DevHouse Picnic – Sunday September 26th

Just a quick update that the annual DevHousePGH picnic will be held on Sunday September 26^th at 2PM.  Sorry we had to reschedule.  The address is 4685 Middle Road, Allison Park, PA 15101.  We will have signs out on Middle Road.  Please park across the street in McAllister Farms.  I would suggest using Google for specific directions but these will get you there.

From the city take Route 28 to Etna exit.  Get off on Route 8 South.  OR you can come across the Highland Park Bridge and take Route 28 towards the city.  Also get off at Route 8 South.

Take Route 8  for approximately 8 miles to Hampton.  At Wildwood Road (The Yellow Belt) make a right hand turn.  There is a McDonalds and Aldi at the corner and a BP gas station.  The road hits a T turn at Middle Road.  Make a Right hand turn.  Go exactly ¼ mile and you will see signs on the right hand side of the road.

We will provide food and drinks for all.  No need to bring anything except your lap top.  We will also have volleyball and other entertainment.

We hope to see you there.

Entrepreneurial Thursday show THIS THURSDAY, July 29

We hope you are having a great summer and are looking forward to seeing you at an Entrepreneurial Thursday show THIS THURSDAY, July 29 where we explore the topic of Cultivating New Technologies in Pittsburgh from a variety of entrepreneurs’ perspectives.  This show was ripped out of the headlines as the Pittsburgh Post Gazette just ran a front page story several weeks ago when they asked how Pittsburgh is doing in cultivating new technology companies.  Rather than read it in an article, come join us to ask questions, share your thoughts and meet area technology entrepreneurs.  Then form your own conclusions:

Jessica Lee and Karl Schieneman will interview the first panel who have been developing technology from 4 different perspectives:

The Entrepreneurs:

1.     Hugh Docherty, a Vice President with Trustwave, formerly BitArmour, a company which started in Pittsburgh then was sold to an outside company, following a common trajectory identified in the Pittsburgh Post Gazette article.

2.     Vasco Pedro, CEO of Bueda, a company who moved to Pittsburgh from Portugal to attend Carnegie Mellon University’s Computer Science program and has stayed in Pittsburgh.  Bueda is receiving funding from Innovation Works and others and is launching several web based concept search tools,

3.     Kurt Carlson, President of a Kore Innovations, a Pittsburgh company started by native Pittsburghers which has been grown through bootstrapping and consulting revenue.  Kore Innovations has developed methods to create more agile enterprise software by using code already included in the enterprise software systems.

4.     and Karen Anderson, CEO of 80 Degrees West, a company started by a team of Carnegie Mellon MBA students who moved to Pittsburgh to attend the Tepper School and which is also a recent AlphaLabs funded company.  80 Degrees West has created a design portal to enable project management and third party collaboration on interior decorating projects.

A Facilitators Panel will be interviewed by Jessica Lee about resources and support being offered to Pittsburgh entrepreneurs:

1.     Mike Woycheck, Alpha Labs

2.     Jonathan Kersting, Pittsburgh Tech Council, and

3.     Karl Schieneman, DevHousePGH

It should be a good night of networking and of course live music provided by Jessica Lee and her band.  The doors open at 6PM with interviews kicking off at about 6:40PM.  Come have a drink with Karl and find out what is next for DevHousePGH and when is the annual picnic being held – NOT AUGUST 14^th!!!!  Sorry. We are looking at a weekend in September.  More about that later.

DIRECTIONS:  Entrepreneurial Thursdays is held at Little E’s Jazz Club, 949 Liberty Avenue, Second Floor.  It is above Mahoney’s Restaurant.  You enter the door into Mahoney’s and go up the stairs.  There is a parking lot on Liberty at the intersection with 9th Street.

If you have any questions please contact us info at devhousepgh dot org.  We hope to see you there.  Feel free to pass on the invitation to others.

