Dallas represent: FacebookDeveloperGarage

July 6th, 2009 by Blake Burris

With 275+ confirmed for the recent “Developer Garage,” we organizers were starting to fret about our best laid plans to host a mixed crowd of technical developers and more business/marketing types in Uptown. With the gracious support from Intel and Facebook, we were able to put on a stellar event at the Rosewood Crescent Hotel; which happens to be the nicest hotel around and it’s just a stone’s throw from CoHabitat (Thanks Intel!)

Now, we both know developers are more fond of comfort wear, snarky t-shirts and flip-flops than the regular Crescent crowd but that’s where the fun began. It reminded me of Deadheads descending on Vegas for the annual Grateful Dead show.

We kicked off the event in two separate tracks: a marketing track led by Blake Burris and technical track led by Tyler Fields. Speakers included local entrepreneurs and developers as well as agency folks representing The Richards Group (Chik-fil-A) and IMC2 (Pizza Hut). We took a break around 3:45 for drinks and tasty appetizers then re-convened to a combined room for a panel discussion featuring speakers from both tracks. We estimate that throughout the afternoon there were about 200 in attendance. The presentations are linked below.

Photo credit: Eugene Hsu

We adjourned the event at 5:30 for pizza, cold beer, t-shirts waiting at CoHabitat (the startup community and coworking space in Uptown), for socializing and music from our regular DJ, Joey Liechty. We also drew names for the netbook from Intel. Thanks also to Albert Lai at Kontagent for donating some trail accounts and to Justin Smith of InsideFacebook for several Faceboook Marketing Bibles.

Party photos courtesy of John Joseph Bachir.

If you’d like to learn more about the Facebook developer & marketing community in Dallas, join our group: Facebook Developers Dallas. We’ll be organizing more regular meetings now that we have a convenient meeting space at CoHabitat.

Speakers and presentations:
Chris St. John, Praxis Bridge “Third party services – A tale of intrigue, betrayal and murder”
Jake Good, Drop.io “digital content switchboard”
Giovanni Gullucci, Measuring Your ROI / Facebook Marketing
Andy Chen / Chris Stevens, Traxo
Bobby MacFarland, SuperRewards – please contact Bobby directly for info: bobby@srpoints.com

Thanks to everyone who made this event rock. Your organizer team, Blake, Tyler, Scott, Stormy.

Tags: blakeburris, cohabitat, facebook, facebookdevelopergarage, fbdallas, harpscott, stormy, tylerfields