I’ll be giving a talk Saturday afternoon about how 20-somethings use photography. (Come if you can!) Once that’s done, it’s off to Disneyland!!!

If you’re in town for the show and want to meet up, or go to Disneyland with us, drop me a line!

p.s. I also spoke at Macworld here in SF last week but forgot to mention it ahead of time. SBI!

If we should meet while I’m in town, drop me a line! -> [current year] at amit gupta dot com

Here’s my schedule

Monday

• 2 pm: Get into town, drop off my stuff at House 2.0
• 3:30 pm: Meeting with Jake Lodwick in Brooklyn
• 6:30 pm: Dinner at Hummus (LES) with these amazing people: Michael Galpert, Nick Gray, Erin Sparling, Nick Hall, Jennifer Daniel (maybe), Kristen Taylor, Jesse Chan-Norris, Naveen (maybe), Lee Semel, Spencer Fry, Ian Van Ness, Mina K, Luke Crawford [Feel free to join us, but it might be crowded...]

Tuesday

• morning: Grabbing bagels at Absolute Bagel!
• 1 pm: Lunch Josh Mohrer (Covester, formerly Busted Tees)
• mid-afternoon: Coffee with Spencer Fry (Carbonmade) , Sahadeva (Print Society), Dave Gorum (Carbonmade)
• late afternoon: Retail adventures with Kristen Wentrcek (Wintercheck Factory) at Kiosk and Lomography stores.
• dinner: FREE!

Wednesday

• 10 am: Meeting David Bolotsky (Uncommon Goods) for some advice
• 11:30/Noon: Visiting the Fredflare store in Brooklyn if I have the time
• 1pm: Meeting Hershel Waldner (B&H)
• 3pm: Stop by to see Tyler Hicks-Wright (Fog Creek Software)
• 4pm: Meeting Keith Carollo (Fredflare)
• 7pm: Flying home to SFO!

Things I’m hoping to do somewhere: Visit this pretzel place, stop by ICP, go skating in Bryant Park

I’ll be talking about Photojojo and the topic is how to get people to pay attention to what you’re doing.

As usual, if you’re in town and want to meet up, drop me a line!

I’m in Vegas for PMA this week. I’ll be speaking on Sunday, looking for new products for the Photojojo store with Jen (our new store manager) during the week, helping with the HP+Photojojo Photo Safari at the Neon Boneyard on Wednesday, and hanging out with Jen, Steph, and Katherine and Cari from SF on Wednesday night and Thursday.

If you’re in town and want to meet up, drop me a line!

Once a month, we’ll be inviting some amazing speakers to visit their local Jelly and give a talk.

Each talk will be streamed live to all other Jellies taking place on that day, and we’ll follow it with a collective Q&A.

January and February kick off with my buddies Chris Messina and Dave Morin debating the relative merits of Open ID and Facebook Connect and how you can implement it on your site, followed by Guy Kawasaki talking about tips for entrepreneurs in February. (These talks will be in San Francisco, with Jellies from Boston, New York, LA, San Diego, Bangalore, Chicago, Vancouver, and Columbus tuning in.)

I’m so incredibly psyched to have these guys come speak at Jelly, and I can’t wait to see the speakers other cities line up in coming months!

A big thanks to Yahoo! for sponsoring our community and helping to make Jelly Talks happen, and to Josh Spear, Mike Arauz, and the gang at Undercurrent for making the connection!

March 1st: At PMA this year, I’ll be doing a solo session on day 1 of DIMA (the series looking at emerginc tech trends in photography). I’ll be talking about some of the “wacky” things we’re doing with Photojojo and how brick-and-mortar retailers can get involved.

March 13th: And I’ll be going to SXSW for the first time, where I’ll be sitting on a panel my friend Brian Oberkirch is organizing called “Try Making Yourself More Interesting” talking about how we built Photojojo’s brand and community to be more human and fun.

If you’ll be at any of these events, come by, or drop me a line. I’d love to meet you!

• San Francisco, CA*
• New York, NY*
• Brooklyn, NY*
• Chicago, IL
• Düsseldorf, Germany
• Cologne, Germany
• New Delhi, India*
• Nainital, India
• South Lake Tahoe, CA
• Brookline, MA
• Edison, NJ
• Woodbridge, CT*
• North Bennington, VT

A quick look on Dopplr revealed that I spent a whopping 31 days in New York this year, burnt 12,281 kg of CO₂, and had no travel in March or June.

See also: Katherine’s list and Chrysanthe’s list

We’ve now been using Yammer at Photojojo for three months, and it’s been a really useful tool for ambient office communication.

