I’ve spent about two weeks there over this summer. Between the Utah Transit Authority’s rail system, my bike and some creative carpooling I didn’t have to drive to one meeting, or even to our offices in Draper. It was like living in San Francisco yet surrounded by mountains and ski resorts. Every time I hang out in downtown catching great music shows (like Lucero and Langhorne Slim) I can’t help but think that Reno is but 20 years behind in size yet poised with the opportunity to focus our town’s growth curve with more emphasis on land resource planning, mass transit and all the green-in-between. Where Salt Lake will suffer is that their hockey-stick growth phase occurred during cheap gas and real estate. Consequently their town is a very car-dependent culture where people live dozens and dozens of miles from their place of work.

So back to Reno:

Jason Geddes kicks ass. Not only does he share in my penchant for cowboy boots, shirts with mother-of-pearl buttons and chasing Chukar, but he’s local visionary leader that’s dragging Reno (sometimes kicking and screaming) into a future that I want to live in. A Winnemucca/Gabbs native, petroleum chemist and former State Assemblyman, Jason assisted Chuck Alvey take the patchouli-edge off of “green” in the EDAWN business development and economic diversification dialog and made huge progress in his time there. Currently he’s a Regent with the University of Nevada and serves the City of Reno as our town’s Environmental services Administrator. He’s also married to Cindy Geddes who’s one of the best writers here locally.

Jason got the Green Summit off of the ground last year. The first Green Summit was held in April of 2007 and served as a dialogue between Council, staff, and citizens on what the City could do to make Reno more “green”. There were almost 400 people in attendance. The 2008 Green Summit is intended to be a report back to the community on action taken since the last summit, and a continued dialogue on what the City should have as priorities in the 2008-2009 Green Action plan.

[Side note: Jason works with another great organization in this community, Nevada EcoNET. Every Wednesday night this summer the City of Reno's West Street Market features “Eco-Nights” produced by Nevada EcoNet. Click here to read about it. Props to Lauren Siegel and the City of Reno for putting this on!] 

Here’s the deets on the 2008 City of Reno Green Summit:

Location: Joe Crowley Student Union-Ballroom, University of Nevada, Reno

Time: 1-5pm, Date: September 20

Program:

• 1:00-1:45 Welcome by Mayor and Council and Report to Community
• 1:45-2:30 Keynote Speaker- Rocky Anderson, Former Mayor of Salt Lake City
• 2:30-3:00 Break
• 3:00-5:00 Concurrent Break-Out Sessions –Moderated
• A- Single Stream Recycling and Plastic Bag Bans
• B- Education/Youth Programs-EnAct/Youth City Council
• C- Green Building and Sierra Green Guidelines
• D- Transportation

Keynote Speaker – The Honorable Rocky Anderson, founder of High Road for Human Rights, practiced law for 21 years; representing plaintiffs in antitrust, securities fraud, professional negligence, and civil rights cases. He then served as mayor of Salt Lake City from 2000 to 2008.

His comprehensive environmental programs, including an aggressive climate protection campaign, achieved a 31% reduction in greenhouse gas emissions in Salt Lake City’s municipal operations.

For his leadership on climate change, Anderson received the Climate Protection Award from the EPA, the Distinguished Service Award from the Sierra Club, and the World Leadership Award from the World Leadership Forum.

Anderson is now working to achieve municipal and regional support for climate protection initiatives and to provide grassroots education and advocacy opportunities in the areas of human rights and climate change.

  Incidentally, here’s some photos I snapped on the ‘ol trusty Nokia N95 while I was roaming downtown Salt Lake City with @leilanis during National Ride Your Bike to Work Week campaign. Obviously I thought it was brilliant!

Online Registration:
Members: Free
Students, AMA, A2N2 Members $20
Other Non-Members: $30

At the door:
Members: Free
Students, AMA, A2N2 Members $30
Other Non-Members: $40

More Information

View Map

Register Now

• First up is a Deanne Stillman book-signing at Sundance Bookstore. Deanne’s latest book, “Mustang: The Saga of the Wild Horse in the American West,” was published today. The event starts at 6:30pm. Click [here] for directions to Sundance. Also, please visit: www.nvwildhorses.com to join a community dialog on this subject.
• After the booksigning, the Reno-Tahoe AIGA (that stands for American Institute for Graphic Arts) is screening Helvetica on the Nevada Museum of Art’s rooftop.

“Mustang: The Saga of the Wild Horse in the American West” Booksigning

Deanne had an article in the LA Times last week. Here’s an excerpt:

Wild horses aren’t free

Failure to enforce a 1971 law endangers the mustangs it was supposed to protect.

By Deanne Stillman
June 2, 2008

It’s not news that America is a cowboy nation, but it may surprise many that we are destroying the horse we rode in on.

Since the early 1970s, mustangs — wild horses — have been protected under the Wild Free-Roaming Horses and Burro Act, spearheaded by Velma Johnston, a.k.a. Wild Horse Annie. In 1950, she saw blood spilling out of a truck on a Nevada highway, followed it, and then witnessed injured and dying mustangs being offloaded at a slaughterhouse. She led a battle to stop the cruel roundups, resulting in the passage of federal protection signed into law by President Nixon in 1971.

