Major announcement about TopFloorStudio

Dear friends,

After 10 years of working with some of the most creative and talented folks I’m happy to say that we are continuing that tradition into the future.  Greenstone Media, an Asheville company, has acquired TopFloorStudio and has my full confidence in disrupting the regional tech scene.  They will work with the utmost of integrity and innovation.  I met Greenstone Media when I asked a friend for the name of the person who did his beautiful App and Website and he told me about Nathan Silsbee, CEO of Greenstone; and he couldn’t say enough good things about Nathan.   Since then I’ve been solidly behind this firm.  Greenstone has treated many of my past clients well with nothing but good feedback. 

Cities 3.0 - Interconnecting Cities with Maggie Ullman

My interview with Maggie Ullman about how interconnecting cities will lead to a healthier world.

http://ashevillegrit.com/cities-30-interconnecting-cities-maggie-ullman

Agile Manifesto

The Agile Manifesto reads, in its entirety, as follows:

We are uncovering better ways of developing software by doing it
and helping others do it. Through this work we have come to value:
Individuals and interactions over Processes and tools
Working software over Comprehensive documentation
Customer collaboration over Contract negotiation
Responding to change over Following a plan
That is, while there is value in the items on the right, we value the 
items on the left more. 

Picture found (like most of the pictures I use) from using http://search.creativecommons.org/

Startup Product Asheville - Wednesday, Feb 26th 5p at Asheville Music Hall

What is Startup Product Asheville?  Startup Product Talks Asheville welcomes everyone passionate about product excellence, regardless of title, industry, or stage of growth, to come together to share, learn and talk about what it really takes to produce products that people love and how to build sustainable businesses and revenue streams based on product excellence.

Register here

Register here

Announcing 4 Speakers for Startup Product Asheville Feb 26th + Help us collaborate please

February 26th 5 to 7pm, what are you doing? In honor of collaboration we've started a new event, Startup Product Asheville. This hopes to bring together different organizations and networks in the name of building out our support for entrepreneurs, cultural creatives, geeks and the creative class in general. Thank you to Asheville Music Hall for hosting us!

We have 4 wonderful speakers lined up and I'm happy to share them here as many of them have just been confirming today. We will have 1 hour of networking and 1 hour or a little more of program.

Robin Cape - will present the Collider, a collaborative space that will change the entrepreneurial landscape (like an RTP in the making move)

Bradley Waldrop - will talk about what an Lean Startup Circle is about

Craig McAnsh - signed on today and hopefully will in part give an update about Mojo, 3d printing and whats next for Asheville 

David Miller - will give us an update on the Story Worlding revolution and hopefully we will have some immersive technology at the event.

Read more about our partnership with Cindy Solomon on the West Coast here: http://tyhallock.blogspot.com/2014/01/startup-product-talks-asheville.html
and more about the spirit of collaboration that we are hoping to strike here: http://tyhallock.blogspot.com/2014/01/i-challenge-you-to-do-organizational.html

I am currently trying to partner with groups that would sponsor and help collaborate, invite your membership and generally help out. Asheville Makers and Lean Startups are the first organizations to come on board, but with your help and with my drive to make it happen we will have a truly collaborative shindig.

Also forgot to mention that Ken Hurley and Nicholas Rake will be making the music for the night.

RSVP for the event here:  http://www.meetup.com/StartupProductAsheville/

Special thanks to KP of Asheville Music Hall for sponsoring this event.  Hopefully Mojo Kitchen will be serving some food upstairs for those who would like to eat.

Speeding up Epiphanies

I had an epiphany in the shower today.  It was something that I've been struggling with at TopFloorStudio for the last 4 months.  It was 2 ideas (one an idea one a tool to be exact) that I put together mentally, both very important ideas that had been in the forefront of my thoughts for months.

At first I was like... YES you are a genius, how did you ever think about this?  Then when I got out and driving to work I realized that in fact it wasn't that I was a genius; since these things were so obviously meant to be together you could have figured this out months ago.

It's funny how our mind sometimes goes from thinking we are geniuses to thinking we are stupid.  I bet some of you out there are thinking your ideas are dumb, but really you are genius!  Especially my readers.

My question for you, yeah you, is how do you, find epiphanies faster?  What should we be doing to find them faster? What is creativity (you don't actually have to answer that)? When do we get to congratulate ourselves for good thinking?