Matt Bigelow – Digital Media

I have agreed to write a monthly article called “Nashville Pulse” for Digital Nashville, the free-to-join networking group dedicated to all things digital in the Music City. The idea is to survey what’s going on in Nashville every month in the digital world, and this month’s installment takes a look at how digital companies are pulling through the recession.

Digital Game Development

At BarCamp Nashville 2009, at least 58 different presentations offered a veritable plethora of options for Nashville’s digerati to learn about, get involved with and participate in topics as varied as search engine optimization to producing original content for Microsoft’s Xbox platform. At least seven of those sessions, a significant minority in a town known more for honky tonks and healthcare, touched directly or indirectly on a topic for which Nashville garners little clout: gaming and game development.

“It’s picked up really in the last year or two,” says Caleb Garner, who since 1998 has been trying on and off to grow the Nashville game development community.

Gardner and fellow game developer Scott Southworth run Part12Studio, an independent game development company, as well as the Nashville game developer’s group.

Read more at DigitalNashville.net.

I have agreed to write a monthly article called “Nashville Pulse” for Digital Nashville, the free-to-join networking group dedicated to all things digital in the Music City. The idea is to survey what’s going on in Nashville every month in the digital world, and this month’s installment takes a look at how digital companies are pulling through the recession.

coworking

It’s taken over a year, a number of meetings, plenty of online chatter and the wrangling of three distinct initiatives, but it looks like Coworking may finally come to Nashville.

Led by Chuck Bryant and Jackson Miller, with support from the Nashville Technology Council, Coworking Nashville hopes to make an announcement soon regarding available space and a tiered membership plan for coworking aimed at Nashville’s budding technology and general geek audiences. Although Bryant offered a tour of the proposed space, the group is on the cusp of forming a formal LLC and signing a lease, and will wait to divulge details until after a formal announcement is made.

Coworking, for the unfamiliar, targets independent creative types who desire the sense of community and collaboration that comes from a shared work environment, without the bureaucracy of a corporate job.

Read more at DigitalNashville.net.

(This is an excerpt from a blog post I wrote over at ParthenonPub.com, my employer’s blog.)

Amid the financial turmoil plaguing the newspaper industry as a whole, accusations and general finger-pointing has abounded as industry players scramble to figure who’s to blame. You’ve heard the culprits:

* Greedy owners took on huge debt while banking on unrealistic future profits.
* The recession.
* The Internet.
* And then, of course, many have argued that newspaper journalists themselves were too slow to adapt to the digital landscape.

A recent report by Northwestern University’s Media Management Center, “Life Beyond Print: Newspaper Journalists’ digital appetite,” sheds a bit of light on this last one at least.

Read more…

This past weekend I attended Nashville’s Startup Weekend. If you’re unfamiliar with the Startup Weekend concept, here’s a primer. I attended the event last year as well, and my two experiences couldn’t have been more dissimilar. Here are my lessons learned:

1. Leadership Matters

Last year, I voted for teams based entirely upon how impressed I was with the person pitching the idea. I was new to Nashville, and therefore figured I may as well just align myself with someone who (at least in all appearances) knew what they were doing.

This year, I shifted gears a bit.

My criteria for ideas was simple: “Does this sound like a fun way to spend a weekend?”

Having taken those two different approaches, I can say that picking a team based on leadership makes an enormous difference.

If you want to spend a weekend working in a creative environment, go with the idea.

If you want to launch a business in a weekend, go with leadership.

(I want to add the caveat that we had an awesome team with some really interesting people. We just didn’t have any one person, myself included, who decided to step up and provide the leadership necessary to carry the idea through to execution.)

Continue reading »

UPDATE: Read the write up on “Tales From the Road” to hear how they plan to celebrate.

The Society of American Travel Writers announced its Lowell Thomas Travel Journalism awards over the weekend at its annual convention down in Guadalajara, Mexico. Southern Living magazine’s “Tales From the Road” blog garnered the Bronze in the travel blog category.

When I was a lowly “Web-tern” at SouthernLiving.com, I helped the editorial team get the blog off the ground, and even contributed some posts here and there.

Kudos to SL!

I have agreed to write a monthly article called “Nashville Pulse” for Digital Nashville, the free-to-join networking group dedicated to all things digital in the Music City. The idea is to survey what’s going on in Nashville every month in the digital world, and this month’s installment takes a look at how digital companies are pulling through the recession.

The recession may be winding down, but Nashville firms remain cautious…

Halfway through September, U.S. Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke claimed “the recession is very likely over at this point,” but cautioned that economic recovery would seem weak for a while.