For those of you who don’t know, Yammer’s basically a private, company-specific version of Twitter. Even in a real office (we’re usually sitting just a few feet away from each other) and with a small team (we’re just three people — p.s. we’re hiring) it’s been really cool to know what people are working on, what they’re noticing, etc. There’s a lot of things that just don’t merit a verbal or email interruption but are still worth putting out there. Yammer fits the bill.

In addition to sending a quick note about we’re working on, we also end up using yammer as a semi-live chat space… the Air app is usually open on each of our laptops, and it’s taken the place of IM.

As a side note, I’ve noticed myself twittering a lot less since we started using Yammer in September. I’m averaging 10-12 yammer messages a day, but only 2-3 twitter messages.

p.s. I also talked briefly about our Yammer usage on a PSFK panel last month.

The Airport Express used to sit in my bedroom hooked up to some speakers, and the Linksys in my living room. By the time the Linksys’ signal reached my bedroom, it was spotty on my MacBook Pro, and streaming music dropped our frequently. (As did Skype, iChat video, etc.)

The Airport Express can be configured to extend a wireless connection (as opposed to joining it) using WDS, but there’s a lot of conflicting and outdated info on whether or how the it will work with non-Apple wireless routers.

After fiddling for a half hour or so, I got it to work. Here’s how…

1) Click on the Airport tab in the Airport Setup Utility

2) Select “Participate in a WDS Network” for your Wireless Mode

3) Type in the name of the network you want to extend, exactly

Things should look like this now:

Note: You can use WEP security (there are reports WPA doesn’t work when extending the network) but I encourage you not to. The dangers of opening up your wireless network are few (especially if you’re using a Mac) and completely overblown by the media. The benefits — letting guests online easily, not remembering another password, sharing your internet with others, etc. — outweigh them.

4) Get the MAC address of the wireless router you’re extending from its online configuration interface. With the Linksys, you’ll find it here:

5) Hop on over to the WDS tab in the Airport Setup Utility

6) Change your WDS Mode to “WDS remote”

7) Check “Allow Wireless Clients” and paste the router MAC address you just looked up into WDS Main

That’s it!

Update your settings, let your Airport Express restart, and once it reboots, it should be extending your Linksys network seamlessly. My connection’s no longer dropping in my bedroom and music is streaming wirelessly.

Amazon sells both the Airport Express and Linksys WRT54GL.

Fellow panel members are Andrew Hoppin (NASA),
John Geraci (Outside.in & DIY City), and
Matt Stinchcomb (Etsy).

There’s 6 tickets left at this moment and it starts way too early in the morning.

Photojojo’s putting on a series of events over the next couple months in NYC and SF. They’re called Photo Safaris and the idea is simple: anyone with a camera is welcome, we find a fun event, location, or organize a tour, you have fun shooting for an hour or two, then we go to a bar, show off everyone’s photos, and give away some prizes from our sponsors.

The first one is this Saturday, October 25th in DUMBO, Brooklyn. Hope you can make it.

Link: Photojojo Photo Safaris
Link: RSVP for this Saturday

One of the rooms in my apartment just opened up, and we’re looking to fill it by November 1st or sooner. We’ll start interviewing this week.

The apartment is a three bedroom in San Francisco that I share with two other people, and one of them (Jenny) started grad school and moved into school housing*.

The room is small (12′ x 13′), has a window, a large closet, and is quiet. The rent is very cheap ($550/month + utilities) and the lease is month-to-month.

• In Duboce Triangle (seriously great, super walkable neighborhood with tree-lined streets, and lots of places to eat.) A quick walk to the Lower Haight or Castro. 2 blocks from Duboce Park (swell dog park — and the apt itself is dog-friendly.)
• Within 3 blocks, you’ll find burritos, burgers, vietnamese and chinese, bars, a gym, and a 24-hour Safeway (grocery store)
• Washer and Dryer in unit.
• Bike parking in back.
• Shared Kitchen + living room + bathroom
• 2 blocks from the Church St. MUNI (K,M,T) and N-Judah, J-Church, F-Market, and 22.
• Available 11/1 or sooner.
• $550/month. (Yes, really. It’s rent controlled because my other roommate has been here for a while.)

We might be picky, but if you are awesome and are interested, email me. And if you know someone who might be interested, pass it on. Thanks!

* Jenny was going to move out a few months ago but she decided she didn’t want to give up the room and stayed on a bit longer. In the end, paying for a room she wasn’t using didn’t seem like the best idea, so now we’re looking again!