Under that law, horses are to be “considered in areas where presently found as an integral part of the system of public lands.” Their management falls to agencies inside the Department of the Interior, primarily the Bureau of Land Management, which culls the herds based on the land’s grazing capacity and what’s required to sustain the wild horse population. But the government also balances the needs of horses against other uses of the range — and that means corporate cattle ranching. Today, instead of being protected, mustangs are in danger of being “managed” out of existence.

At Twelve Horses (where I’m employed) we kinda stirred up the dust on the wild horse issue and did a video podcast and created a social community to foster more dialog on the subject. Here’s the video, and if you will, please join www.nvwildhorses.com and let’s find some resolution to this issue. Our aim to get folks leveraging social media to draw the attention, air out the facts and protect our State’s brand.

Helvetica: Rooftop Film Screening Party at NMA

Thursday June 12, 7pm: Nevada Museum of Art

Join us for a rooftop screening of the acclaimed documentary Helvetica on the 51st birthday of the typeface. We will be serving birthday cake and beverages and the museum galleries will be open prior to showtime.

7pm – Food, drink and museum galleries, 8pm – Showtime

Members | Free
Student non-members | $10
Non-members | $20

Everyone is encouraged to bring a guest, free of charge.

Register [here].

It was a long weekend of shooting and we all had an excellent time staying up all night watching Reno native writer/director Justin Francis work his magic. A Flickr slideshow is here.

A year later, Modest Mouse is playing at the Grand Sierra Resort on Tuesday 5/27 the whole Twelve Horses crew is going to support and draw attention to GabrielsLife.org. Modest Mouse is an amazing band in the first place, but this whole experience has made them even more amazing with the attention it has brought to Reno and to GabrielsLife.org.

The Backstory:

Many of you know my best friend / local attorney Matt Francis. We met on the UNR ski team back in 1988. His younger brother Justin Francis is an amazing music video producer/videographer having done music videos for artists like Gwen Stefani, Alicia Keyes, Mariah Carey, the Hives and on and on and on….they guy never stops shooting videos and commercials.

Anyway, he pitched Modest Mouse on shooting a video of their song “Little Motel” in the town he grew up in, Reno Nevada with a script he had written. He asked Cody to play a role in it. If you’ve not seen the video, now would be a good time to watch it so the rest of this blog post makes sense!

Modest Mouse – Little Motel

For obvious reasons, the subject of the video was difficult at best. My wife and I had our reservations about having our son play a role in such a tragic story. I mean, would you? Every time I watch this video I tear up and cry. If you made it through this video and are still dry-eyed, you’re definitely not a parent!

Leilani, Twelve Horses’ Social Marketing Manager, talked my wife and I in to letting Cody doing the video. I work closely with Leilani every day and she’s been a tremendous role model in my life. If you have had the wonderful opportunity to get to know her, then you are undoubtedly aware of the tragedy in Leilani’s life due to Hydrocephalus and the amazing leadership and courage that has led her to launch GabrielsLife.org. If you’ve never read this story or met Leilani, please take a moment to do so and sup[port this organization. Also, there’s a great story that the local newspaper did here: http://www.rgj.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20080129/LIV/801290331.

Now it’s almost a year later and I’m reading the hundreds and hundreds of comments of how deeply moved people are by this video Justin wrote.

Our family is absolutely proud of being part of a project that has reminded so many people how precious life is and how powerful connections are. Through family, friends and the online social media, tragedy, writing, creativity and friendly helping people have all had an opportunity to inspire each other. That’s cool.

If you’re in Reno Tuesday, I hope to see you at the Modest Mouse concert! We’ll all be there!

The men’s bathroom stalls of pretty much every ski resort in Colorado during the 1980s were adorned with that poem. Standard issue. And when AIDS became mainstream, we hung boxes of “Texas T-Shirts” in those same men’s stalls. Despite being the economic life-blood of the Colorado Mountain Ski-Town, by-and-large the Texan’s typically arrogant, loud, flashy and better-than-you we-got-helluva-lotta-oil-money attitude created a fueled our bathroom poet laureates. More often than not…with PLENTY of good cause! They could be horribly demeaning: “Do y’all even have schools here?” Action-reaction. JR Ewing was not an aberration.

I spent most of my youth working in my Dad’s shops at the ski resort waiting on those Texans that bought the “Knee-Deep Sky-High” T-shirts, I-Ski Sunglasses, Scott goggles, Smith no-fog-cloths and Playboys/Penthouses from us at a rate so frequent and high enough margin that our family could eat and afford ski. This was the 80’s. Big oil money. Texans in 10 gallon hats and dinner-plate sized gold belt buckles. JR Ewings in sheepskin coats doused in too much men’s cologne smelling like Scotch.