A quick survey of area digital firms seems to confirm Bernanke’s caveat, as local companies don’t expect a boom in activity any time soon.

“People are looking for ways to save money. They’re really running at a high break-neck rate,” says Bruce McCully, owner and founder of Dynamic Edge, Inc., the IT and computer support firm with offices in both Nashville and Ann Arbor, Michigan. The firm’s products are selling well, but sales of its services and consultation have slowed down, McCully says.

Read more at DigitalNashville.net.

Just stumbled across the following video report on social media in the workplace, via Nathan Moore over at Anthology Creative, a local Web Dev firm here in Nashville. I wrote on this before here, and I couldn’t agree more with Nathan’s assessment.

Whatever you do in your free time is a reflection on you, right? You are you. Your actions on the weekend reflect on your 9-to-5 life and vis versa.

Video Link

I’ll reiterate what I said earlier. Two things must happen (and, indeed, are happening).

1) Employees will be more mindful of their personal behavior and how it reflects on them professionally (or at least they will when they know there’s a digital camera in the room).

2) Employers will become a little laxer when reviewing social networking profiles of employees and potential hires.

Your take? Agree? Disagree?

So I met yesterday with Elin Mulron and Clay Willingham, both members of the leadership team over at Digital Nashville, to discuss story ideas for an upcoming feature/column I am writing for Digital Nashville’s e-newsletter. I wanted to make the ideas public in case you fellow Nashville digital folks have ideas, contacts, etc.

Coworking in Nashville

For the uninitiated, Coworking involves freelance, start up and entrepreneurial-minded folks who rent office space on the cheap from a partnering organization. Where Coworking differs from, say, just simply renting office space from any old random company, however, is that coworkers value collaboration and the benefits of sharing space with like-minded individuals.

So what do you think? Interesting? Uninteresting? What questions come to mind?

Social Media Marketing

Marketing via social media sites (Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, etc.) gets a lot of press these days, so I’m looking for innovative examples from the area that are helping company’s bottom line. (Think “boring” companies doing interesting things or small companies doing big things.)

Got any examples? Send them my way.

Entrepreneurship/StartUps/Product Launches in Nashville

I’ll be following area blogs (both niche and company) for news, but if you have any tips, send them along.

Web Development

This is for all you Web Dev shops out there. Up to anything interesting? Pitch me.

Gaming

Nashville isn’t viewed by many as a gaming town, but more and more developers are getting into it based on the existence of great distributive platforms (think gpsAssassins for the iPhone, or Klouds on addictinggames.com).

Any other Nashville examples?

And for the rest of you Digital Nashville folks – anything else you’d like to see covered? Trending topics? Interesting stories?

Send them my way…

I just wrote and published an article on studying Spanish in Guatemala over on MatadorAbroad.com, part of Matador Travel, an online community for travelers. An excerpt:

Studying Spanish in Guatemala: Quetzaltenango Vs. Antigua

Most foreign travelers looking to learn Spanish in Guatemala make Antigua their first and longest stop, charmed by its cobblestone streets and its lively bar and club scene. More serious travelers, however, take the 4-hour bus ride to Quetzaltenango (or Xela) for a different kind of experience.

While Antigua offers a lot, there are compelling reasons for giving Guatemala’s second city another look. Read more…

Stop on over, read it over and leave a comment if you’re so inclined. Thanks!

Toddlers on the backs of motorcycles. Hunching over a river of lava for a photo op. A waterfall hike over a rickety bridge (not to mention the police escort lest robbers attacked us on the way).

After four weeks in Guatemala, I’ve concluded that “safe” is a relative term at best.

It’s the little things…

Roasting marshmallows over the lava of Pacaya - a typical gringo activity outside Antigua.

Not unlike other American travelers outside the States, I had my fair share of moments thinking, “There would so be a guardrail there if this were the U.S.” But even in the more mundane instances of life, I couldn’t help but feel that we Americans are a bit over protective.

Take the children for example. Our host family had four girls under the age of 12. Almost their entire house was floored with the same unforgiving surface, including the landing next to their staircase, which in turn lacked “proper” guard rails. The entire house certainly wasn’t what I’ve learned to consider “child proof.”

And it’s not as if the kids never fell down. They did. They just learned that it hurt like crazy and so learned not to do it again.

It reminded me of a professor I had at Xavier who claimed that, if he had had kids, he would not buy them bicycle helmets. “I want them to learn to not fall on their heads!” he would exclaim.

A happy medium…

That said, I think there’s a middle ground between coddling kids and neglect, when it comes to child rearing, and between overprotective and dangerous, when it comes to safe habits in general.

Besides, as an urban dweller with a bicycle, I’m actually for bicycle helmets.