Upcoming events

First, Entrepreneurial Thursdays will be on Thursday July 29th  starting at 6PM on at Little E’s Jazz Club. There will be a panel of start up companies talking about their experiences starting a technology business in Pittsburgh. Current panelists include Bueda, DeviceKnit, Kore Innovations, and representative from Trustwave which was formerly Bit Armor.  While there is a panel ready to present, come and add your experiences to the mix as Karl helps R&B/Jazz Singer Jessica Lee host this event. If you’d like to be involved in a panel at this show let Karl Schieneman know at Karl dot Schieneman at jurinnov dot com . There will also be a panel of support groups such as Alpha Labs,  The Pittsburgh Technology Council and us, DevHouse PGH, sharing how we try to help the region too. For any of the groups who wants to talk, let Karl know and he will add you.

Little E’s Jazz Club is located at 949 Liberty Avenue on the 2nd Floor above Mahoney’s.

Secondly, DevHouse PGH will be having a cookout at Karl’s Place August 14th 3PM till later. More details to come in July.

Summer Break

DevHouse PGH will be taking a summer hiatus so there will be no coding sessions in June or July. We will be having an event in August details TBD.

Additionally we are looking for help with running the organization. If you are interested we particularly need help keeping our web site and Twitter stream up to date.  And as always we welcome any suggestions you have for making DevHouse PGH a better organization.

DevHouse May 18th 2010 Lightning talks at REMEDY

Our next event will be at REMEDY in Lawrenceville starting at 6PM. We are going to be focusing a little bit more on lightning talks for this event and we are hoping that you all will bring in something to talk about. Remember that lightning talks are ideally short and shouldn’t require too much preparation. Slides are nice but totally not required. Subjects can be technical or business related or anything really.

Also we would really like to hear what you all think of DevHouse. How do all perceive us and how would you like us to change? Let us know on twitter or send us some email at info AT devhousepgh DOT org. Also we are looking for some more leadership particularly a more technically inclined person.

Senator Dodd’s Financial Reform Bill.

Joe Barron talked a little bit at our last meeting about a bill being proposed in congress that could cause serious problems for anyone looking to invest in or get investment for early stage companies. Here is a blog entry about the Financial Reform Bill by Washington State based Dan Rosen & Associates, an angel investment organization similar to Pittsburgh area’s Blue Tree Capital. Today would be a good day to talk to our PA senators Arlen Specter and Robert Casey about your opinions on sections 412, 413 and 926 of the Financial Reform Bill.

DevHouse March 16th 2010

We are happy to announce we have been able to reschedule all our speakers from our canceled February event for our March meeting on the 16th. All information is the same we are still at Alpha Lab and we are still starting at 6:00PM with talks at 7:00pm. Hope to see you there.

DevHouse Feb 2010 details

DevHouse Febuary 16th 2010

UPDATE: DevHouse February has been canceled due to weather. We will be rescheduling.

DevHouse for February will be held at at AlphaLab, 2325 East Carson Street,doors at 6:00PM talks at 7:00PM

We have some very excellent speakers this month at DevHouse.

Firstly will have Jim Jen Director of AlphaLab will giving a talk about AlphaLab and Innovation Works and some of the recent changes in the Alpha Lab programs.

Next we are very pleased to have Joe Barron a Principal from Socius Partners, LLC, a consulting service which assists technology start ups. He will be speaking about Angel Investing. Joe been has part of many influential Pittsburgh Technology companies including FORE Systems, Marconi PLC, TrueBaseline, and recently Talkshoe, and Malabar Partners, and is sure to provided some great advice and insight.

We will also have speaking Jeff Kovacs Director of the Emerging Business And Technology Group
Director of Quality Control at Alpern Rosenthal an accounting and strategic services company who’s corporate offices are located here in Pittsburgh.

We can’t stress enough how what a great line up of speakers we have for this event. You are sure to come away with something really useful, especially if you are thinking of becoming or are involved in a start-up company. Even if you aren’t these guys have been involved with some great success stories and you are sure not to come away without something. And as with every DevHouse there is sure to be good conversations on code, technology, and business.

Hope to see you there and if you can help us spread the word about this event on twitter, Facebook, your local mailing list and company.

Also we would like to highlight a blog post by a local Pittsburgh bloger Josh Sager about the scope of the Pittsburgh technology community check it out at his blog. We really do have a great tech city.