By and large I was treated like dirt working in the ski shop. And not because I was a punk ski-town kid looking to meet their daughters either! It was my age. I noticed they treated their own kids the same way, and their kids had tremendous contempt for them. ”Junior” was an idiot for not being old enough to drink or drive. Their interactions with my father, however, were quite the opposite. Dad was usually trying to grade P-CHEM 401 tests while ringing up customers in the shop. Professor-by-day-entrepreneur-by-night. After they learned he was a nuclear scientist-turned-college professor turned Dad-in-Crested Butte-outdoors-bum who hunted elk and flyfished the local waters since he was age 10 and was raising a 3rd generation of skiers, they couldn’t spend enough time talking to him. Apparently, age, intelligence and ‘intrestingness’ had a lot to do with how you were treated by adults.

“What kind of sunglasses would YOU wear?”

Every so often a Long Tall Texan would make a connection with me…the punk kid at the ski resort. They’d hang out in the store for 30 minutes longer and ask me lots of questions. “What’s the best locals hang-out? Who’s got the best steak? If I really want to get a good instructor, who should I ask for? What’s the scariest run? Where can I buy some cocaine? <got that a lot in the 80s>”

To my surprise, they’d often remember my name year-after-year as they showed up for their annual two-week family ski vacation. Sometimes they would give me a crisp $20.00, $50.00 or even a $100.00 bill for helping carry luggage, lug some firewood up to their condo, or sherpa their skis over to the shop for tuning. A crisp Ben to a 14-year-old was unforgettable. Most, it seemed, carried money clips with inlaid turquoise fat with what appeared to be $10,000 folded up. These rare-breed Texans asked me lots of questions and listened intently to my answers. They, in turn, often gave me some really great advice. They were simple. One in a thousand, and they stood out, and not because of the Willy Bogner fur-lined one-piece they were wearing.

As I rambled in to college I  took many internships and jobs with the “local elite” and “national elite”. Mostly I worked for the National Judicial College where I met and mingled with thousands of the nation’s best and most respected judges. Again, like the JR Ewings, most could not be bothered to acknowledge someone many years younger than them. Maybe a “thanks” for holding a door open.

And yet this time, when the I observed the odd judge interact among their peers and later on with me I realized what natural leaders they were and how comfortable they were in any social setting. Mills Lane was one of those judges. (Maybe he spotted that can of Copenhagen in my pocket and we became friends over that.) Or maybe all that time he spent refereeing boxing matches with Mike Tyson gave him an affinity to hang out with people much younger than him. But he was genuinely interested in my perspectives when we talked and he would remember our conversations year-after-year. There were several others like that and over time I realized they were similar to Mills Lane in their communities. Very prominent, very self-confident and very passionate about their vision. They always transcended the age-barrier. It was as if they were ageless. They were simply comfortable hanging out with any age-demographic. I first met Chuck Alvey then. He was the GM for Channel 8 and not the EDAWN CEO he is now. He probably doesn’t remember, but he and I hung out many times chatting on the lunch patio at the Judicial College.

I interned at the Truckee Meadows Regional Planning Agency when Elisa Maser (then Erquiaga and the assistant director) was defining and implementing the Regional Quality-of-Life Factors. (Whole post on that someday!) I spent a year forming and holding these focus groups with every mucky-muck in town and once again experienced largely the same repeated pattern. I met the CEO of the Chamber of Commerce over 20 times for the “first time”. The then-Mayor verbally berrated me for not having ice for the sodas in front of 10 other local leaders when I had nothing to do with F&B. And then Max Page — a man I would later work for at Fitzgeralds — hung out with me and asked me a bunch of questions about what I thought about downtown Reno and what should be done.

The battle between the young, inexperienced and often idealistic versus the older, experienced, scared and more realistic generations seems to be forever-generations old. That sucks.

I intend to be the older dude  in the suit that holds the door open for the college kid instead of vice versa. I’ll think I’ll enjoy being a bridge between generations as I slide out of my 30s and in to my 40s. My parties and companies will be filled with both the young-in-age and mature in mind and the older in age and ageless in attitude folks. The self-important age discriminating can stay home uninvited and bitch about how the world is out to get them and why the age-demographic on the other end is holding them back. 

It shouldn’t be about the age of a person. It’s about the connections and the conversation between people. Age discrimination is a concern and practice of the self-conscious, the ignorant and the unethical individuals unwilling to remake themselves in to the human being necessary to gain access, acceptance and rapport with others.

…stay Tuned for Part II

• Esquire Magazine Article: Print No. 12: The Dirtiest Secret in Nevada (Reno)
  This is AWESOME. From Esquire: “You cannot deconstruct Reno. It’s ruddy and rock hard, self-evident and openhearted. Reno is of a whole. It is a city, not an event.” Bingo. From Esquire’s second annual register of emerging ideas,
  (tags: reno nevada vegas branding outdoors adventure)
• Esquire Magazine Article: Print No. 13: The Best Breakfast in America
  The author — Tom Chiarella — blows the secret on what we already know: “Don’t leave Reno without stopping at Peg’s Glorified Ham & Eggs for breakfast. They’re glorified for a reason.” Great to see Reno get some *real* treatment from a non-RV driving writer. Thanks Tom for the great ‘investigatory’!
  (tags: reno nevada vegas branding outdoors adventure)
• Checkout my previous story on The Biggest Little City in the World 2.0

#1: ‘Get Yo’ Global Look On’ your business card

A 44-year-old unemployed ’seasoned senior executive vice president of sales’ person says to me, “Why’s there a plus sign in your phone number? Is that a typo?” Nooooo!

