Day 1:
Thursday, November 8th
4-6 pm
Opening Night #HootUp
Moon River Brewing Company
21 West Bay Street
Kick Geekend 2012 off right at our #HootUp sponsored by HootSuite! Join fellow geeks over some adult beverages in Savannah’s only brew pub. Badge pick up available here.
Day 2:
Friday, November 9th
9 am
Registration Opens
SCAD Museum of Art, 2nd Floor
Pick up your badge and join fellow Geekenders for some morning java before embarking on the full day of session goodness.
9:30 – 10:45 am
Opening Remarks & Keynote
From Script To Screen: Developing “Archer”
Neal Holman, Floyd County Productions
SCAD Museum of Art, Auditorium
The session will focus on the development process of the animated series “Archer.” Topics covered will include the early research and design trials of the pilot episode, comparing and contrasting how that process has evolved four seasons later. Plus, we’ll explore the general lessons learned from a thousand billion mistakes.
11 am – 4:15 pm
Letterpress Demonstration
The Soda Shop
We’ll be kickin’ it old school with The Soda Shop, Savannah’s full-service graphic design and printing shop. They’ll have their retro letterpress machine on site to make it rain with Geekend bookmarks and posters for attendees!
SCAD Museum of Art Viewing
If you’re a geek for contemporary art and design, make sure to check out the exhibitions at the SCAD Museum of Art! They will be welcoming all Geekend attendees during this time.
11 – 11:45 am
Pack Your Brand’s Compass
Heather Nagel-Doughtie, Morris Communications Company, LLC
SCAD Museum of Art, Room 213
Today, creating a digital brand is a journey. There are twists, turns, dead ends, and forks in the road with so many choices. Whether you are rebranding or creating a new digital business brand, this session will show you how to create a brand compass that identifies what you want your brand to mean, what personality you want it to have and how you want to go to market. More importantly, you can use this as a tool to keep you on course as you trek.
Are You Trying to Fit a Rhinoceros into a Mini Cooper? The Reality of Responsive Design
Tyrus Christiana, BFG Communications
Randy Rodriguez, BFG Communications
SCAD Museum of Art, Auditorium
This session will discuss the challenges of responsive web design and development, and how to make your campaign successful in a multi-platform context by organizing your strategy and delivery. We’ll cover the pitfalls and paths to success in this emerging market in relation to how it affects your creative team.
When Higher Intelligence Leads to Higher Return
Timothy Burke Sullivan, AT&T AdWorks
SCAD Museum of Art, Room 215
These days, data is king. In this session, Timothy Burke Sullivan shows how aggregate and anonymous data is playing a role at AT&T as they dig into 150 million+ subscriber relationships across three screens of media: online, mobile and IPTV.
Social Media Professionals Meetup
SCAD Museum of Art, Room 214
Social media geeks, unite! In this session, meet up to network and share ideas on all things social media. Come prepared to chat up a storm (in person)! Hosted by Hal Thomas of Social Media Club
LUNCH BREAK
The Hive at SCAD Dining
231 West Boundary Street
1:30 – 2:15 pm
A Designer in a Startup World: Marrying Entrepreneurship & Design
Matias Corea, Behance
SCAD Museum of Art, Auditorium
No one is born a start-up entrepreneur, just as no one is born a designer. In this session, Behance co-founder and Chief of Design Matias Corea will talk about building a start-up company from the designer’s perspective. Drawing on his six years at Behance, he’ll touch on the risks, challenges and rewards of cultivating an incredible creative team and learning to extend design-thinking to business-thinking.
Jumping Into Tumblr Theme Development
Graham Blevins, Business Bullpen
Todd Wickersty, Business Bullpen
SCAD Museum of Art, Room 214
Creating Tumblr themes is a great way to express your creativity, exercise your front-end development chops, and give back to the Tumblr community. In this session, Business Bullpen will provide an overview of the Tumblr theme engine and API in order to create your own custom theme. Business Bullpen, a web development shop in Charlottesville, Virginia, creates premium themes for Tumblr. Our first free theme, Single A, was launched in April of 2011 and is closing in on 100,000 installs.
