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. There is tech networking in Los Angeles!”. 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, what now?

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

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 to

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.

I'm happy to announce the launch of the Los Angeles Tech Content Community . This is the beginning of a content community that collects and organizes the best content from blogs and web sites. 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. The content comes from other places.

Welcome to Los Angeles, city of angels, demons and everything in-between. Two years ago I was working some low-level web development job, even worse, I was doing it from Orange County. I’ve had a rather in-depth look at the people and culture of the Los Angeles tech scene, both in person and virtually. For one of a million reasons you may find yourself here, perhaps you’re even trying to make something happen in the tech space. For those who are, I thought it might be helpful to share some of my own experiences.

He talks about a bunch of the different networking events that occur in Los Angeles and other parts of Southern California. In his post, he mentions the following events / event organizers, and you should visit his post for a bit more on each of them. LA CTO Forum Dealmaker Media Digital Family Reunion Startups Uncensored Social Media Club, LA Twiistup Mindshare LA LA Hadoop Meetup Dorkbot Geek Dinners LA Cloud Computing LA Web Application Developers LA PHP Developers In

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. I also blog at http://gilison.wordpress.com/ and you can find me on twitter: @gilbola . What are you working on now? I’m currently

We’re pleased with its growth but, as with any Web-based business, we’re looking for additional organizations we can help. It's good to hear that a person who I go to for marketing advice has the same challenge as the rest of us. world? What networking events in Los Angeles or Southern California do you go to? 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.