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Little Geeks News: GTA Children To Receive 100 Free Computers June 12th

By mesh08 news

At the mesh social on May 21, we, our guests and the event sponsors, Social Media Group, helped to raise money for Little Geeks, one of our favourite organizations. Ben Lucier, one of our favourite geeks, is very active within Little Geeks, and writes in with news, which we’ve copied below. We admire and support Little Geeks, and hope you’ll think about doing the same.

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GTA Children To Receive 100 Free Computers June 12th

Over the past several months, the Little Geeks Foundation staff and Board of Directors have worked hard to lay the groundwork to deliver on our mandate: To enhance the lives of children by providing computers to the underprivileged families within our community.

Thanks to the generous donations of the Foundation’s individual and corporate sponsors, I am very excited to announce that on June 12th at 3PM, The Little Geeks Foundation will hold an event and give refurbished computers, complete with Windows XP and Microsoft Office to 100 families of underprivileged children, free of charge.

This very special event will be held on June 12th from 3PM until 7PM at:

St Andrew’s United Church
117 Bloor Street East
Toronto, Ontario
(Google Map)

If you have a child in need of a computer, you can visit the Little Geeks Website to register. Once qualified, recipients will be contacted by a member of the Little Geeks staff to attend this event and pickup their free computer. NOTE: Don’t forget to register, you must register to be qualified to receive a computer.

Recipients of our computers are screened and selected in advance for the event, but media and supporters of Little Geeks are also invited to attend this event to learn more about our Foundation’s mission and the environmental and social roles The Little Geeks Foundation serves within our community.

Looking back at mesh 2008

By mesh08 news

Much like its two predecessors, the mesh conference this year was just a huge amount of fun — I can only hope that the people who attended and meshed along with us had as good a time as I did. From the keynote I did with Ethan Kaplan from blackrimglasses.com, the VP of technology at Warner Brothers, and the one that my colleague Stuart MacDonald did with Lane Merrifield of ClubPenguin.com (who seemed like just a terrifically down-to-earth guy — very Canadian) to the panels and workshops, and of course the great social events, it was as good a time as I can remember having at any conference. For me, the mark of a good conference is always the people you meet and the ideas you share, and hopefully we enabled a lot of that.

Some highlights for me personally included the design presentation at meshU by Daniel Burka of Digg and Pownce, who is just a super-nice guy (also very Canadian), and the ones by Ryan Carson — complete with his trademark hat — and Kevin Hale of Wufoo.com. As for mesh proper, the music panel was one of my favourites, in part because I programmed it; but also because David Gratton was such an excellent moderator, and because the mix of people of the panel was so good, with David Usher, CRIA head Graham Henderson and Kieran Roy of the indie label Arts & Crafts.

The presentation by Mike Masnick of Techdirt.com on “the economics of abundance” was also a personal favourite, and a whole bunch of people came up to tell me the same thing. Mike is extremely good at explaining difficult economic concepts as they apply to digital media and business models, and I could tell people in the panel room were getting a lot out of it — and I think 322 slides in 30 minutes is a new record. And of course, all the social meshing in the concourse was a big part of the conference for me, and hopefully for others, as well as the great parties put on by Maggie Fox and the Social Media Group and by Edelman, our PR partners for mesh 2008.

If you want to try and track some of what went on at mesh, here are some places to look:

— mDialog has video highlights of many of the keynotes and panels, and the videos are also available on iTunes as well (thanks to Greg Philpott and his team, and to the excellent Mark McKay).

— Flickr has some photos from mesh and from the mesh party at the Rockwood, hosted by SMG (thanks to Rannie “Photojunkie” Turingan and Arieh Singer)

— David Janes’ Onaswarm has a roundup of Twitter posts, Flickr photos and more.

— Nora Young of CBC’s Spark has posted video of her chat with Bill Buxton, which will be broadcast as part of next week’s show

— Michael Geist has uploaded his excellent slide presentation on digital advocacy

— Daniel Burka of Digg and Pownce has uploaded his meshU presentation to Slideshare.

— Sam Ladner, who did the Reputation Management workshop, has uploaded her slide deck.

— Amber MacArthur has put up a YouTube video of her presentation on video

Jonathan Keebler and Guinevere Ortis (who was also on the video panel, and was an excellent choice) live-blogged most of the conference using ScribbleLive, which was featured in a TechCrunch article written by Erick Schonfeld, who attended mesh08 (and is a really nice guy).

— Mark Blevis live-blogged many of the sessions, as did Dave Fleet and Connie Crosby, and music-panel moderator David Gratton.

— Nav from Scrawled in Wax wrote about a couple of sessions, as did Colin Carmichael and mesh regular (or irregular), the excellent Michael O’Connor Clarke.

— Marketing magazine has a story about mesh 2008, as does The Industry Standard

and for bonus points:

— Mike Masnick writes about how Warner Brothers should move Ethan Kaplan out of the technology side of the label and into the business side.

— My Globe colleague Matt Hartley worked his tail off at mesh and wrote several excellent stories (and I say that as a completely unbiased observer :-): one about StumbleUpon, one about Michael Geist and online advocacy, one about online brand-building and one about online video.

— Alec Saunders of Iotum gets into a back-and-forth with moderator Rachel Sklar from Huffington Post about the privacy panel at mesh 08.

— Ross McKegney has some thoughts about meshU.

— Jon Lax of Teehan Lax posted his presentation from meshU.

— Mark Kuznicki and Sean Howard have posted their Government 2.0 presentation from meshU on Slideshare.

— Wayne Macphail from Rabble.ca has posted video of six sessions at mesh, including the keynote by Michael Geist, the keynote by Lane Merrifield of Club Penguin, the “Video is Everywhere” panel, the “New Front Page” panel, the “Cultivating Community” panel and Mike Masnick’s presentation on “the Economics of Abundance.” Just click the “On Demand” button on the Rabbletv player.

— Reg Braithwaite has posted slides from his Building and Managing Great Software Teams presentation from meshU on Flickr.

— Alistair Croll has posted his slides from his Watching the Web presentation at meshU at the Bitcurrent site.

— more at the Tucows blog, as well as from Glen Farrelly and from Doug Walker, and some thoughts on meshU at StartupNorth

— Rahaf Harfoush also live-blogged a couple of the marketing panels.

— Stan Sutter of Infopresse has a post up about several of the panels and keynotes.

— Kevin Restivo has posted some thoughts about mesh08.

— Rob Hyndman did an interview with CFRA and has posted the audio.

— Kathryn Lagden has a post up about the conversation between Nora Young of CBC’s Spark and researcher Bill Buxton.

If you have any other links to mesh-related stuff — or thoughts about it — please post a comment. There are also meshU and mesh feedback forms you can use to give us your take on either of the two events.