From June 24-26th, the first ever Startup Weekend was hosted in downtown Las Vegas.  Startup Weekends take place around the world and aim to build communities and start companies. The super-packed 54 hour event focuses on building web or mobile applications that could be viable businesses.

While this was my first Startup Weekend, seasoned attendees and sponsors were overheard as saying that it was one of the best they’ve attended. Contributing to the success was the sponsorship of local mega-success Zappos, other Vegas business support and collaborative team dynamics. Oh, and did I mention the panel of judges? Lending heavyweight credibility to the event were: Tony Hseih (CEO of Zappos), Kevin Rose (founder of Digg.com and CEO/Founder of Milk, among others and former Las Vegan), Tom Anderson (Co-Founder of MySpace), Ryan Carson (Founder of ThinkVitamin and Carsonified Events) and Josh Reich (CEO of Bank Simple).

Fourteen teams labored for two days in pursuit of startup-dom: brainstorming, planning, coding, branding, market researching and PowerPointing their five-minute final presentations for judges. I was reticent about how much could really be accomplished in a weekend but as enthused teams shared their brainchilds with the audience, I became a Startup Weekend believer.   Sure, teams were competing but what really became apparent was the power of passion, collaboration and a supportive community. Not every team was comprised of Vegas locals but it was the local community itself that produced and supported the event, giving every attendee and sponsor the platform to collaborate on something with long-term viability.

A few highlights from the presentations include second place finisher IOTW (I Am On the Way), a mobile app for volunteer firefighters, claiming to reduce response times by minutes and ultimately, save lives. ClippPR, the first place team, produced a PR clippings organizer that is already in beta. Rumgr is a virtual garage sale app built by Zappos employees (including event organizer Dylan Bathurst) and heralded with the crowd favorite and “most likely to continue” designation. Sojo, an online journal, lets you gather your life experiences into stories with the help of others with whom you’ve shared experiences.

During the weekend and in the spirit of startups, our company alpha released a software project to a very receptive welcome. With the majority of attendees signing up, we’re getting productive feedback from the crowd and keeping in touch with this freshly invigorated group.

All this innovation reminds me of the energy I witnessed in Vegas over a decade ago when the dot-com boom had infiltrated the Valley. Myriad startups were enjoying the cash conveyor from Silicon Valley into Vegas, a.k.a. Silicon Oasis at the time. Our company, Vortaloptics, was a startup in 2000, but we were here for the connectivity. Our vertical search solutions needed reliability, speed and cost-effective data hosting and fledgling Switch Communications fit the bill. Switch (SuperNAP) is now one of the premier tier-4 data center facilities in the world.

While the vast majority of the dot-com boom startups went bust, companies Switch and 2004 transplant Zappos, are thriving. There is a viable foundation in Vegas for new ventures. The city needs more economic diversification apart from entertainment and tech provides real promise. We recently learned of a couple of business incubators that are in the works for the near-term. This and other developments could provide a platform for local entrepreneurs to build upon existing infrastructure, established corporate support and an eager talent base to become a true Tech Oasis.

So while Vegas was built on the competitive notion of gaming, Startup Weekend demonstrated that collaboration and community can produce a diffusely productive result that can diversify the Valley’s economy. Hopefully it’s a sign of things to come for a #winning Vegas tech community.  Like anything worth pursuing, we’ll have to work diligently and as we learned from Startup Weekend, we’ll need to work as a team.

Thanks to the event organizers for making this inaugural event a launching pad for #VegasTech!

Consumers are also flocking to connect with SMBs on Facebook, making the site one of the most effective marketing tools, right behind Google search. Social, search and email are rated as the three most effective outlets for small businesses, also helping their small budgets stretch further. More than 50% of local businesses spend less than $2,500 annually on marketing with few planning to allocate more funds in 2011.

Mobile marketing is yet an enigma for almost 75% of merchants and daily deals have only been adopted by 11%. While consumers seem to be trigger happy for local deals, merchants are less eager with negative or mixed results experienced by many businesses.

Of the $26 billion online advertising market, small businesses account for about half that revenue, with big brands matching their spend. Google’s bottom line has benefitted significantly in the last ten years from the large SMB base buying its search advertising. Facebook has similarly been boosted from this group and now Twitter is honing in on SMBs as well. Twitter’s promoted ad product is being used by about 100 small business advertisers. That’s not bad considering there are 125 big brands using the ad service, according to the Wall Street Journal. Twitter’s relatively low cost and unique targeting and placement make it a generally better ROI than Facebook or Google.

It’s important to remember that connecting with your customers is the driver for social media. There is a different decision cycle for someone “liking” your Facebook page vs. a clickthrough from organic search results for a long-tail phrase. Even though resources are minimal, small businesses should tailor their messaging, landing pages and calls-to-action based on the outlet and their customer’s behavioral trends.