Frictionless Sharing: The Future of RFID & NFC
Richard Guy, Engauge
Carla Paschke, Engauge
SCAD Museum of Art, Room 215
RFID made a splash in 2003 when Walmart mandated that its suppliers use the technology. Today, it’s come a long way. While known primarily for supply chain management, it’s used in everything from tollbooths to event marketing. And it’s ushered in new technologies, such as NFC, widely associated with mobile payments. Yet RFID and NFC’s future extends much further, with huge implications for consumer-facing marketing and utility. This session will showcase unseen and future uses of the technologies. We’ll also demo our “Snap-Tweet” photo booth, which combines RFID with Microsoft Kinect’s gesture control capabilities to seamlessly share photos to Twitter.
2:30 – 3:15 pm
Boldly Go
Mimi Chan, CBS Outdoor Canada
SCAD Museum of Art, Auditorium
Presenting “The Making of A Transporter Bus Shelter,” featuring the creative process of an interactive outdoor campaign. It used Augmented Reality to simulate the transporting effect on board the Star Trek USS Enterprise-D. The campaign was developed for the Calgary Comic and Entertainment Expo by CBS Outdoor Canada, and ran in Calgary through the month of April 2012. A live demo will be set up for Geekend attendees to beam each other up and back in cyberspace.
Hacking Your Home
Jeff “Huey” Huelsbeck, Carpe Telam, LLC
SCAD Museum of Art, Room 214
Using a Mac, an extensive network of Insteon devices, in-wall speakers and a few Airport Expresses, Huey has created his very own smart home. We will take a look at what was needed to complete this task including hardware, software, budget, recommendations, examples and planned future additions. So come and learn how you can hack your home!
Why #Instagram is #Instagood
Ian Leslie, Savannah College of Art and Design
SCAD Museum of Art, Room 215
Facebook loved Instagram so much that it scooped up the photo-sharing platform for $300 million cash and 23 million shares of stock, but is the popular app worth your brand’s time, and how can you best leverage the content? This session will explore ways that the Savannah College of Art and Design and other brands are using Instagram within their social media content strategy and why they think it’s #Instagood.
Design Professionals Meetup
SCAD Museum of Art, Room 213
Calling all designers — this meetup is for you! During this time you’ll get to know others in the industry and swap ideas, tips and tricks. Don’t forget to bring along your spiffy custom business cards! Hosted by Steph Calvert of Hearts and Laserbeams.
3:30 – 4:15 pm
How to Fund your Dream with Kickstarter
Kristine K. Stevens, Savannah College of Art and Design
SCAD Museum of Art, Room 213
Kristine has supported numerous Kickstarter projects. This summer she successfully funded her own project, “If Your Dream Doesn’t Scare You, It Isn’t Big Enough.” Learn from her experience on how to apply content strategy to your project description, best practices for establishing backer rewards, ideas on how to promote your project, and how to tip the odds of success in your favor with time and valuable statistics.
Servers & Public Service: How Technologists Can Improve Their Country
Tom Lee, Sunlight Foundation
SCAD Museum of Art, Room 214
Across the country, people with technical skills are exploring how engineering can produce not just better products but also a better society. We’ll talk about how a new generation of civic organizations is pursuing this goal in different ways, and some specific projects that the Sunlight Foundation has in store. From web scraping to natural language processing and from Hadoop to Twitter API hacks, there are countless ways to use technology to enable transparency and accountability — and plenty of opportunities for creative technologists to lend a hand.
My Lifestyle Business Makes More Than Your Awesome Startup
Micah Wedemeyer, Obsidian Portal
SCAD Museum of Art, Room 215
All around you, fellow developers are getting fabulously wealthy. They get an idea, grab some angel or VC money, then flip their website to Google for $100 million in six months. Maybe you’re thinking you could do the same? Well, that’s what I thought about six years ago, and I went for it. I managed to build a successful business, but it played out nothing like what you read in the tech press. If you’re thinking of quitting your job and swinging for the fences, then come learn what it’s really like to be an entrepreneur.
BREAK
Catch up on email, tour Savannah or take a disco nap before the evening’s festivities.
7-8 pm
Friday Night Keynote with Charles Adler of Kickstarter
Coastal Georgia Center, Auditorium
Since its launch in 2009, Kickstarter has changed the way artists, musicians, videographers and creators of all types can fund their ideas. Kickstarter Co-Founder Charles Adler will lead this keynote discussion around the ever-changing definition of creativity in an age of ever-present technology.
9 pm – ??
Afterparty With Savannah TweetUp
Taco Abajo, 217 West Broughton Street
Our final destination of the night will be Taco Abajo where we’ll meet and mingle with the Savannah TweetUp crew.