Business cards that are “global friendly” immediately communicate that you have a passport and are capable of surviving outside the US on your own. Or that you’re aware that the US is not the only place in the world that has phones. That maybe you actually know/interact with someone outside the US.

More than likely, you are experienced/capable of interacting with other professionals outside of the US and you do that frequently enough that it’s important to have a global-friendly phone numbers that include the country-code. I can run through a pile of 1,000 business cards from folks I’ve met recently and immediately tell you who has gold/platinum status on United and is capable of speaking in front of large audiences by this simple little trait alone. (For now, I guess. I just blew the secret!)

The international seasoned professional simply includes the mobile-phone friendly country code, i.e: +1.775.555.5555. The key here is to simply include the County Code (CC). Here in the US it’s “1″. +1 on mobile devices. We do this because phone numbers in pretty much every country outside of the US and Canada are totally f’n confusing. Want to send a txt to someone in another country? You have to use the +CC.86.311.456.12345

(BTW, seasoned globe-trotters carry ATT or T-Mobile phones. Sprint & Verizon largely don’t work outside the US.)

#2: UPPER CASE EMAIL ADDRESS IS BAD. lowercase everything communicates way emo-hip-startup-with-not-a-lot-of-revenue

You’re email address should always be all lower case. BAD: DAVID@IMADORK.COM. Weak: David@ImADork.com. good: david@imadork.com. Punctuation still matters on everything. Typically well designed business cards that are in all lower case shouts: Hey! I work at a small start-up where we jobbed our corporate collateral to an emo identity designer/we’re trying waaaayyyyy to hard to be hip and cool!!! Companies over 10million in revenue largely care about proper punctuation on their business cards. Startups that are too cool for school are less than 1 million in revenue.

#3: No mobile phone number on the business card.

This guy interviewing with us sporting a sweet Motorola Star-Tac said to me: “I’m sorry, I keep my mobile phone number private and only give it out to my close friends and family.” That was in 1994.

Sorry to bust out the big news on some of you: <cough> It’s 2007. If you still have a land-line, you’re getting kinda weird. I absolutely think it’s quaint of those folks that still think of their mobile phone a private luxury only to be used to call AAA for a flat tire or to let their honey know they’ll be late for dinner. Yeah, back in 1992 when I paid CellularOne $1.25 a minute with “no free anytime minutes” (yeah, shocking!) I was kinda stingy too. Now I chaw down 2000 minutes, 3000 sms and an all-u-can-eat data plan for ~$100.00/month. And guess what? You can too! 

Seriously, get over it. Give it up. There’s nothing gained by being stingy with that mobile phone of yours. And guess what, it get’s stranger: I actually don’t want to call you! I’ll be more likely sending you a text message.

No text messaging plan? Great! I can’t think of a better way to nonverbally tell someone, “Hello. I stopped evolving as a functional part of the professional business world in 1999 and please consider me to be unemployable. Dude, let’s trade voicemails and faxes!!!” C’mon. 33% of the kids 12 and under are more freakin’ connected than you. Get with the ’00’s.

#4: Print-at-home says “Unemployable”

Word.

#5. Kill your FAX number.

Get rid of the fax. Shoot it. Blow it up. And PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE don’t put it on your card business card unless you’re a lawyer who still uses Word Perfect 5.1.

Fortunately the folks who still send/receive fax’s don’t read blogs so I don’t need to hammer down this point to much. I’m pretty sure I’ve “faxed” two people in the last year. One was a practical joke. I typed up an email, printed it, and then faxed it to a friend who works for a prominent US Senator who employes interns to print his email for him and then called him and left a long voice mail asking him if he got my email. hahaha!

In a world where we send/receive hundreds of email, + txt, IM, facebook, myspace, do we really need to send/receive faxes? Replace that with your Yahoo!, AIM, Skype, Gtalk!

#6. Holy-mother-of-all sweet receding hairlines/sick vertical bang factor 10x! Dump that photo!

This is rather narrow nit and aimed particularly at my black-turtleneck-wearing real-estate/insurance/human resources bro’s. Leave the photo off the business card. Seriously. That Sears model look you’re sporting ultimately does you more harm than good unless you moonlight at Tao in a bathtub. Replace that photo and reclaim that space with links to your facebook/MySpace/LinkedIn/Flickr/Tumblr/WordPress/Typepad/etc. so we can see some better photos of you and your family/friends and validate you’re not a total dangleberrier freak.

Oddly enough, not having an online avatar/profile photo on the social networking sites says “I’m a freak/lurker.” Again, it’s 2007. Something’s wrong if you don’t have a digital photo of yourself at all. One that’s semi pro looking or minimally visually complimentary says a lot about to the degree to which you clean up and care to function professionally.

