a-tech-company-founder-through-exec-for-donors) for more information.

Lead image courtesy of Shutterstock.

You don't have to be employed by the non-profit to enter: just designate who is going to get the dough if you win. The winning entries will be based on the strength of your story, presentation composition, and your non-profit's potential to make an impact.

Good luck! It is a great idea, and showcase's SlideRocket's process to collaborate too.

In short, the anonymous Pastebin post slams MongoDB saying "I now feel a kind of social responsibility to deter people from banking their business on MongoDB" and then lists reasons why MongoDB is a bad choice. Sounds like typical HN front-page material, right?

The problem is, the veracity of the original piece is in question. True, false, or a mix of both – it made it to the front page of Hacker News very quickly. Who knows how many folks have read it since then? Certainly a lot more folks than have read the comments thread or the follow-up from the poster claiming "it is in fact a hoax that has gone too far, you got trolled."

To be fair, a lot of the people on the HN thread don't seem to have taken the post at face value. There's also been effort to spread the response from 10gen alongside the original post.

A Grain of Truth?

To 10gen's credit, Eliot Horowitz (CTO) was in the thread and responding to the post right away on a point-by-point basis. Even more, Horowitz respected the forum and wasn't spinning the usual corporate response. Even though Horowitz had clues the poster was trolling (the original post has something about having a "crazy platinum support contract," which Horowitz debunks), he did acknowledge some of the actual problems that exist or have existed with MongoDB.

I also spoke with Horowitz and 10gen president Max Schireson yesterday about the post and problems with MongoDB. Again, rather than deflecting the entire thing, Schireson and Horowitz were fairly candid about MongoDB's shortcomings. Of the nine sections, Schireson says that "some are definitely valid, some we haven't heard or seen."

For instance, Schireson says that the complaint about the global lock is a "well-known deficiency," but "something we're working on to improve."

The biggie for any database, of course, is data loss. Is that an issue? Not anymore, says Schireson, but there were issues prior to 1.8. "If you only used a single server, then there were reliability issues where you might lose data. We tried to clearly document that, and make clear that the recommended approach was to use multiple servers to achieve reliability." Since 1.8, says Schireson, "we do not believe there have been substantiated reports of data loss when the system is used in the recommended way."

Perhaps surprisingly, Schireson didn't seem too upset with the post. "I tend to rely on users to be pretty smart and sophisticated." Schireson admits that it "created some FUD for us." But, looking at the response and comments voted to the top, Schireson says that most users seemed to be examining the issue pretty carefully.

So should users avoid MongoDB? I'd say they should take the same approach as the HN skeptics: evaluate it and find out for yourself. It does sound like MongoDB, being a relatively new project, has some sharp edges. But given some of the success stories (such as Foursquare), it's clear that MongoDB can also be used successfully in production for large data sets.

The System Works?

Sites like Hacker News are a blessing and a curse for dissemination of news. The good news is that they can provide a platform for information and viewpoints that wouldn't otherwise be heard. (Though HN these days is less and less non-mainstream.) The bad is there's little editorial quality control.

A single-sourced, anonymous, piece like this one wouldn't (or at least shouldn't) be making the front page of widely read publications.

But the reaction on HN is heartening. Though it's disappointing it made it to the front page at all, it also seems that the bulk of the audience at HN took it with the grain of salt it deserved.

The conference, organized by RedMonk emphasized the social side of software development. Unlike many conferences that are hard tech or business focused, Monktoberfest focused primarily on the things that make software development a passion and not just a job. And beer, of course.

Attention Conference Planners

I didn't do a formal survey, but I asked a lot of the Monktoberfest attendees what they thought of the event. Not a single person complained about the event. So what did the Redmonk folks get right? Two things above all else – catering and content.

Obviously, beer was a big focus of Monktoberfest. The evening before the event we met at a fantastic craft beer place in Portland and had a great selection of beers and appetizers. The conversation flowed well, and it was a great ice-breaker for the following day.

The day of the event, the RedMonk folks arranged a really good lunch that was not the standard conference fare. Lobster rolls, chowder, and a few other options that I forget. (But worth noting that there were good vegetarian options as well.) And yes, there were good beers for lunch as well.