Day 3:
Saturday, November 10th
9 am
Registration Opens
SCAD Museum of Art, 2nd Floor
Pick up your badge and join fellow Geekenders for some morning java before embarking on the full day of session goodness.
10 am – 3:15 pm
Letterpress Demonstration
The Soda Shop
We’ll be kickin’ it old school with The Soda Shop, Savannah’s full-service graphic design and printing shop. They’ll have their retro letterpress machine on site to make it rain with Geekend bookmarks and posters for attendees!
SCAD Museum of Art Viewing
If you’re a geek for contemporary art and design, make sure to check out the exhibitions at the SCAD Museum of Art! They will be welcoming all Geekend attendees during this time.
10 – 10:45 am
The Appeal Of Virtual Spaces
Celeste Lovette Guichard, Savannah College of Art and Design
SCAD Museum of Art, Room 213
Virtual environments are more popular than ever but they’re hardly a new phenomenon. Humans have been creating these types of spaces to transport, educate and entertain for millennia. But why do we like them so much? And is there any consistency in the way people have conceptualized alternate environments throughout history? In this talk, I investigate these questions using a set of historical and contemporary case studies. Central to my analysis are recent neuroscientific research findings on the way in which our brains process and respond to spatial cues, both real and illusionistic.
Debugging Tools For Mobile Applications
Josh Brown, OnPoint Digital, Inc.
SCAD Museum of Art, Room 214
Javascript frameworks are cropping up everywhere and web developers have more options than ever when it comes to creating mobile applications using HTML, CSS and Javascript. Adobe’s Shadow has been a boon when it comes to debugging web applications running in a mobile browser, but what about HTML/Javascript applications destined for native delivery? Take a look at Weinre (sounds like “Winery”), the tech behind Adobe Shadow and fill the gap in your mobile development workflow.
Connected Consumer Insights: Marketing, Advertising & Consumer Research in One High-Tech Solution
Kyle Langley, Ph.D., BFG Communications
SCAD Museum of Art, Room 215
Typically, consumer researchers and marketers use various and disparate methods to market to, reach and survey consumers. Often, those separate entities never talk until they are discussing results, if they talk at all. Today it is possible to use high tech solutions and field marketers to present products, advertise, measure advertising concepts, explore product concepts and gather real-time consumer insights in person. Not only is it possible, but it is currently being used by Fortune 500 clients to do just that. The ultimate upside is that it’s real-time fast, thorough and keeps insights teams, advertising creatives, brand planners, R&D and interactive teams linked into the process at all times from start to finish.
11 – 11:45 am
Design Without Limitations
Andrew Bolton, thismoment
Abhishek Lahoti, thismoment
SCAD Museum of Art, Room 213
Creative teams are increasingly becoming the linchpin for some of the most beautiful and engaging experiences deployed throughout social media. Because many design efforts are often limited by the technologies that are layered beneath them, what should agencies consider when choosing a technology that will maximize creativity and really allow an agency’s concepts to shine?
CoffeeScript: Your New JavaScript Style Guide
Jed Schneider, Mode Set
SCAD Museum of Art, Room 214
CoffeeScript is a little language that compiles to JavaScript. Modeled after languages like Ruby and Python, with a functional twist, it has a strong emphasis on creating recognizable patterns and expressive idioms to accomplish the most common tasks in JavaScript with ease and brevity. Currently one of the most popular languages on Github, its reputation has been met with much excitement and a fair amount of criticism. Is CoffeeScript right for your needs? Jed has spent most of the last year working with CoffeeScript: writing, teaching and speaking about the language. He will provide a solid introduction into the principles and language features, as well as highlight some basic use cases.
A Pinteresting Conversation
Lars Bredahl, Eckel & Vaughan
Steph Calvert, Hearts and Laserbeams
SCAD Museum of Art, Room 215
No one needs another social media website to keep up with… Or do they? The image-bookmarking site Pinterest is quickly gaining speed as one of the biggest website traffic generators around, meaning it’s not one to be ignored. From branding and marketing to providing creative inspiration, this site does it all. Join avid pinners Lars Bredahl of Eckel & Vaughan (yes, there are guys on Pinterest!) and Steph Calvert of Hearts and Laserbeams for a lively discussion on how to make Pinterest work for you.