#7. Serif Type Face or an ignorant use of MS Comic Sans, Hobo or Arial Black

Don’t get me wrong, there’s a lot of serif types that kick-ass and I love it and it looks awesome. But on a business card that will more-than-likely be scanned, serif gets hard to read and is totally the civil engineer, tax attorney or banking/finance look. That’s OK if you’re one of them kind of folk. If you don’t know why using Hobo is like writing “I’m a dumbass” on your forehead and hanging out in front of Hot Topic at the mall with an OrangeJulius in your hand then go right ahead and use it. Or hire a trained professional identity designer. Best case: copy as close as you can that card from Deloitte.

#8. Test Drive that sucka on Card-Scan and make sure it scans 99% accurate.

Word.

#9. Quality says quality

Business cards printed on nice recycled stock with a matte/gloss finish say “I’m a clean, contemporary and professional.” Some people complain that gloss scratches. That was back in 1992. They fixed that. Now it protects that card. 

If you’re coated cards are getting bent/scratched then you don’t give out enough cards/party/meet people. Certain businesses can get away with rough, uncoated stock — like a concrete manufacturer, dog-groomer or the carrot-juice supervisor at Wild Oats.

Anything that can easily be confused with print-at-home stock is simply a business card personal branding death sentence. If you can’t be bothered with getting professionally printed business cards, you’re killing your professional brand. C’mon, there’s like 5,000 places on the Web (Flickr has a cool service) that can do this in 1 week or less and you won’t look like a total goober dangleberry!

#10. Some random nits for people looking for employment or a sales pitch appointment beyond the business card but related enough for this post:

• Got a sooper slick resume and absolutely no Google Juice? You’re either spooky, strange, of no social relevance or just plain out-of-date.
• Don’t be stupid. Get your Google on. Google me. See what Page 1 looks like. I own my Page 1. And Page 2…
• Google yourself before you go meet a potential employer or sales prospect. What you see (or don’t) is what they see (or don’t).
• Research who you’re talking to! I have pretty much laid out my whole personal life online; you should be able to find something to talk about/have in common.
• Resume’s are dead. Don’t send me a resume. Point me to your Facebook/Myspace/LinkedIn/ClaimID/OpenID/etc.
• I had a 55 year-old former CFO/business executive complain I was hard to reach. hahahahah! I had a 17 year old high school kid reach me out of the blue about an internship in 60 seconds flat.
• If you want employment at my company, it’s not my responsibility to conform to how you communicate best.
• Don’t EVER EVER EVER EVER be anything but sweet, humble, gracious and courteous with anyone at the Company — especially my assistant or the receptionist. Here’s how they relay your message to me: “Some total ass-wipe dickhead just called you from Wall Street Mergers & Acquisitions. Do you want me schedule him to call you in January of 2032?”
• Talk to the people who talk to me. Talk to the people who talk to the business leaders. It’s not so important that you talk to me more than anyone else…or even exclusively. Do you honestly believe I walk out after meeting with someone and give a unilateral order: “Hey, you in that cube. I just hired this guy. He reports to you know.” hahaha! I look to my team to be the social filters. How someone interacts with my team is 99% more important than how much they interact with me. It really doesn’t matter if I like you. If my team can’t like you, that’s an insurmountable problem.
• I ultimately look to my team that I trust to filter and opine their impressions of anyone. Getting a glowing recommendation from Steph at the front-desk is worth more than an hour my time telling me your five-year plan and your summa-cumma-humma claude thingy you did in college.
• Overt attempts to hide your personal life and go for the Sears model look work against you these days. Businesses are more than ever not interested in homogenized drones with no personality. Birds of feather flock together. Everyone at my company is sooper cool. I love hanging out with everyone at my company. They’re all cool. You’d better be too! We want real people with really cool/interesting personal lives that make our lives richer and more interesting. But don’t tell us how cool you are, show us!
• What are you hiding that can be all that negative today that Google can’t find? By the way, we do a standard 10-year background checks on pretty much everyone. The HR Scare-mongers of the 80’s got everyone all screwed up on union-driven fear. All the old hangups (you’re gay, you’re divorced, you’re a single mom, you’re pagan, you like to go to burning man, you have tats all over you, you accidentally voted for GW, you were in a Sorority, you hunt, you support PETA, it’s not your natural hair color, you drink soy milk) have soooo little bearing on what really matters. Great companies are filled with great people who could largely give a crap about whether any of that. What matters? (a) Are you congruent with the company’s brand? (b) Do you present any significant HR issues/risks? (c) Will you attract other good people to the team instead of driving good team members away? (d) Are you really good at what you do and willing to learn to do other things? (e) Are you socially conscious and willing to invest in and give back to your community?
• Get a Gmail account for personal email and get it out of the work email. ’nuff said.

I’m a huge proponent of professional social gatherings (a.k.a. parties) here in Nevada to bolster our tech/design economy. Lifelong experience has proven to me over and over that people do business with people and if you’re not out starting and maintaining relationships you eventually suck at your business and/or your career. And there you have it: business is largely about parties and meeting people hahahah! 

From a branding perspective it’s ABSOLUTELY IMPERATIVE that our Greater Reno Tahoe brand perception is that of a great place to party and hookup I’ll blog about why Reno’s burgeoning meat-market is vital on another post…just know that the 20-30 something tech/creative’s are in high demand everywhere on the planet and we need to hold on to every single one of them here locally. Frankly, my business cannot grow without them.

