This year’s techMaine conference was held at the Clarion Hotel on outer Congress Street in Portland, Maine. It’s always fun to go to this inexpensive one day conference to catch up with old colleagues and meet new folks.
The keynote this year was by Douglas Banks, editor of MHT: the Journal of New England Technology. He gave an interesting talk on technology trends in New England, but he was not as good as speakers from past years.
The first session I went to was on “cloud computing”. Here, an industry analyst covered the various companies that offer cloud computing services. I didn’t realize that Amazon had some sort of cloud virtualization (EC2). I need to look into that more!
Lunch was a very tasty buffet and some good conversation. After lunch I ran into Keith Goodwin of Accomplished Professionals. If you’re looking for technology work in the Portland area, you should give him a call. Keith is a good guy.
I blew off the session after lunch because I had some work to do, but I attended the final session of the day on MTI Grant Awardees. MTI is the Maine Technology Institute, a non-profit group funded by the state. They distribute money to companies in the form of seed grands and development awards. It was interesting to find out more about this. All awards require matching and there can be some daunting paperwork to fill out. But it appears they can be a great way to get some funding for starting new projects. This is something I need to investigate in 2009, I think.
Thanks to Joe and the folks at techMaine for putting on another good conference!