On Saturday I had the privilege to present on Mobile Apps that your business shouldn’t be without. All in all I think that, while much of it was review for many in attendance, as to the dissemination of ideas it was a success in that each person left with at least one new tidbit of information.
As for how I felt after presenting? Well, besides it being an unrehearsed and fairly disjointed presentation, I felt dirty. Despite my intentions, I felt like the entire presentation had the external appearance of leading the attendees down a path that ended with hiring redPear to build them a micro mobile app. I regrettably felt like I had done the redPear brand a disservice by delivering a message that, in my opinion, felt so self-serving. Even though I bundled redPear in the same sentence and “pitch” with great companies like Magical Panda and Held, I felt like some of the attendees were thinking, “Oh, I get it now, the whole reason he’s teaching us this is so that we’ll do work with his company.”
F*$% that. That’s the last reason I would spend a Saturday away from my family teaching about such a dry topic as Mobile Apps. My reason for sharing the information that I did was that I have a small passion (not my largest by any means) for helping to move small businesses to the cloud. And one of the main tools for accessing that cloud-placed data is via a mobile phone. You really can’t talk about the Cloud without talking about the Mobile tools used to access the data you place there.
So, where does this line of thought lead me? I’m pretty sure that we’re going to review the presentations and speaking opportunities that redPear chooses to engage in to make sure that we don’t come out looking self-serving. We aren’t and for us everything we do “publicly” is always with the intention of supporting the greater Phoenix community with no hope for a direct reward. As for me? I’m going to stay away from teaching/speaking about topics that result in a “pitch” at the end and just focus on teaching about the things that I am both passionate about and that have no direct correlation to a service that redPear provides. A talk about “The Benefits of the Cloud?” Sure. “How you can hire a development firm to build your business a mobile Cloud app?” Hell no.
Here’s the slide deck. There are some good nuggets in there if you dig deep.
Update: And here’s the actual video of the presentation posted at CenPhoCamp.com.