May (and Almost June) in Review

I’m getting really bad at keeping this up to date. Here’s what you missed if you haven’t been following along with the 15 second blurbs on Facebook and Twitter. And yes I’m breaking bog rules by not including links or photos.  I’m just happy to have 10 free minutes on a sunny coffee shop deck to bang this out.

  • If you didn’t catch the US Soccer game vs Panama at Century Link on June 11, you really missed out on a great experience.  At least 40,000 fans made their way into the stadium.  You really have to wonder why the Mariners and Major League Baseball didn’t try to move the Astros/Mariners game up to 12:40 for a business person special. I mean, with all those out of towners visiting Seattle for the day, some percentage would have started their festivities at the baseball field.  You certainly would have drawn more than the estimated 3,500 fans you got trying to compete with a once every 40 year occurrence. I still haven’t sorted any of the 450 pics I took, but you can see them all here.
  • Congrats to all of my former students who took home prizes in the UW Business Plan Competition in May (links to come.) ZGirls featured former MKTG 555 student Libby Ludlow, and iHome3D featured former student Nelson Huang.  Alvaro Jimenez and Dave Knight put in strong perfromance as well with Elemental Hotels and a host of the folks from the TMMBA class went on to the final 32 and 16. Big winner was Alan Luo from MKTG 555’s Team Happy Back, whose BPC team Pure Blue Technologies won the whole shibang.  Nice work guys.
  • If you haven’t made it to a Seattle Tech Meetup yet, I would mix it into your networking event rotation. It has start-up flavor, but isn’t 100% focused on start-ups.  So there’s a nice mix of people. Red and Brett do a great job mixing in networking time, short presentations, good speakers, great sponsors and free food and drink.  Check the next one out.
  • On a side note, the seat belt law is stupid.  I’ve never been in an accident, am stopped at a light, take off my seat belt to reach back to the back seat and grab something out of my bag, when all of a sudden State Patrol Officer Snoopy Brains drives by.  Forget the fact that he nearly causes his own traffic incident for parking his patrol car in the middle of the road waiting for the light to change, and forget the fact that by the time he pulls me over my seat belt is back on.  The guy still writes up a ticket.  Seriously WSP – 20 years and no accidents and like one speeding ticket 15 years ago. I have health insurance.  Is the state budget in such bad shape that you need to be searching for seat belt offenders, and not even let me explain the situation? He tried to give me a ticket for lack of insurance because I was pulling up the cards on my phone and he didn’t want to wait for me to find them.  Annoying.

More stuff is coming in the next few weeks. So come back soon.