LUNCH BREAK
The Hive at SCAD Dining
231 West Boundary Street
1:30 – 2:15 pm
The Aesthetics of Motion in Mobile Interaction Design
Dave Malouf, Peer Loft
SCAD Museum of Art, Room 213
We aren’t just engaging in more complex information structures and being inundated with data from every angle, our very movements are shifting, becoming more complicated, harder to remember, and difficult to balance. Interaction designers are even more responsible for helping people maintain their balance due to the paradigm shifts occurring in mobile interaction design. And they aren’t staying with mobile either. We’re even being asked to dance in our seats.
ChatOps: Campfire As A Console For Your Company
Josh Nichols, Rails Machine
SCAD Museum of Art, Room 214
What if every time you had a question about how your company works, or where to find something, or what to do, you could simply ask a robot helper? Rails Machine has been a distributed team for many years, and we’ve found that group chat is a great tool to get stuff done as a team. Day-to-day, we interact with numerous SaaS, self-hosted or self-written applications. Over the past two years, we’ve been slowly building our robot helper to help navigate those services, to connect the dots, and generally make our lives easier from the comfort of group chat.
Why Your Social Content Strategy Sucks (And How To Fix It)
Meghan Gargan, Girl Scouts – NC Coastal Pines
SCAD Museum of Art, Room 215
If you’re like many brands and organizations out there, the increase of players on social platforms, not to mention the number of channels available, has made it difficult to be seen and heard among the newsfeed clutter. Many don’t know how to get better traction on their updates or how to compete with big brands with tons of resources. The good news is that there are easy and simple solutions you can put in place today to start seeing a higher volume of quality conversations and interactions. In this session we’ll examine popular content pitfalls as well as how to create a robust, effective and engaging content strategy through text, multimedia and website integration. We’ll also cover metrics and reporting to ensure your content strategy is on the right track.
Instagram Savannah
Old Savannah Tours
Join fellow migratory members of the Geekend crew for a private tour of historic Savannah. We’ll be cruising around town with smartphones in hand to Instagram all that the beautiful city has to offer. Our friends at Old Savannah Tours have the hookup with a discount from the original $25 price tag! Requires sign up and $18 special tour fee
2:30-3:15 pm
How Designers And Doodles Can Save Our Education System
Mike Wirth, Queens University of Charlotte
SCAD Museum of Art, Room 213
As the education system in the U.S. spirals to the ground and the polarized debate about how to save it heats up, a window of perfect timing opens for designers to parachute in and save the day. This session explores and explains how information design, visual mnemonics and doodle-note-taking can effectively redesign curriculum, craft engaging media aids, and equip young students with visual problem solving skills that can greatly increase their engagement and chances in the classroom. Session goers will receive a custom sketchbook and permission to draw everywhere.
App Evolution: Patterns from Prototype to Behemoth
Kevin Lawver, Rails Machine
SCAD Museum of Art, Room 214
Every app grows and evolves over time, hopefully as it gathers more users and more features. We’ll take a journey through the app lifecycle and look at the shape, size and properties of apps at different points in their lives, and the things you need to be aware of so you know when it’s time to evolve your app and “level up” to the next stage.
How Viral Ideas Lead The Revolution
Greg Satell, Digital Tonto
SCAD Museum of Art, Room 215
When we see large-scale and revolutionary change, there is always a hero: a Gandhi, a Martin Luther King or a Steve Jobs. However, the truth is more complex and vastly more interesting. Leaders are often the beneficiaries of a movement rather than the drivers. Underneath, there are viral ideas moving through social networks. In order to build more innovative organizations, we need to learn how to harness the power of social networks through better and more organic connectivity.
4-5 pm
Closing Night Reception
Coastal Georgia Center, Lobby
Take this opportunity to enjoy some last minute networking before hearing from Kevin Curry of Code For America.
5-6 pm
Closing Night Keynote
Hacking As A Civic Duty
Kevin Curry, Code For America
Coastal Georgia Center, Auditorium
Geeks know that despite what we hear on the news, hacking isn’t evil. Hacking isn’t all about breaking into computer security. It’s about finding new ways to get stuff done—often through constraints and with limited resources. It’s about finding new uses for old designs. This is a talk about hacking for your country, your city, your community—hacking as a civic duty. The talk will inspire coders, designers, data scientists and other technologists to use their talents for civic good and show them how to get started.
