My friend Mark Long recently asked me about networking in Los Angeles. Rather than write something just for Mark, I thought I would let everybody else know what the good, tech-oriented networking events are in Los Angeles. It took me a little while to figure out the difference between entertainment meetups, advertising events, marketing conferences, and even fashion shows (did I mention that I am a Technologist?). Mark is a CTO, see, and his company, PortBlue , was recently acquired (congrats, Mark!). After transitioning to the new team, Mark was left to wonder,

Los Angeles? Los Angles founders are hustlers and deal makers. At parties in Los Angeles people talk about a media deal they’re “closing”, what TV star is at the party, and some “gray hat” spam-like technique that made them an extra 100K last month. Folks in Los Angeles are shrewder business people, have better interpersonal skills, but are more full of shit and two faced, and struggle to build products that get virally adopted. Is there a difference between tech startups in Silicon Valley vs. Most emphatically, Yes !

He was struggling to find high quality developers in Los Angeles. Just the kind of person I like to meet. :) But I was a bit surprised when he emphasized how hard it had been for them to find a web developer in Los Angeles. My flippant comment was, “If you do a Google search for Los Angeles web developer, you’ll find a LOT of people and firms.” His response was that he had done exactly that, but that the long list is not all that useful. Yesterday, I met with someone at the early stage of a startup. He has a great concept with some complexity

Attendees: If you have review comments I'd be happy to consider them. Name: XING Community Los Angeles Sites: https://www.xing.com/net/la/ , www.linkedin.com/groups?gid=33803 gid=33803 (main), https://www.xing.com/ Self-description: "This forum is dedicated to all Los Angeles inhabitants, visitors of the area and business minded people from all around the world, who would like to explore business opportunities with L.A. This is will be a continually updating post. I'll be creating additional lists for educational, chamber of commerce, etc. Organizational representatives: please contact me directly for updates, etc.

Great by Cliff Allen Business Networking Online who I had blogged about previously in Marketing, Startups and Networking in Los Angeles . I'm going to be working with people like Cliff and Steve Gilison (see Product Management for Startups in Los Angeles ) and Tom Humbarger (see Social Media to Build Reputation and Reach Prospects ) to create this online business networking group for Los Angeles. Cliff also sparked an idea that along with using in a separate conversations sparked the idea that we should be using Southern California Tech Central as a means of helping

I'm hoping you can help me figure out who I should be connecting with on this. I find myself speaking at various venues in Los Angeles to tell people (most often service providers) about how I've used social media and particularly my blogs, LinkedIn, twitter and topic hubs as part of my own services business. What do they search for? So this person needs to understand how to quickly move through marketing analysis 101 type things. My perception is that most services professionals like this are not going to want to spend a lot of money on these things, but I've not market

I'm happy to announce the launch of the Los Angeles Tech Content Community . The goal is to create a place where it's relatively easy to find current content and highly relevant content surrounding Los Angeles Technology. To be clear Los Angeles Tech is a jump off point. This is the beginning of a content community that collects and organizes the best content from blogs and web sites. The content comes from other places.

Cliff Allen is someone I've known for quite a few years and he's a go to person for me when I'm thinking about issues around marketing, sales, technology, startups and networking. Of course, when I started thinking about Visible Networking , I immediately went to Cliff to check in to see how he's doing and to get his feedback, thoughts and ideas on the concept. Cliff, remind me about your background? My first career was spent building radio and television stations, then running the programming side of those businesses. In 1986 I started an advertising and public relations

quot; Kurt has a great background in sales and marketing. They can figure out who they really want to connect with. What networking events in Los Angeles or Southern California do you go to? Digital LA is fun when I want to be social. Besides Tony Karrer for technology, who are some of your go to people in Los Angeles? There are too many to mention. Kurt Daradics ( Facebook , @KurtyD , FriendFeed , MySpace , LinkedIn , Delicious ) (pronounced dare-a-dix) is a great guy to know. He recently co-founded CitySourced and I think Ben Kuo nailed

Steve Gilison worked as a market researcher and product manager at a startup where my company, TechEmpower , did the software / web development. Of course, I immediately gave him the whole spiel on Visible Networking and Steve was totally game to make our networking visible. Remind me about your background Steve? I have about 11 years in the technology sector including roles doing market research, sales and product development. My focus has been marketing strategy and product development. It was great to hear from a long, lost colleague the other day.