A long time a go (1999 – 2002) Michael Thomas (now at EDAWN) ran Greater Reno-Tahoe’s first technology oriented social-networking driven organization, the TechAlliance @ NewNevada. Perhaps the greatest boon to northern Nevada’s tech economy back then was what was then known as Cocktails.com. It’s where we all got together, got on the same page and built momentum with cocktails in hand.

I met Robb Smith for the first time at a Cocktails.com event and he convinced me to joined the Entrepreneurs’ Organization (then known as YEO) which has been perhaps one of my greatest professional life experiences. Back then there were startups like Ken Hawk’s iGo, CandyBarell.com, HardwareStreet.com, HomeSeekers.com and a dozen others. UNR’s Mike Reed, Nevada Bell’s Dick Bostdorf and Reno attorney Garrett Sutton were instrumental in the TechAlliance’s startup. More recently, thanks to EDAWN/Michael Thomas we’ve got the newly formed  Reno Tahoe Young Professionals Network kicking ass and an we’re on the world’s design radar with a fully legit and operatin cool AIGA chapter.  

At the beginning, Cocktails.com events would last all night with everyone spilling out of bars, nightclubs and JK’s Nugget in the wee hours of the morning. It was a great time of forming a tech-community. Then: Dot.com bust…and as Paul Harvey would say “now know you know the story….”

Michael Thomas to came to work for Twelve Horses in 2002 and the TechAlliance eventually folded in to a newly formed state-wide effort known as Nevada’s Center for Entrepreneurship & Technology (NCET.ORG). (DISCLAIMER: I’ve was on the founding board and am now the Chairman of this wonderful organization — so this is blatant promotion.) About a year-and-a-half ago under Dave Archer & Emily Lowe’s exceptional care, we brought back Cocktails.com as Tech Thursday’s. These events have been awesome, however, they’ve leaned a little too much on the professional and a little too less on the networking/drinking/have fun/hooking up. In perhaps kinder words, Tech Thursday attracts an “older behaving crowd”. Folks that have to be home before sundown.

WiFi Wednesdays are, by design, intended to be much more geared to the twenty/thrity-somethings rather that “all-inclusive professionals”. If people aren’t doing shots of Tequilla and YouTube jousting, we’ve failed at this experiment. I expect/hope that the Thursday mornings following an event to be just a little less productive among Reno’s tech/design class. But in trade for that, collectively we hope to have a larger pool of those workers to chose from. Now this doesn’t mean that folks over the age of 40 aren’t welcome. If you still feel and act like you’re twenty-six (that’s my personal maturity wall) then get your game on and come out!

Wi-Fi Wednesdays is the brainchild of NCET marketing manager Emily Lowe and Robert Payne/Josh Kenzer of Twelve Horses. The trio was looking for a way to expand their professional networks and was weary of the same old venues. Wi-Fi Wednesdays is intended to be a bi-monthly high-energy networking opportunity designed to serve the specific needs of and cater exclusively to the influential 21-39 demographic. Come help make it succeed!

Details:

August 22, join NCET and the Reno-Tahoe Young Professional’s Network
(YPN) as they put a modern-day spin on Greater Reno Tahoe’s networking with the launch of Wi-Fi Wednesdays: “Connecting the Connected.”

- Wi-Fi Wednesdays is a bi-monthly high-energy networking opportunity designed exclusively for the influential 21-39 demographic
- Held in wireless venues throughout Reno
- Entertaining high-tech networking tools
- “Speed networking,” a twist on the “speed dating” concept that helps facilitate numerous one-on-one introductions in a short period of time
- Brief presentations by successful young entrepreneurs and technology professionals.

The Chocolate Bar
August 22 – 5:30 – 7:30 pm
475 S. Arlington Ave, Reno

August’s Wi-Fi Wednesday features a YouTube contest where you get to vote on your favorite video. To enter, send links of your best videos (3
max) to Emily at NCET by Monday, August 20.

- Space for the August 22 Wi-Fi Wednesdays debut is limited and reservations are preferred.
- Cost for the event is $5 per person for Reno-Tahoe YPN members and $10 per person for non-members. RSVP@NCET.org.

NCET, Nevada’s Center for Entrepreneurship and Technology, helps foster an environment within Nevada in which high-growth entrepreneurial companies can succeed and flourish. NCET has a strategic partnership with the Nevada Commission on Economic Development. For more information on NCET, visit www.NCET.org. NCET is a 501(c)3 non-profit organization.

I thought that this was such an excellent transcript of the resourcefulness of using social networking tools to make a connection that I couldn’t help but post it.

