David Herrold

Good-bye Houston!

Posted by Dave | Filed under Personal

 

It’s official, Justine and I will be moving to Denver, Colorado April 30th.  We are in the process of trading our flip-flops for hiking boots and our margaritas for micro-brews.  The adventure begins in a few short weeks.

Over the past 4 years, I have enjoyed working at the Houston Chronicle more than I could have imagined.  My colleagues in the web department are some of the brightest in the industry and I consider myself lucky to have worked with them.  I have no doubt they will continue to serve the Gulf Coast of Texas and beyond with the most comprehensive news site possible.

They have an amazing passion for the industry.  It is truly humbling.

In Denver, I will be taking on a new role as the Director of Marketing and Business Development for Kaango.com, a web-based advertising platform.  I have had the pleasure of working with Kaango while at the Houston Chronicle and they are equally as passionate about their industry and products.  

They have created a best-of-breed classifieds platform to help newspapers evolve online and I am looking forward to joining them.

If I began naming names of all the people in Houston we will miss, this blog post would swell to over 50K words.  Needless to say, we have an amazing group of friends in Houston we will miss very much.  This town is full of unbelievably talented and generous people.  I will miss you all.

The good news: now you have a good excuse to visit Denver.

- Dave

Tags: denver, goodbye, houston, moving

Hurricane Ike – lost electricity

Posted by Dave | Filed under Personal, Science

UPDATE – Saturday, Sept 12th - We’re all fine here, just without power and water.  It’s like camping, except not nearly as much fun.

I’m updating the blog with my phone because we’ve lost power here in the 77007 area of Houston.

The wind and rain seems to be coming pretty steadily, howling outside. The tall palm trees across the street are bending like flowers. Surprised they are still standing.

Hope everyone in Houston fairs well.

-Dave

PS- wish I could show you photos, but it’s too dark for my phone’s camera.

Tags: houston, hurricane ike

Hurricane Ike wind speeds

Posted by Dave | Filed under Personal, Science

According to the City of Houston’s wind speed charts, our neighborhood will be experiencing 79MPH winds later today.  I suspect Galveston will be experiencing the full force of the hurricane speed winds.  The farther south you go, the faster the winds get.

Stay safe, everyone.  This will be a gully-washer for sure.

- Dave

(Thanks to Marc Nathan on Twitter for the link to Houston’s wind speed chart.)

Tags: houston, hurricane ike, Saffir-Simpson

BarCampHouston3 recap

Posted by Dave | Filed under Design, Development, Marketing, Mobile, Networking, Social Networking, Software, Technology

Justine and I attended BarCamp Houston at the Houston Technology Center yesterday and had a great time. A big thanks to all the organizers (Marc Nathan, Kelsey Ruger, Josh Tabin, Scott Stolz). You guys made the event a smashing success for everyone. And thanks to all the sponsors for helping to make BarCamp Houston possible.

For those who don’t know what BarCamp is, here is a brief explanation:

BarCamp is an international network of user generated conferences — open, participatory workshop-events, whose content is provided by participants — often focusing on early-stage web applications, and related open source technologies, social protocols, and open data formats. – Wikipedia

This can be simplified to “day camp for nerds.”

I watched some great presentations and participated in some interesting discussions throughout the day. BarCamps are only as great as their participants, and we had some great participants this year.

Ed Schipul’s presentation on PR and social media was sharp. His creative use of a green laser pointer kept the crowd in line (as much as possible) as he explained how to “put the relations back in public relations” using social media. It’s a pleasure to watch a pro on stage engage the audience as well as Ed does.

Josh Tabin spoke about how start-up funding works. I found his discussion about the ins and outs of financing to be pretty enlightening. I left the discussion knowing a lot more about how start-ups make that initial leap into businesses.

Tracy and Imelda whipped up an impromptu discussion on digital photography and social media. I’m pretty sure there should have been a cover charge for the room and IDs checked at the door. Tracy had the room in stitches for a solid 30 minutes, while feeding them great advice for managing their photos in Flickr.

Katherine Druckman also jumped into the mix with an impromptu presentation about Drupal, the open source content management system. The crowd had lots of questions and she fielded them like a pro.

Wynn Netherland and Jim Mulholland from Squeejee.com gave a great presentation on virtual collaboration tools. I’ve gotten used to keeping much of my work “in the cloud” and Wynn and Jim did a nice job of rounding up the most useful tools for working with teams spread across the globe (they even did their presentation live on Google Docs. Cool.)

Here’s a photo of the schedule board in the lobby. A little something for everyone.

My own presentation about mobile web design & SMS went pretty well (at least I think so…it’s hard to gauge while standing behind a podium). I used a live SMS poll to determine how the crowd used their phones the most (talking, email, text messaging or mobile internet). Email and WAP came out on top, which isn’t surprising given the technologically savvy crowd at BarCampHouston. (Screenshot of the BarCampHouston3 mobile poll results.) I also posted some photos on Flickr yesterday.

(Update: I just found out my presentation deck was featured on the homepage of Slideshare today! Woot! Here’s the screenshot.)

Have a great Sunday, everyone!

P.S. – Bill Shirley posted a nice BarCampHouston update, too. Check it out.

P.P.S – Steve Evatt also recapped BarCamp Houston and took some cool photos as well.

Tags: barcamp, barcamphouston3, conference, houston, Technology