I'm sure the catering cost was a bit higher than the average conference on a per-attendee basis, but I'm also sure that was a major contributing factor to attendees' happiness with the event. Well-fed people are happy people as a rule. Conferences that skimp on the food and drink tend to skimp elsewhere. To be fair, I've been at conferences that were well-received that had mediocre food, but that's usually community run events that don't charge much (or anything) for attendance. If you're charging, making with good food is a really effective way to ensure that people go away happy.

The wrap-up dinner was, well, over-the-top. We ate at The Lion's Pride, a bar/eatery in Brunswick that has an A+ rating on Beeradvocate. The beers were unusual and quite good. The food – starting with appetizers, then several courses and dessert – was abundant and well-done. I'd write more about it, but I think it might be cruel to those who didn't attend to go into detail.

Lessons Learned at Monktoberfest

While there's plenty of good things to be said about the food and drink at Monktoberfest, I can find reasonably good food and drink in St. Louis. I wouldn't have flown cross-country to attend Monktoberfest if it hadn't promised to be enlightening as well.

I've already written about Matt LeMay's talk about Bit.ly data and Greg Avola's presentation on Untappd. Those were really top-notch talks.

After lunch we heard from Theo Schlossnagle, who talked about social improvements in monitoring. Schlossnagle had a lot of really good points about what we can learn from monitoring and how to implement process in a business.

Zack Urlocker, now with Zendesk, gave a really good presentation on social and distributed development. Urlocker, formerly with MySQL, has a lot of tips here that he gathered from his time at MySQL and by reaching out to other folks who manage or work on distributed teams.

One thing Urlocker said that really resonated with me was when he talked about team leaders who didn't make an effort to go where the developers were. Instead of one person traveling to the team, they'd require the entire team to travel to them. That's simply broken, for a lot of reasons. It's more costly, and it's lousy for morale.

Urlocker also stressed the importance of not putting all the burden of time zones on one team or person. For instance, if you have employees all over the world, meetings shouldn't always revolve around one time zone. Nobody appreciates having to always be the one waking up early or staying up late to attend virtual meetings.

On Difficult Developers

The last presentation, "Assholes are Killing Your Project," was also lively. Donnie Berkholz, of the Gentoo project, has been giving this presentation for a while but it's still relevant. Berkholz largely talks about open source projects, but it also applies to companies with volatile and difficult employees.

Berkholz showed a graph of involvement with Gentoo, and overlaid lines on the graph that corresponded with the rise in assholishness and decline in community participation. A key thing, says Berkholz, is to have metrics – have a way to display the impact on the project that comes with dealing with the difficult contributors.

That might be difficult in some situations, but Berkholz recommends pulling contribution statistics and mailing list traffic stats to demonstrate a correlation between bad behavior and a drop-off in contributions.

After Berkholz's talk, James Governor took a few minutes to wrap up the conference. Monktoberfest, says Governor in part, is about the fact that "people matter, and we have to care about them." Software development is not just about making money, it's about people.

Where to Improve?

Really, there's only one thing I'd ding the conference for, and one suggestion that I've made for the next event. (Yes, there will be another event.)

If you look over the agenda you might notice a pattern. A smashing line-up of speakers, no doubt, but not very diverse. Monktoberfest had no women speaking at all, and not too many women in attendance. I did talk to O'Grady and Governor about the testosterone-heavy speakers list, and they let me know they had approached women to speak at the event but the scheduling didn't work for the women that they asked. They also made clear that they were going to make an effort to ensure that they have women on the list next time around.

The suggestion I have is that they should consider a second day with an un-conference format. The audience that attended Monktoberfest had a lot to offer, and I think that some of the talks might have spun off great discussions with more time. Plus, as fantastic as the event was, it's a lot of travel for a one-day event.

But the RedMonk gang knocked it out of the part for a first-time event. It was well worth the trip, and I'm looking forward to round two in London.

What could have been an extremely dry and boring presentation was fairly lively. Robinson started with a quick overview of Doctor Who, just in case the audience wasn't familiar with the show. I don't think he needed to have worried, given the demographic.

So what is a graph database, anyway? Basically, Neo4j is a database that stores the relationships between nodes using semi-structured data. Robinson says that it's fully ACID-compliant, high-availability, and capable of dealing with 32 billion nodes, 32 billion relationships and 64 billion properties.

It can run as a standalone server, or embedded in a Java application. (The site claims it has a footprint of around 750kb.) Neo4j is released under the GNU General Public License for the community edition, and under the Affero GPL (AGPL) for the commercial editions. (Robinson says that companies can "buy their way out" of the AGPL if they want.)

