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.

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.

We’ll be heading over to Austin tonight for the Austin on Rails meetup tonight. We’ve recently switched over from SVN to Git and wanted to hear what Rein Henrichs has to say about it. Depending on when it’s over, we may swing by Refresh Austin or GeekAustin.

We will be bringing along a new Ruby friend we found at BarCampTexas, Dean Brundage.

Austin on Rails Post

Downtown Cartel, a member company of the Creative Space, was one of the hosts for BarCampTexas. Ben gave a talk on test driven development. A panel of folks from the Creative Space, including our own Cody Marx Bailey, talked about our co-working implementation in beautiful downtown Bryan. All in all, it was a great success. The beer flowed, the talks went late into the night, and a stack of business cards were obtained.

It was really nice to meet a lot of the folks from around the state that do the same kind of stuff we do. I think we surprised a lot of the people that came who had never heard of Bryan/College Station, TX.

We’re busy working on our next event with the Creative Space, but we don’t want to let the cat out of the bag quite yet.

We’ll be at Margarita Rocks at 7pm tonight for RefreshBCS’s January happy hour. Stop by and say hello.

Location: 1601 Texas Ave S College Station, TX 77840 (979) 680-0600

Downtown Cartel and the rest of the Creative Space will be spending the day in Houston on Thursday, January 17. We are coming down to see some of our friends, supporters, and folks we’ve heard about but never met face to face. Here’s how the trip is looking right now:

• Wednesday
  • Leave The Creative Space at 5:30.
  • Arrive in Houston for a delicious dinner (suggestions welcome).
  • Maybe go out for some music/dessert.
  • Head to the hotel downtown.
• Thursday
  • 8am - 10am > Open Coffee Club
  • 10am - 11am > Jelly Coworking Space
  • 11am - 12pm > Houston Technology Center
  • 12pm - 1:30pm > Lunch (suggestions welcome)
  • 1:30pm - 3pm > Pop Labs
  • 3pm - 5pm > Schipul
  • 5:30pm > Dinner

We’re really excited about the trip and hopefully we’ll represent the Bryan tech community well. We’ll be traveling with:

• Always Creative
• Building Process
• Erickson Media Group
• Michael Cummings Photography

GeekAustin Happy Hour Details: Geek Austin Happy Hour Date: Tuesday, January 8th, 7-9PM Location: J Blacks 710 W. 6th St., Suite B, Austin, Texas 78701