Downtown Cartel, as a whole, believes that culture is a very important part in our local communities and that is why we have chosen to sponsor the 2008 Red Wasp Film Festival. The Red Wasp Film Festival attracts many film industry professionals early in their careers. Through the years we have enjoyed the festival and this year we felt that stepping up and sponsoring was the right thing to do.

We live in a small city where finding culture isn’t as easy as it may be in places like Los Angeles or Chicago. When we started our company we knew that we couldn’t sit around and wait for others to bring the culture to us. Sometimes you have to be the catalyst and actively cultivate it.

I think this attitude and understanding runs very deep in Downtown Cartel, as well as the other members of the Creative Space. I hate sounding cliche, but the words “Be the change you want to see in the world” seem to resonate in us.

The Sixth Annual Red Wasp Film Festival in downtown Bryan at StageCenter (201-B W 26th St.), October 24-25, 2008, from 7:30 until 11:30 pm. Tickets are available at the door: $15 for one night or $25 for both nights. There is also a special student rate of $10 for one night and $15 for both nights.

I think choosing the right venue for an event is one of the most important factors of having a great event. There are a few things to think of when scouting venues. After holding more than three dozen venues over the last year, I believe I have learned a thing or two and I’d like to share them.

1. Physical Location - Will most of your guests/visitors be in the area already? If you plan on holding your event, be it a Happy Hour or Networking Event, at 6PM on a weekday ask yourself where most of the participants will be when they get off work.
2. Parking - Make sure to inform your guests of any parking information. Will there be valet parking? If so, how much will it cost? Is there a parking garage? Parking meters?
3. Size - When I began planning events I would err on the side of a larger venue, just in case more people showed up than I was expecting. After attending other events I realized that the more cozy things are the better. If there is too much open space between people they will be more reluctant to start talking.
4. Type of Venue - For a happy hour, it’s obvious that there should be alcohol of some sort. Wine bars make excellent venues for business events. Social groups do well at coffee shops (with a meeting area). I think matching the overall feel of a place has a lot more to do with a place than the amenities.

Finding the perfect venue can be difficult at times - especially if you live in a smaller city or town as your options are not that great.

Downtown Cartel, in partnership with Always Creative and Matt Fruge, will be launching DesiredHearts.com in the near future. Part of the unique value Desired Hearts is bringing to the online t-shirt business model is the idea of building a donation to charity into the price of the product. With every shirt purchased, a portion of the revenues will go towards a charity of the t-shirt designers choosing.

I have not seen this done in many cases online, but I do feel that it’s a socially responsible thing to do. If more businesses followed this model, where your dollars go directly to charities for things that affect us all, such as the American Cancer Society or Oxfam International, even a fractional percent of sales would add up really fast considering the $14 trillion economy we have in the US alone. The question, and risk of this model, is would you choose to shop at places where you knew that a fixed amount (5-10%) would be going to a charity - or would you shop around to save a few bucks?

An added value that can emerge from this model is the free marketing your products receive if you work in conjunction with the charities you are raising money for. For instance, if you donate $600/mo from your sales to a charity with a large distribution network, like Oxfam International or similar, there is a distinct possibility of having your products marketed throughout their extensive distribution network on a continual basis because of the benefit they receive from your increased sales.

Share your thoughts in the comments section below.

On Saturday, a few of us from The Creative Space made it down to Houston for their 2008 BarCamp. I had not been down to Houston for any community/tech events lately and it was really nice to finally get a chance to see folks I hadn’t seen in a while. I would list them all but I’ll save you the time having to read 50 or so names.

Ben gave a presentation on Merb - The Pocket Rocket Web Framework, which was a modified version of the talk he and Brian gave at Austin on Rails recently. Several in his audience had either used or at least heard of Merb, which is always a suprising thing to us considering the newness of the framework. Ben’s talk generated great discussion afterwards.

Roby, of Always Creative fame, followed up with a presentation on Building Better Brands (slideshare). He did an outstanding job and piqued the interest of several in the audience when he took folks through the process for three jobs they had recently done.

Overall, the BarCamp was fun and the community was definitely out in force.

I will be attending the Magic tradeshow in Las Vegas in two weeks. You may be thinking to yourself “Cody, you are a grown man, what are you doing playing Magic the Gathering”, but I’m proud to say that is not the case. Magic is the premeir, twice a year, tradeshow for the fashion industry.

So, now you may be asking yourself “Cody, you are involved with a software company, what are you doing going to a fashion tradeshow?”. I will be there with Desired Hearts, a t-shirt label for now, learning about the industry and promoting our soon-to-launch website that Downtown Cartel built.

I’ve been to a few fashion shows, and been to plenty of boutiques in the different metropolitan areas I’ve lived in, but I’ve never been on the “industry side” of things.

What I’m Expecting To Learn

I want to learn how the different companies pitch their ideas. How they separate themselves from each other. I’m also wondering if there is something to learn about how we do our own service/product pitches by looking at a wildly different industry. I’ll be taking lots of notes and really digging into the techniques.

I think it will be a wildly different type of tradeshow than I’m used to, to say the least. I mean Linux World doesn’t quite have the same sort of feel that this one will.

It seems like it’s every few days we’re mentioned in our local paper. I guess that’s what happens when you are busy all the time changing the world.

Today, The Eagle mentioned us as “New Entrepreneurs”. The Brazos Valley has been a great place for us grow and start our company and Holli Estridge mentioned Downtown Cartel and Always Creative in a piece highlighting our companies.

I think she hit on some very good points about how the area is ripe for new businesses and start-ups.

The Article

Well, as many of you have pointed out, hashtags.org has been down since July 10th - nearly a month. This is because we rely on Twitter’s XMPP service to recieve tweets. They took the service down on the 10th and since then we’ve been waiting, patiently.

I have emailed the folks at twitter several times, but I haven’t been able to get a solution from them. In the mean time we are going to try a few other ways to get the data from them - even if it means banging on the public RSS feed every 2 seconds.

I assure you that we will be back, it’s just a matter of when Twitter gets it’s things in order.