AIM IM with ryan jerz <mrjerz>.
2:51 PM
hey ryan… hows the job?
solid
2:55 PM
word. you like it?
yeah i do. i’m currently rewriting the stuff that’s on the website…not too bad so far. i’ll get a chance to do some fun stuff
cool. working at the office now?
yes
know anyone hiring?
can you do design?
web? what i learned in teh master’s program. which means i could probably fake it pretty well.
places like 12 horses are always looking…the rgj is hiring a business reporter
eh, already worked at the RGJ.
plus, they just sent a photog to the grad program
yeah, that’s right
i saw
12 horses… do they need photographers?
designers
any photo work?
photographers i never hear about
dave laplante, right?
yes
maybe i’ll flickrfriendrequest him. i’ve seen his name on there. isn’t he friends with nick van woert too?
i have his mobile…text him
“sent from my iphone”
totally
that reminds me, i should probably change my outgoing signature on that thing.
i’ll check to see if it’s ok to give it to you.
say, my buddy jerz said you guys are hiring…who do I talk to?
ok, really?
3:05 PM
ask about jobs…yeah, i’d do it
there may be nothing he can do, but he’ll know your name.
and flick friend him too
this will be fun.
well, when I wanted to meet him to go over thisisreno, he had me text him to set a time…i had never really done it. it’s how he communicates
he sounds like a cool guy. ok, i’ll do it. i’m going to bombard him with media.
he doesn’t like email as much
you have nothing to lose
amen
4:10 PM
k, doing it now. i should probably send him my websites, though i guess he can just find them through flickr. for the text, what’s a good one liner?
good question. what’s your site again?
davidtorch.com
and
thesupermarket.us, but that’s more of a collaborative thing with nick and i.
wait! actually, i think i’m just going to copy this text and send it to him. (with your permission, of course)
what text
3:15 PM
this ichat conversation. don’t worry about it. if it gets me a job, we’ll both be stoked that things like this actually work. if not now, it seems like a good way to get a job in the future. you know, the kind of thing you hear about…
did you say anything you regret? anything you wouldn’t want him to see?
heh, no
k, this conversation is pretty long – his phone might explode if i tried to text it to him. i’ll sms and flickr just to be safe….
i’m not going to fix the typos
adds more mojo.
here: i’ll type out my phone number so he can atleast text me back with a heartbreaking “no.”

this conversation will be a record of social networking realized. it’s pretty much our graduate project from last year, right?
at the very least, we could use this to supplement the research paper:

“Example of Social Networking and Job Application at 12 Horses, appendix C”
cool, i think we have another week to turn it in.

Technorati tags: ryan, jerz, ryan jerz, davidlaplante, davelaplante, Twelve Horses, 12horses, 12 horses, interviewing, networking, social networking

I was listening to this week’s episode (#107) of TWiT (This Week in Technology) while eating a bowl of Pho noodles and almost started choked when Leo LaPorte started talking about this news story. If it weren’t for TWit, I would have totally missed it. Listen to this clip of the banter of TWiT…too funny hahaha! (BTW, you should subscribe to TWiT. Best tech podcast.) 

In what could be a whopping security hole, Nevada has posted the password to the gubernatorial e-mail account on its official state Web site. It appears in a Microsoft Word file giving step-by-step instructions on how aides should send out the governor’s weekly e-mail updates, which has, as a second file shows, 13,105 subscribers.

And just before anyone goes off claiming that this is endemic to a particular political party or something snidely silly like that, let me tell you first hand that for the last 16 years I’ve witnessed this type of stuff go down at pretty much every level of government on both sides of the aisle. For the one or two times that make it to the headlines such as this, there’s the ninety-nine other times that it does not…which is ultimately a good thing. It does get depressing when you think about all the folks who “run this place” who can’t even send or receive a simple text message or an email for that matter!

 What we’re witnessing is the last days of the “un-connected” political elite. It’s still possible for folks to get elected without a Blackbeery in hand. But those days are numbered. The 2008 election cycle will prove that the luddite politicos are on the decline. Facebook and MySpace friends count more than ever. Luddlite politicians who can’t compete for the mindshare of the “media consumer voter” may not swing a lot of elections in 2008, however, by 2012 that will change.  I predict it will be folks like Reno 911!’s stars (who partnered with Declare Yourself to produce satirical video shorts) that will begin to dominate the voter’s attention. Simply put, by 2015, Gen-Y will account for 1/3rd of the voting population.

Lastly, what is missing from most of the elected 1.0 is the self depreciating sense of humor about themselves that develops personal brand trust and connectedness with the media consumer voter under the age of 40. Al Gore’s figured it out…see that post here. John Edwards’ campaign should jump on the hairdo PR wagon and hand out mini-shampoo bottles with his mug on them driving them to his Facebook page. But alas they’re probably too busy fighting off hackers in Second Life!

I’d just like to go on record to say that I predict that our longtime slogan/tagline is cool. Reno is the Biggest Little City in the World.

Despite what some people would have you believe, Reno’s “Biggest Little City” tagline kicks ass. It’s way cool. Timeless cool. The downtown Reno Arch which incorporates the slogan is even cooler. Standing under the arch from 11pm to 5am Sunday night for the Modest Mouse video shoot, (Modest Mouse, Little Motel) I was yet again impressed with the unique and lasting icon that the Reno Arch is…and the brand that it assists in representing. Tacky at times. Vintage old-school casino. Visually iconic. Set and centered among a defining skyline. Global recognition. A timeless retro-look. Way f’n cool.