Briefly, we’re looking for someone entrepreneurial, smart, and savvy to take charge of our online store business. We started the store two years ago and have seen impressive growth despite it being a sideline until now. We’re aiming to put a lot more time into the store, and we’re looking for a perfect someone to take over buying, marketing, promotions, and overall direction. You’ll have a good deal of responsibility, lots of flexibility to be creative, and the opportunity to learn and grow a ton.

Please pass it on to your photo-happy San Francisco friends!

Details: Photojojo Jobs: Entrepreneurial online store manager wanted

Looking forward to seeing my pal Mareen, meeting new friends like Fabian Töpel, and finding some cool products to sell in the Photojojo Store!

If you’ll be at Photokina, drop me a line so we can meet up!

(And if you’re free Saturday night, stop by House 2.0 and hang out!)

I wrote about them back in March and am thrilled to see ‘em getting more and more attention. Just in the past few days, they got a plug in the Wall Street Journal and a post in TechCrunch!

Their marketing strategy for the site, by the way, is spot-on. Instead of trying to attack the entire world at once (and spreading themselves too thin, with cities upon cities with no listings) or concentrating on one city at a time (slow), they’re latching onto popular events and conferences.

By creating campaigns around design and political conferences and major events, they make it temporal, and relevant. In one stroke, the site is worth talking about and blogging about for anyone who’s talking or blogging about that event. Smart.

Allow people to review, fave, or star individual menu items.

Here in San Francisco, Yelp is indispensable. In NYC, I used Menupages all the time. Both are great for simple, honest, user-generated feedback of places to eat.

Often, I’m visiting the page for a restaurant I’ve already tried, just to skim through the reviews and decide what to order. Case in point, my favorite sammy shop in the whole wide world, Ike’s Place, has a ton of amazing vegetarian sandwiches on the menu. My favorite is their “Going Home For Thanksgiving” sandwich, but sometimes I want to try something new.

Wouldn’t it be neat-o if you could just look at the menu and see reviews for each item? Maybe even sort by popularity or rating? I think it would.

I’ve been noticing something happening to me more and more often recently: serendipitous social connections being made between me and old friends, strangers, or even between two people I barely know, as a result of some data I put up publicly on the net.

Here’s three examples over just the past few days:

1. I twittered a meeting I was having earlier week with Lisa Congdon at Rare Device, who I met through my pal Kate Bingaman-Burt, and as a result, someone I don’t even know named Beth, was reconnected with Lisa. Beth and I don’t know each other, Lisa and I just met this week, and Kate and I have only communicated through digital means… we’ve never met in person.
2. I posted a photo of a dollar bill I had that reminded me of a side project of a guy that used to work for me… seven years ago. As a result, I got an email from him the next day.
3. I posted this photo of a special bottle of Dr. Pepper I bought back in February. Yesterday, I got this email through Facebook from a gal I don’t know looking for the soda in the Bay Area for a friend who’s obsessed with the drink and has a birthday coming up.

Of course, none of these events are truly serendipitous, they’re all indicative of the incredibly interconnected fabric of social connection we’re weaving online with every piece of information we put out there. The more we open ourselves up, the more we’re weaved into the social fabric, with each piece of information we release becoming a possible point of connection (or re-connection) with old and new friends.

If that’s of interest, or if you know someone looking for an apartment, read on…

If you or an equally awesome friend is looking for an apartment in San Francisco (starting mid August to Sept 1), a room is about to open up in my apartment. It’s a three bedroom in San Francisco that I share with two other people, and one of them (Jenny) is starting grad school and moving into school housing.

• In Duboce Triangle (seriously great, super walkable neighborhood with tree-lined streets, and lots of places to eat.) A quick walk to the Lower Haight or Castro. 2 blocks from Duboce Park (swell dog park — and the apt itself is dog-friendly.) Within 3 blocks, you’ll find burritos, burgers, vietnamese and chinese, bars, a gym, and a 24-hour Safeway (grocery store)
• Washer and Dryer in unit.
• Shared Kitchen + living room + bathroom
• 2 blocks from the Church St. MUNI (K,M,T) and N-Judah, J-Church, F-Market, and 22.
• $550/month. (Yes this is the insane part. It’s rent controlled because my other roommate has been there for a while.)

p.s. If you’re interested in the share idea, drop me a line. I have one person interested so far, and it’d be around $100-200/month.

Either way: email me.

Sarah Austin did an interview with me for Pop17 (Thanks, Jamie!) when I was at speaking at PSFK SF a couple weeks ago, and it just went up! I talk about Photojojo and Jelly.

p.s. Here’s a post by Jeannie on the panel we did on Core77.