The data , two of the three largest yellow page companies are bankrupt, radio listeners are down, TV prime time viewers are down and viewers are switching to Internet viewing instead. The reality is: consumers are getting the information they need but from other sources. Local media companies aren’t selling products that get the job done for consumers. And as a result, these companies lost their majority share of all local online advertising in 2005 to pure play internet companies.

In an interview with Harvard professor and author Clay Christensen, Gordon Borrell asks “how can local media survive?” The answer is provided in his book, “The Innovators Dilemma” which proposes that the next phase of local media innovation will be by companies that “get it” and retool: they’ll need to put dollars and strategy into new people, systems and processes.

As it is now, many local media companies believe that their current staff can translate their offline experience into new media but it’s not working. The result is that they’re supplying a product with a declining audience: they integrate the wrong elements into their traditional-converged products and fail to supply what the consumer really wants. Instead, they need to develop better user experiences that will set them apart from the competition.

A good example was provided in an interview with Christensen, where he mentioned the  home furnishings brand Ikea. There is no clear competitor to Ikea’s unique customer experience. In the furniture business, companies generally focus on a specific customer segment and product segment. But with Ikea, it’s about the experience. You can furnish an entire apartment in an afternoon with one stop and get lunch while you’re at it. Customers want the experience that Ikea offers and they keep coming back.

If the “more” that consumers want is essentially more information delivered in the form that they want it, local media companies will need to scrap the old paradigms (numbers of viewers, readers, listeners) and build a new model around the consumer experience.

Learn more information about Vortaloptics’ local media focused online advertising solutions.

A recent study uncovers some disturbing trends about increasing tech competencies compared to the simplicities and perhaps necessities, of certain life skills. For instance, the study showed that 58% of 2 – 5 year olds can play a basic computer game while 52% can ride a bike. The Digital Diaries study from AVG surveyed 2,200 online moms of kids aged two – five years in the U.S., Canada, Japan, Australia, New Zealand and the EU nations of U.K., France, Italy, Germany and Spain.

Riding a bike is a seriously fun life skill. My twin brothers were all of 2 1/2 when I decided it was time to get rid of their speed-inhibiting training wheels. I was so over their slowness and needed them to become real competitors in the daily race down the long driveway! So one day, my 7-year-old self gathered up the little tikes into the garage while I snagged a screwdriver from my dad’s wall-of-tools. I proceeded to unscrew those kill-joy training wheels once and for all. I helped them on their bikes and one at a time, gave them a good push from behind while they deftly exited the garage into the light of day, wobbling into the big world at first, then confidently balancing themselves down the driveway. Neither of them suffered harm during this experiment, mind you: they were biking naturals! Their toddler mindset removed any fear and gave them the I-can-be-big-too confidence they needed to master the balancing act of bikedom. I couldn’t be more proud of them in that moment. Soon after, my parents emerged from the house with collective gasps as they witnessed my toddler brothers riding on two wheels, but they quickly recovered when they saw their sons’ enthusiasm and newfound skill.

Now back to the numbers.  Only 20% of the children in the study can swim without help, 11% can tie their shoelaces unaided and 20% know how to make an emergency phone call. Yet, 63% know how to power up a computer and turn it off and 69% can use a mouse. More computer skills stats include the fact that 19% can operate a smartphone or tablet, 25% know how to operate a web browser, 16% can browse between web sites and 15% know at least one web address.

Thankfully, 37% can write their first and last names. But isn’t that a little telling? Twice as many children can operate a mouse than can write their names? What’s happening at home that brings these statistics to life? Children merely imitate the behavior they see. The connected lives of parents – namely mostly Gen X parents in this study – are having an impact on the skill sets that children will develop.

85% of a child’s core brain structure is formed by age three so what happens in the earliest years of life form a person’s belief structure, habits, relational capabilities for the rest of their life. While this is just one study and we have yet to see how quickly these children will catch up the analog skills of life, it does illuminate trends that we all should be aware of when dealing with children.

Teaching children life-hacking skills are times that can be savored for decades to come. There is plenty of time to teach tech-savviness but the skills learned in the early years about life and human relationships will become programmed into their psyches the rest of their lives.

Apparently, others feel the same way. New research exposes evidence that our digital interconnectedness does not generally produce authentic relationships. Rather, people are becoming increasingly alienated and dissatisfied with their relationships.

A recent book by MIT science professor Sherry Turkle, “Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other” discusses the ubiquity and usefulness of technology in contrast to the quality of our human relationships. Technology holds a major role in most people’s work lives and its high value in our society is merited. But while the casual observation is that the age of social networks is improving our interconnectedness, the reality may be that technology is failing to facilitate real communication, making people more closely tied to machines than each other. In short, too much technology is exacting an increasingly apparent toll on our relationships and health.

