Earlier this year we registered to exhibit at CES. It’s going to be great to be back in Vegas for the nation’s largest consumer technology tradeshow, January 7 – 10.
The one thing is that the flight from Nashville, TN to Las Vegas, NV is about three long hours. I don’t know about you, but being crammed in a plane for three hours with weak coffee and no leg room doesn’t sound like much fun. So we came up with an alternative plan, and we’re calling it CES BOUND.
We buy a bus, fix it up and do a road trip to Vegas! Why be crammed in a plane for three hours, when we can be crammed in a bus for 120 hours (give or take)? Surely we’ll find better coffee on the road than at 30,000 feet in the air, right? Besides, how can we ask a pilot to land in several cities to meet with you?
What could possibly go wrong for five Griffin peeps traveling in a 37 year old VW Westfalia bus across 2,476 miles?
Have you ever done a long road trip? Where to? Do you have any tips?
We’re racing wood! If you have spent any time around Boy Scouts you’ll be familiar with the pinewood derby. According to Wikipedia:
Cubmaster Don Murphy organized the first pinewood derby, held on May 15, 1953 in Manhattan Beach, California by Pack 280c.Murphy’s son was too young to participate in the popular Soap Box Derby races, so he came up with the idea of racing miniature wood cars. The cars had the same gravity-powered concept as the full-size Soap Box Derby cars, but were much smaller and easier to build. After Don Murphy’s first race in 1953 the Los Angeles County Department of Recreation copied the pinewood derby with Murphy’s permission.
Our friends at Imogene + Willie have invited us to the first annual 12th South Pinewood Derby next Saturday, November 21st!
Watch for the Griffin car, it’s going to rock your socks off. We already have some great ideas on how to customize our vehicle.
If you’re in Nashville and you love the smell of pine in the morning (or at 4pm), you won’t want to miss this amazing opportunity to get together and race some wood! Not to mention you’ll be getting BBQ, beer, whisky, a t-shirt and Griffin goodies!
You can pick up your car kit at Imogene + Willie for $50.00. Don’t be shy, it’s not hard to create a great pinewood ride. Did I mention the winner wins a $500 GriffinTechnology.com shopping spree?
We spent an exciting and exhausting weekend in Los Angeles at the Daytime Emmy Awards. Griffin was nominated for Best Supporting Actor. Ok, so we weren’t actually nominated… but you would have voted for us right? The truth is we were there to work the talent gift lounge.
It was nice to mingle with the stars as they visited our table to learn more about Griffin, and each one left with a bag of Griffin goodies. We met Erik Estrada, Alex Trebek, Susan Lucci, Patrick Duffy, Jenny Garth, Dr. Travis Stork, Gilles Marini, Lori Loughlin, to name a few. All told, we shook hands with about 80 actors!
The most popular products to the stars were PowerDuo Reserve and Elan Form Graphite. Many of the celebs already knew Griffin. A few even had some of our products with them.
We got back to Nashville earlier this week, and we’re slowly settling into business as usual. But if you would like our autographs please feel free to let us know.
Check out all of the photos of the stars on our Flickr page.
I had the extreme pleasure of spending the last number of days in Seattle with a few hundred of the coolest geeks on earth.
Each year Internet super star, Chris Pirillo, organizes an incredible conference called Gnomedex. I’m happy to write that Griffin was a proud sponsor this year.
The conference mixes technology with social issues. We learn of ways people are using the power of the tubes to better their communities. The following is a short summary of some of my favorite presentations, but they were all good.
One of the advantages of attending tech conferences is that everything is recorded, streamed, tweeted and blogged. I highly recommend you take the time to watch some (or all) of the presentations when they become available. Each one was extremely relevant, thought provoking, touching and humorous.
Cyborg Anthropologist, Amber Case, spoke about the evolution of cyborgs. She showed us examples of people like Steve Mann who has created glasses to send and receive information online, so he can actually block out things he doesn’t want to see like advertisements on billboards. Every time I use my iPhone, TuneBuds and this computer now, I think about how they have become extensions of me. I am a cyborg. We all are.
Mark Horvath brought the house down by sharing stories about his and other people’s homelessness. While Mark was introducing us on stage to James, a Seattle (Nickelsville) tent-city resident, a hat was passed around the room. Together we collected $1,500 cash to help James get back on his feet. I hope he does.
Phil Plaitt, who writes Bad Astronomy, spoke about pessimism skepticism (oops, I wrote this too quickly). It was a fun presentation that made us all realize we are pessimists skeptics and that it’s actually a good thing. I ran into Phil waiting for the same flight home. He’s a great guy.
Drew Olanoff, a popular social media maven, was recently diagnosed with Hodgkins Lymphoma cancer. Being the outgoing funny guy that he is, he has created a site called Blame Drew’s Cancer. The site aggregates Twitter tweets tagged with #blamedrewscancer and is linked with Lance Armstrong’s Livestrong campaign to raise awareness and money for cancer research. Go ahead and give it a try if you’re on Twitter. For example you could tweet, “I #blamedrewscancer that my coffee spilled in my lap.”
Micah Baldwin had a great presentation about building influence online, or How To Be Awesome. He had some wonderful insight in using the web to promote yourself and your business. Heck, I’m doing that right now aren’t I? Check out his slides.
Friends, Chris Brogan and Julien Smith, spoke about their book, Trust Agents. Together they shared great examples of how to use the social web effectively and properly. Chris and Julien are both friends who I recommend you watch. They’re always outgoing and insightful.
These are just a few examples of how outstanding the quality of the conference was. My other highlights were the tweet up (thanks for coming if you were there), hallway, party, lunch, dinner, and walking down the road conversations that I had with so many of the wonderful attendees. I wish I could include your name here, but a) this post would become a massive list, and b) I would inevitably forget someone and then feel terrible when I realized it.
I want to personally thank Chris, Mona, Maya, Chris’ mom and dad (who help run the conference with him) and all of the Gnomedex volunteers and attendees for making this such an inspirational event. I’ll see you all next year.
Fast-forward to 2009 and Lollapalooza returns with a vengeance! The music festival featuring alternative rock, hip hop, punk rock bands, dance and comedy performances never really went away, with the small exception of 2004.
The line up this year was an incredible one and Griffin was there. Sadly, I wasn’t one of the lucky ones to make the trip to Chicago. However, I did enjoy the festival vicariouslythrough photos of the artistsenjoying our cool products, like AirCurve, Simplifi and TuneBuds. Hopefully I’ll be able to attend next year.
We’re racing wood! If you have spent any time around Boy Scouts you’ll be familiar with the pinewood derby. According to Wikipedia:
