LA Web Design Camp Barnsdall Park 15Nov12

Aaron Houston — Sun, 02 Dec 2012 21:13:36 +0000

I recently had the opportunity to attend the LA Web Professionals User Group’s Design camp at the Barnsdall theater (BGT) in West Hollywood on 15Nov2012. LAWEBPRO is an interesting User Group: they are very large (over 900 FB members); they run very large events (often 300+ attendees); and, they attract the very best web designers & internet marketing specialists in LA. And so, it was no surprise that Daniel Kramer (User Group Mgr) did a great job in organizing this event. Daniel also has a lot of help from his coordinator, Anissa Barton. It’s actually a great combination with Daniel & Anissa. Daniel handles the logistics, speaker-wrangling, and event-promotion and Anissa is great with the people. The event went down, pretty smooth and there were lots of LAWEBPRO volunteers manning the check-in desk and food line.For the main event, LAWEBPROs hosted a great cast of speakers: noted web designer, Author, certified trainer Brian Wood (askBrianWood.com); long-time Photoshop guru Lee Varis (Los Angeles Digital Imaging Group - LADIG co-organizer), and Adobe Community Professional Chana Messer (Mac in Art). Chana did an overview of Adobe’s TouchApps for iPad.

Attendance was great! Over 250+ attendees throughout the evening showed up for some great tips for the website development. The venue’s auditorium was nearly full and the lobby during breaks was “cozy”. Any more attendees and things would have started getting uncomfortable. Daniel Kramer also feeds his attendees & guests quite well; This time he had a variety of Chinese food entrees. Attendees seemed very happy with the selections. The LAWEBPRO group does charge a minor fee to attend these events, but the amount was insignificant compared to the value and content that this event provided. One thing I do recommend to User Group Managers who want to hold events is that it often good to charge a fee to attendees, because it keeps the attendee “no-show” rate low. And since, this event was funded by Adobe Camp monies, the Adobe Community team appreciates a “personal incentive” for the attendess to ensure they show up. “Details about the sessions and the content can be found at the LA Web Design Camp – Registration Page.All in all, this was a successful event.

Looking forward to future LAWEBPRO events in 2013.

Adobe User Group Mgr (LADIG.org) Lee Varis really enjoys presenting!

After the event, I asked the event organizer to provide me some EventBrite charts on how this event tracked in terms of paid registrations and page views from the time we first started promoting the event till the day of the event. The charts are interesting in that what we see from attendees is that most decide with 72 hrs whether they will be attending.

LAWEB Pro Web Design Camp – Attendee tracking

2012 LA Web Pro Web Design Camp – Registration Page Views

Mobile Camp Los Angeles-18Oct2012

Aaron Houston — Wed, 24 Oct 2012 23:05:27 +0000

Mobile Camp Los Angeles convened on 18 Oct 2012 at LA Mart. Adobe Community team was a co-sponsor of this camp along with RIM BlackBerry Playbook folks, and Lunarpages. We had over 380+ paid registrants. Audience mainly consisted of: Entenpreneurs, hackers, coders, designers, i-Phone, Android Developers, and Adobe LA area User Groups. (We had more attendees viewing the live-stream)
Greg Wilson, Adobe’s Evangelism director, kicked-off the event keynote with a couple of questions:

How many people (raise hands) knew that Adobe was involved in web standards?
How many people know that Adobe is contributing to WebKit?

Response: Very few hands…which was exactly what we were looking for. Adobe is trying to build awareness around its contributions to WebKit and HTML5, so this is the type of audience we are doing outreach to. There’s a new website http://html.adobe.com dedicated to showcase our contributions, use-cases, and the new html5 tools — Adobe is a tools company. So, for the 250 folks watching the Adobe keynote, Greg Wilson (Adobe Evangelism Director) focused on Adobe Edge Tools & Services (Animate, Reflow, Code, Inspect, Web Fonts, TypeKit, & PhoneGap Build) and CSS Shaders. This was same content from the “Create the Web” launch event which kicked-off on Sep 24th, 2012. Greg also did an additional deep dive session after the keynote; and, the overwhelming interest from the attendees was in the responsive design tool “Reflow” which is to be released by the end of 2012. (Those who signed up for the free Edge tools creative cloud account would get notified via Adobe Application Mgr + email when reflow would be available. Greg’s slides are forthcoming.

Over 25 LA-area technical User Group communities came together to organize this huge effort; and, there was lots of learning along the way for the event planners (i.e. power outages, “musical chairs”, etc). Adobe’s local User Groups were heavily involved in the logistics, venue selection, setting up the day before, and the promotion of the event. My thanks to the volunteers and the event planners: ShaRon Sachse (HTML5-LA organizer & DDLA AUG Mgr) & George McKinney (LA PhoneGap User Group Mgr). Thanks to the sponsors like LunarPages and RIM BlackBerry Playbook team. Without sponsorships, large events like mobile camp LA just don’t happen, there’s lots of logistics to consider. Lunch, Prizes, Speakers…Yep, lots to do! Thanks ShaRon & George!

Community Kitchen » HTML5

LA Web Design Camp Barnsdall Park 15Nov12

Mobile Camp Los Angeles-18Oct2012

Photos from the Event:

STATs for this Event:

Main registration Page: http://www.eventbrite.com/event/2402395630

Website: http://mobilecampla.com

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