Slamdot

Many of our Knoxville-based customers know that I’ve been routinely co-hosting a radio show on Saturdays at noon called Your Opportunity Knox with Tom and Judy Irmen. Tom and Judy also own Everything Knoxville, a local publication highlighting all things Knoxville. The radio show’s format is tech and business talk, with a goal of helping small businesses leverage technology to reach their full potential. We’ve had several shows on sales, marketing, social networking, website design and everything in between.

One topic we’ve discussed several times on air has been the book Getting Real by 37signals. Everyone at Slamdot has read it. We pretty much live by it. I have two copies of the book myself: one I keep, and one I loan out. So, I loaned Tom Getting Real a few months ago and he wouldn’t give it back, or stop talking about it. He liked it so much that he brought it up during several shows.

This weekend we decided to dedicate an entire show to Getting Real. We were going to take several statements from the book and compare them to general business uses for our listener audience. Just before the show, I twittered (tweeted?) that we’d be talking about Getting Real on the radio. Within 5 minutes, Jason Fried had messaged me and offered to be available for an on-air interview. I was totally mondo stoked.

All within about thirty minutes we managed to get the word out, coordinate with the producer, and get Jason on the line for the interview. Talk about agile. I must say that I was a little star-struck for the first few minutes, and you can hear it in my voice! The show was fantastic and we really appreciate the opportunity to talk with Jason.

Listen to the interview with Jason Fried

Hopefully we can get Jason to come back again soon!

Jason Fried from 37signals will be on the air with us today on WNOX FM 100.3 at 12:00pm EST. We’ll be talking about their book, Getting Real and how it applies to any business.

Listen live at http://tinyurl.com/6e2b69!

It’s with great honor that I get to write this particular blog post, because the founder and owner of Slamdot, Sean Christman, who also happens to be one of my closest friends, has won the Young Entrepreneur of the Year Award at the Knoxville Chamber’s Pinnacle Business Awards for 2009. Beware because you will hear things about Sean that you wouldn’t otherwise hear if I weren’t writing this myself.

On Friday, May 1st, in front of a packed formal ballroom, with the lights dimmed, and most of the other award winners already announced, roughly 600 of Knoxville’s top business leaders and community members were gathered to watch my short tribute to Sean:

After surprising the heck out of him, his name was announced and he took to the stage for a short acceptance speech, which if you know Sean was spontaneous and straight from the heart. He thanked our customers, the community, his parents, his wife, and, of course, yours truly. Except, I was only fortunate enough to have randomly met Sean during a brief stint at the same high school back 10+ years ago. His dream, his passion, his knowledge, his charisma, his business savvy, and his vision are what brought us to today. Ok, I was only paid for a couple paragraphs, I believe that’s a wrap. Kidding!

Here are some pictures from the Friday evening ceremony.

Pinnacle Business Awards

Sean on the Big Screen

No music can drown out this noise. It’s hard to hear each other, even though we’re shouting across the room! The construction has really begun here on the 100 Block of Gay Street. They brought in large machines to tear up the road, shake the buildings and confuse the office pets. We’ll get through it though!

Hancock was here

The Scoop on Gay Street

Elaine Frank came on board a couple of weeks ago. She’ll be helping out with customer service/support and design work. Elaine was recommended to us by one of our customers who hired her to take pictures for their website. Her passion for photography should start shining through on our blog soon :)

So everyone please welcome Elaine Frank to the team!

If you’re wondering why our website looks a little strange today, it’s because we’re joining in on the fourth annual CSS Naked Day to help promote Web Standards, and simply because it has been a long week and we’re having a little fun. Daniel is nervously watching the telephone, waiting for the confused callers to come buzzing in. Rest assured, everything will be normal again tomorrow!

So, shed your styles and come on in, the water’s fine!

Everything Knoxville ran a story about Sean being on the Your Opportunity Knox radio program on Knoxville’s Big Talker, FM 100 WNOX. You can check it out here.

Sean and Daniel were on Knoxville’s Big Talker, FM 100 WNOX a couple of Saturdays ago. They talked about search engine optimization, social networking, and being small and agile. Here are some pictures from the studio.

Daniel on Air

Tom and Sean

Tom and Jon

We celebrated our open house and ribbon cutting on Friday, March the 6th. The Knoxville Chamber sponsored the event, while Little Havana and Rita’s Ice provided the food and refreshments. Overall, the event went better than we could have hoped, with over a hundred people coming out to show support! We gave away an iPod and a couple of iTunes cards as door prizes. WBIR even came out to join in the festivities! Here’s some coverage from the event.

Ribbon Cutting

Speech! Speech!

WBIR News

We got the wall with the sign on it painted blue yesterday. We’re still trying decide whether we should paint the other wall white or lime green. Any suggestions?

Blue conference area

Full shot of the blue wall