Yeah, there’s a lot of people who feel “embarrassed” by it, or perhaps it’s not “cool” like Metronatural (cough, not that there’s anything wrong with that) or that it’s too “old” or “typography challenged”. Incidentally, these are the folks that you won’t find downtown. They’re huddled up in South Reno at Chili’s bitching about how we don’t have a Nordstroms or our museum doesn’t compare to the MOMA in SF or NY (duh, what does?).

I’ve always liked the Reno Arch. When you say “Reno” to people, you always get a distinct reaction — good or bad. From a branding perspective, that’s good. Brands that illicit strong reactions are at least not milktoast.

The Reno Arch is the first thing I saw as I rolled off the Amtrak in 1988 headed to college. There’s actually been three Reno Arch’s: The first was constructed in 1926 to celebrate completion of the transcontinental highways, the Lincoln and Victory (and modified in the 1930s to incorporate the city’s slogan). It was replaced in 1963 and, again, in 1987. Origins of the slogan vary but most historians believe it was adopted in the 1920s as part of a chamber of commerce promotion.

From a popularity decline, I think it’s bottomed out. Californication has slowed. All the relocated tax-evading SUV driving Californians that are too “cool for it” are being mitigated in the overall brand conversation. The popularity resurgence is just around the corner. I can sense it. I feel it. And I’m not alone.

• Scotty Dunseath figured it out and gave us Reno eNVy. He’s proud. He has swagger. I love Reno eNVy just as much I as love watching Reno 911. (Note: Too bad Reno 911 is filmed in Bakersfield instead of actually being filmed here! That shouldn’t fly…we need to get Reno 911 to actually shoot here…but I digress…)

Here’s TEN — count them — 10 reasons why predict The Biggest Little City in the World 2.0 is on the upswing:

1. It’s true. Looking out at the Reno skyline with all the new construction cranes and all the lit-up casinos, it really is a BIG little city. There’s bike piles in frot of bars larger than you’ll see in SF. Our airport — because of gaming — is like 10x bigger than what it should be. 
2. The downtown up-and-coming urban core is only getting cooler and cooler. (When the custom Reno Bike Project bike racks hit the bars, it will be even more cooler.)
3. Reno is a population dense city. We pack a lot of folks in a small space. (That means we’re a greener-than-thou city.) A lot of people live in a small footprint. As the downtown core continues to go up and up (like New York, Chicago or San Francisco), our density will increase. As density increases, so does arts, culture, community and coolness.
4. For a city of our population, we have the dining, entertainment, air service and transient tourist population of a city 5-10 times our size.
5. The River Park on hot and balmy summer Sunday afternoons is getting a kinda nature-ghetto-groove…it’s an awesome paradox in front of your eyes.
6. Reno is actually more West than Los Angeles because of the curvature of the coastline. (OK, that was weak, but I think there’s something too that.)
7. We have the gosh-dang mofo National Bowling Stadium. They filmed KingPin here. ’nuff said. The Taj Mahal of bowling in here. A billion bowlers over the next century will visit Reno. That creates a cosmic energy that no one — not even Toronto being Canadian and all — can ever re-create.
8. We have a litany nutty and strange special events downtown to party and get silly at.
9. It’s you’re last stop before Burning Man. It’s your first stop after Burning Man.
10. Fernando Leal just bought the Fitzgeralds. I bet he guts it and renovates it to be something cooler than the Clift in SF. His Montage project is his opening act in this town. He has that southside Chicago swagger that gets’r done! I can hardly wait…

Sure, are there folks that don’t have the swagger in them to LOVE Reno…and many more are embarrassed to be affiliated with a definitive icon of Western cheese and cachet culture? Yeah, and they love to shop at the Sierra Summit and fondle their wine collections in their 5,000 sq.ft. homes in Arrowcreek while bitching that we haven’t perfectly cloned the downtown Santa Monica retail district like Phoenix has. Great for them. As their growth-rate slows, their relevance in the brand-bashing will subside and those of us that see this town for it’s collection weird hip strange tweekerness will prevail.

For the revitalized downtown urban core that is getting younger and cooler by the day — especially as the people-who-don’t-like-to-have-any-fun crowd — moves out to the suburbs to shop at Old Navy at Sierra Summit and enjoy the “quiet life”, The Biggest Little City as a brand and as a life is being re-born for a new generation to steward. For the tax base that means god news. Higher ADR’s downtown means more room taxes and more marketing might for the city. Very cool.

Final kicker: For too long too many people Reno marketers have felt it necessary to glom on to the “Lake Tahoe” brand. Over the next ten years, I think that it will reverse itself and Lake Tahoe will become as much–if not more–dependent upon Reno. As it becomes impossible to even mow your lawn without a permit from the TRPA and Tahoe inevitably turns in to another Park City-Vail-Sun Valley-Jackson-Mammoth clone losing it’s Frank Sinatra uniqueness, Reno will surpass Tahoe in many aspects of cool.

Anyway, just putting my thoughts down so I can blog a big ‘ol “I told you so” post in two years. hahaha

Technorati tags: reno, nevada, branding, marketing, destination, icon, culture, arch