DevHouse January 2009 wrap-up

Things people talked about at the session.

XOmB – an exokernel operating system being written by students at the University of Pittsburgh targeting current gen multi-core 64bit hardware.

http://xomb.net

Hackey Hack and how to contribute to OSS projects presented by Steve Klabnik

http://docs.google.com/present/view?id=dcfdkdc9_61pm3kcgf4&interval=30

http://hacketyhack.heroku.com/

http://twitter.com/hacketyhack

Crisis Commons – an international volunteer network of professionals who build custom technology solution for humanitarian crisis.

http://crisiscommons.org/

2009 in Review

January

Lightning Talk DevHousePGH Event at Remedy.

• Dave Nelson from Talkshoe talked about Talkshoe and lessons learned from the experience.
• Miriam Goldberg with FuseCal talked about sharing calendar technology she is writing code for.
• Karl Schieneman presented the next AlphaLabs entry deadline for start up funding.

March

Lightning Talk DevHousePGH Event at Remedy.

• Eric Kline from Morgan Lewis & Bockius on raising money in today’s market. A description of what deals today look like and how much is involved.
• Andy Fraley, former CIO from Co-Manage and key employee at Fore Systems talked about his experiences with Cloud Computing services and evaluating their tool kits and support for building software.
• Khalid Harun gave an update on the DevHouse Pgh website.
• Nick Pinkston talked about Hack Pittsburgh and their new facility.

April

DevHousePGH coordinated a very successful networking meeting called Pittsburgh Technology Mash Up Event on April 23rd at Alpha Labs Groups that participated or were invited:

• Rossum
• Pittsburgh Flash Users Group
• Web Developers Meetup
• Coding Dojo
• PodCampPGH
• Alphalabs
• Hack Pittsburgh
• Pitt MFUG
• Web Design Meetup
• Pittsburgh Geeks
• wplug
• Refresh Pittsburgh
• DevHousePGH

June

We met at Hack Pittsburgh to see the new hacker space that had recently opened in Pittsburgh.
Hack Pittsburgh gave a presentation on what they offer.

• Karl Schieneman gave an assessment of the history of DevHousePGH to date and the need to get a technologist to take an active role in managing DevHousePGH. Hack Pittsburgh offered to host monthly DevHouse meetings and a working group started planning scheduled DevHousePGH events.

July

First Month coding only session at Hack Pittsburgh

August

Lightning Talk DevHousePGH Event at Remedy.

• Pritam Advani CEO of PCN closings gave a talk about how to create a business plane for a technology company. Pritam has been a serial tech entrepreneur and has created over $6 mill. in shareholder value at TechRX, eTransport, and PCN closings.

September

Coding only session at Hack Pittsburgh.

October

Coding only session at Hack Pittsburgh.

November

Lightning Talk DevHousePGH Event at Remedy.

• John Rodney, a tax and corporate attorney with Thorp Reed & Armstrong talked about various methods of incorporation and their advantages and disadvantages as well as common mistakes that startups make.
• Robert Emmert, Managing Director and a Principal with Metronome Labs SEO spoke about their product for gathering mettrics on websites and applications as well as Metronome Labs unique aproche to growing a bussiness.
• B6 Systems Presented Java PureFace, a system of developing JSF using primarily JAVA code eliminating large amounts of XML configuration.

December

Coding only session at Hack Pittsburgh.

Upcoming Events for next 6 months

January 19th

Coding only session at Hack Pittsburgh

February 16th

Lighting Talk DevHousePGH Event.

• Joe Barron – Blue Tree Capital. Invited speakers Jim Jen Innovation Works and Jeff Kovacs Alpern Rosenthal. Common theme is raising capital in today’s market.
• Karl Schieneman – Update on meetings with Pittsburgh Technology Council and Innovation Works to assist with marketing DevHousePgh.

Location TBD (either Innovation Works or Remedy in Lawrenceville.)

March 16th & April 20th

Coding only session at Hack Pittsburgh

May 18th

Lightning Talk DevHousePGH Event

Invitations have been sent out to solicit speakers from local technology companies.

June 15th

Coding only session at Hack Pittsburgh