The fact is, humans are hard-wired to connect with other people. But we’re starting to prefer technology over people: “Our relationships with robots are ramping up; our relationships with people are ramping down.”  (Excerpt from “Alone Together”).

Sadly, many teens now gather their self-identity from what their online network says about them instead of discovering who they really are. As Susan Maushart, author of the just-released “The Winter of our Disconnect” reported, her digitally connected teen girls had become “accessories of their own social-networking profile, as if real life were simply a dress rehearsal (or more accurately, a photo op) for the next status update.”

Perhaps some parents are driving the trend, with digital addictions birthed out of the necessity to be always accessible to work then slithering into their home lives. Parents are gravitating toward texting their children because they think that they’re connecting more with their kids when in reality, the medium only allows shallow connections.

As chronicled in “The Winter of our Disconnect,” Maushart’s solution was a season of unplugging. She admits that her gadget addiction was as serious as her teenage children. She went so far as to disconnect the electricity for three weeks to begin the experiment and coax the teens into appreciating electricity, much less the internet. Instead of texting, being tethered to the iPhone, playing video games, watching TV, chatting on Facebook and listening to iPods independently, the single mom of three spent time with her children playing board games, looking at photos, enjoying family meals and listening to music collectively. Time could be spent in rest, community and introspection:  Maushart writes that her kids “awoke slowly from the state of cognitus interruptus that had characterized many of their waking hours to become more focused logical thinkers.”

While this experiment represents an extreme, the point is to listen to the positive changes wrought in their lives as a result of connecting with themselves and each other, in real life (RL for you texters). It’s a good reminder that we have a choice to turn off when we want to.

We can consciously allow time to disconnect and stop the obsessive-compulsive check-ins, email scans, Facebook updates, Twitter posts and general connectedness that drives many people. It’s about rediscovering the very real face-to-face relationships that satisfy deep-seated human needs and even connecting with ourselves for greater mental, emotional, spiritual and physical health.

Maybe you’ll choose to disconnect daily, weekly, or less frequently, but when you do, know that you’re taking a positive step to staying grounded with yourself and the relationships you value most.

Side note – the picture chosen for this blog is not my favorite. I wanted a positive image of a modern family, with teens, having dinner. But it was not to be. At iStockPhoto, there are 1100 photos in the search results for “family dinner” but add “teens” to the criteria and you are left with 20 photos, most of them old school (no offense). Perhaps something is wrong with our society when you can’t find 1 decent modern family picture in 1100.

While Baby Boomers and Gen Xer’s tend to be somewhat confined by brand loyalty, Gen Yers have grown up in a marketing-saturated, information-overloaded, technology-ubiquitous world. Since Millenials are now said to be the dominant generation, surpassing Boomers, understanding the world-as-they-know-it will help you reach them in a relevant way.

1. Mobile phones have always existed. Texting is king with teens. Thus, choosing the right phone is more about enabling a better texting experience rather than selecting one with the most bells and whistles.

2. Unified brand experiences across devices matter. Music and computers have always been portable for Millenials. Rather than the cumbersome PC towers I started out with, the first computer for teens was probably a laptop. Portable music has always been accessible through MP3 devices like the iPod. As such, teens have no reference point for why there should be different brand experiences for various devices – they want and expect seamless interaction no matter what device they’re using.

3. It’s the benefits, not the brand. Teens expect your brand to be online and to be everywhere they are. Maybe it’s novel to you that your brand has just launched a Facebook fan page but don’t tout the medium, proclaim the benefits. That’s what teens are looking for – and count the rest of us in for benefit-driven marketing too.

4. Empowered consumerism is the norm. Millenials are savvy researchers, prolific sharers and have high standards in customer service. Millenials research their tech purchases; 86% look in multiple online stores before selecting a product or service (“8095” survey, October 2010, Edelman).  But 8 in 10 will also take action on behalf of brands they trust, such as joining communities, posting reviews and sharing brand experiences with others.

5. Connecting online with social good causes is a form of self-expression. Millenials have witnessed 9/11, the Great Recession and a general decline in corporate moral standards. They want change and they want to know that the brands they patronize care about social initiatives. How you do what you do may be as important as what you produce.  To stay relevant, think about the value that your brand offers the world and express your contribution to the greater good within your online social communities.

6. Technology is ever-evolving but it still needs to serve them not their egos. While they’ll adapt to new technology faster than any other generation, they’re not as brand or feature-hungry as other age groups. They’ll upgrade if the experience is significantly improved, but won’t shell out just because everyone’s tweet-bragging about their new tech acquisition.