After the requisite explanation of the show, he then started talking about how Neo4j might be put to use. One example he provided was tracking the Doctor's frequent nemeses, the Daleks. More accurately, he discussed tracking the Dalek props that were used in the show. Apparently there's a Web site called Dalek 6388 that (as he says) "wondrously and laboriously" has gone through all publicity photos, episodes and so on to track the various Dalek costumes.

Robinson showed how you might track each and every piece of a Dalek costume, along with the episodes that it's appeared in using Neo4j. First Robinson graphed it out visually, then showed code examples of how you would retrieve the information using Java and the new Cypher graph query language.

Assuming you don't have a need to track Doctor Who props, what else might you use Neo4j for? Robinson mentioned that one of his first jobs was working with supply chain traceability. He gave the example of the late 90s Mad Cow outbreak in the U.K. Robinson explained you might use Neo4j to track the history of any given cow that turned up with Mad Cow, and then be able to tell which locations it'd been to and any other cattle it'd been in contact with.

Robinson finished off the presentation with a demonstration of the Neo4j Webadmin interface, and ran through a few queries to show results returned by Neo4j. If you're interested in learning more about Neo4j, Robinson recommends starting with the tutorial.

Meijer, is an architect in Microsoft's SQL Server division. He was previously an associate professor at Utrecht University, and an adjunct professor at the Oregon Graduate institute. No doubt, he's been spending plenty of time thinking about the differences between SQL and NoSQL databases lately.

As Meijer's title suggests, the keynote was anything but fluff. Quite the contrary, as Meijer spent the allotted time talking about the differences between NoSQL and SQL so the audience could make "a more informed decision" about which tech to use in any given situation.

Don't Call it NoSQL

Actually, Meijer might not like it being called NoSQL – he prefers calling it "coSQL." Why? Meijer says that NoSQL (or coSQL, if you like) is "more friendly and more scientifically valid." NoSQL, he says, is too negative.

Much of the keynote was given over to Meijer talking about the differences between SQL and NoSQL. He talked in detail about the limitations of SQL and reasons why programmers would prefer NoSQL databases. He poked fun at SQL join statements, saying that joins "make great exam questions," but not so great to use in the real world. He also talked about the problems with NULL semantics in databases, saying that they represent "a full employment theorem for database folks."

But after pointing out differences between the two, and some annoyances with SQL, Meijer noted that they're "not that different" after all.

Two Sides of the Same Coin

The big difference, says Meijer, is that "all the arrows are reversed" when you look at diagrams of how data is stored and accessed in the database. A good example of what Meijer discussed, in more detail and with similar diagrams, can be found in his paper for ACM called "A co-Relational Model of Data for Large Shared Data Banks."

In short, Meijer says that there's a "duality" between SQL and coSQL – and each has its place. It's really all about understanding what fits best with the task at hand. For instance, Meijer compared coSQL to referencing objects in RAM or using a URI to grab a resource on the Web. You may not know exactly what you're getting when you request something using a URI. With SQL, it's highly structured and you should know each time roughly what you're getting back. That is, you may not know what album title to expect from a query of a database, but you know it's going to be a string of text with a character limit of some kind.

Meijer covered quite a bit of ground in a short time. The audience seemed to enjoy the talk quite a bit, and the room was packed nearly to capacity. More than 900 people are registered for Strange Loop, which continues through tomorrow afternoon at the Downtown Hilton in St. Louis.

The folks behind .tv aren't some fly-by-night operation, we are talking Verisign, one of the big Internet domain authorities that has been around for decades. You have to answer the question "Why should I get seen on .tv?" Entrants do not have to purchase or use any .tv domain names to enter the contest, and just have to get their submission uploaded before October 23.

Contest judging takes place over two rounds. The first round of judging begins Monday, Oct. 24, and includes a panel of judges determined by Verisign who will narrow the field to 10 semi-finalists based on the following equally-weighed criteria: on-air presence, relevance to theme, originality and creativity. The second round of judging, commencing Thursday, Nov. 3, allows for the public to vote on the 10 semi-finalist projects hosted on Facebook. Upon the conclusion of the public voting period, the top three commercials based on total votes will be awarded to a Grand Prize, First Prize and Second Prize winner.

So start blocking out your shots and planning your entries. Good luck!