Being me, I took some meticulous speaker notes for those who want a readable or search friendly version of the conference.

Also being me, the only photo I took was of the delicious desserts after lunch the first day. In my defense, the food was as stellar as the speakers. Luckily, there’s a flickr group with tons of photos from people with less photographic ADD. See you all next year!

As a delighted NYC dweller, there’s a goldmine in the NYC subway. Here’s a cute ad from grubhub:

I’ve been espousing this philosphy for years, and now Meetup has brilliantly used it as a slogan in their ads: “use the internet to get off the internet.”

Coming from one of several hundred people who stood in line for free icecream from Coolhaus’s Firefox gone Mobile truck to promote their new Android browser, guerilla marketing approaches can be highly fruitful. Plus, the icecream was delicious. A job well done all around.

Photo Credit: http://barbariangroup.com/

I build websites, and I happily use the websites I make. Actually, it’s quite difficult to stop me from making them; passion is a powerful force. I’ve previously sold coffee I love, and books that I haven’t read. Any wonder which I was better at? Whether or not your product is tangible, the question remains. If you’re not going to shell out the money your asking your customers for, why should they?

When you love what you’re making, and you’re solving your own problem, it shows. Unlike most Apple products, the default iPhone calendar app leaves much to be desired. On the recommendation of a friend, I tried out the lite version of Calvetica and within moments I was hooked. A fish on the dock, I couldn’t help but shell out for the full version and ask the app where it had been all my life. My calendar woes were over. Quick event entry and crisp interfaces were mine to enjoy.

We’ve all used products that are riddled with disfunction, pretty but it seems like nobody ever tried to use them, or just plain perplexing.  Consider the next time you’re making something, if you’d want the finished product. If you’re not invested, stop. Find a way to make something you want to use, buy, and love, or just start over fresh. These are the products I want to see more of. When you make something you’re passionate about, we know, and we also go into a purchasing frenzy.

Want your already high powered phone to be your credit card, metrocard, and anything else you’d previously needed a card for? It can be with Near Field Communication (NFC) chips. Swipe the chip close enough to a reader and you can transfer data, whether it be your credit card number or your location for a quick check-in. NFC chips are already in some Android phones and there are rumors foretelling an NFC chip coming to the iPhone 5 (or whatever Apple chooses to call it). In the next couple of years, they’re likely going to be available in most smartphones. At that point, it will be up to the less tech-savvy businesses to integrate card-readers into their normal operations.

I’m excited for my Foursquare (or Yelp, Gowalla, or SCVNGR – gosh there are a lot of startups in this space) check-in to happen by tapping my phone at a reader by the door, and then I can pay by waving my phone over a sensor at checkout. For those of the female persuasion without the functional pockets of our counterparts, the need for a purse declines significantly. Leaving the house hands-free is a wonderful feeling.

In addition to consolidating and simplifying the repetitive process in life onto your phone, the UIs for onboard apps are going to get simpler, too. No more refreshing the page to find the location you’re at before you check-in, tapping the place, tapping the check-in button, then clicking submit. Four steps turns into one: swipe… done.

The potential uses are endless. Want to know how much money you have in your account? Swipe your phone by a sensor when passing by the bank. (This does raise an inevitable security issue, but I’ll leave that to the hardware geniuses to protect.) Diabetic, have a rare health condition, allergic to Penicillin? Your phone can let the EMTs know even if you’re unconscious. I’m eager to see all the day-to-day stuff get increasingly easier and tackle the bigger problems we’ll now have new solutions for, all from a small piece of hardware.

I use this icon set for my own personal and commercial projects, and I’ve always been surprised at the lack of fully open source vector icons. So, I’m offering these to you for free! You can use these icons for pretty much anything you can think of. Adorn your personal projects and commercial work. Revise them and redistribute them. You could even try to feed them to your tamagotchi, if it’s hungry… and still alive after all these years. Whatever you do, just don’t resell them for money. Please keep free things free for everybody.

It would be nice if you included a link back to this site or post. It’s certainly not required, but karma points are nice and all. I keep hoping I can trade some of mine in for brownie points. Those are more delicious.

Download Here (zipped .svg file)

Back in New York, I am continually challenged by the work ahead of me. I see the path to mastery of HTML5, CSS3, Javascript, Ruby, git, and languages yet to come, and I know that I am in the right place. Around me now are Mints who are exceedingly passionate about what they do, happy to help each other, and eager to learn more themselves. Nobody is done learning, everybody is eager to get their hands dirty, their characters jumbled, and their pixels squashed, knowing that there is a great team rooting for them (as well as tests and validations to sort it all out at the end of the day). I am so honored to be a part of it all, and I know what comes next from this team will continue to astound and delight.

Also, they certainly know how to calculate horns on a unicorn acre in teaspoons per light-year. That’s because they’re geniuses, and they make friends with unicorns.

If you ask Google Maps for directions from California to Japan, it makes some delightful assumptions about your kayaking abilities:

More reminders not to take life so seriously, and to make some time to play. You might become a multi-billion dollar company in the process, and you might not. Either way, it doesn’t matter so much if you’re having fun.