I really enjoyed the informal style which allowed for a lot of interaction. Ideal.

• #BOS2010 blog index & links to other great summaries. Please add yours if you write one. http://bit.ly/bstNtd #
• Hee hee! Now those @stephenfry & @apple fanboyz are confused. #wp7 #
• Is it bad to vote for the best sounding name if you don't know any companies in an obscure awards category? #
• If you read my @eric_sink blog you should read his clarification. He doesn't hate Fred. http://bit.ly/aqvrz8 #BOS2010 #
• When @ericries speaks London must listen! http://bit.ly/9uBRVF was at #BOS2010 #techhub Friday 15th October. #

AlpinaSearch is an award-winning executive search partner for emerging leaders in SaaS/cloud-based solutions and wireless/telco/convergence. We’ve built successful teams for high growth technology ventures within the portfolios of investors such as Qualcomm Ventures, Sofinnova and Summit Partners. Since co-founding AlpinaSearch in 2000, Gary has helped dozens of high growth North American & European technology ventures to identify and attract high impact leaders; Exec and Non-Exec Directors & Advisory Boards; and sales, marketing, business development and delivery teams.

• www.alpinasearch.com
• +44 (0) 117 230 7650
• info@alpinasearch.com

The BLN ‘Future of App Business Models’ discussion dinner provides an opportunity to meet other doers in the mobile industry to share ideas on emerging business models, challenges, and how we might support each other to reach our goals.

As the mobile industry explodes, we want to ask the best entrepreneurial minds in the industry, ‘How can you make money from this? What business models can best capitalise on the opportunity?’

Over the course of a roundtable discussion and 3 course dinner we would like to explore some of these issues with invited guests.

Confirmed company participants include CEOs, founders or relevant board level representatives from:

Ixonos, Cortexica, Cellectivity, Silicon Valley Bank, Business Leaders Network, Cloudmade, Mobile IQ, Sccope, Inmobi, The BLN, Mobile Interactive Group, Taptu, Grapple Mobile, Golden Gekko, Mippin, Mobcast, Goetz Partners, PlayPhone EMEA, IF Comm, Dorsey and Ideaworks3D.

We also have seats for a maximum of 4 active investors.

BLN discussion dinners are run under the Chatham House Rule and are for high-value people who appreciate the opportunity to discuss new ideas and explore business relationships with their peers in a relaxed, informal and fun atmosphere. This discussion & dinner will feature both upcoming businesses and well established big brand organisations. Participants in previous events have included founders/CEOs/senior executives from companies including: Google, Admob, Mind Candy, ARM, eBay, Tesco, Bango, Microsoft; as well as European VC and PE investors including Index, Gresham, Accel, Balderton and Intel Capital.

We anticipate significant demand for the 20 available places.

If you are a CEO/Founder/Senior Exec in a relevant organisation, we would love to hear from you if you would like to attend this event. Please note that by applying we CANNOT guarantee a place although we do our best to accommodate relevant individuals. Our priority is always to ensure that our guests are relevant to the specific discussion.

I thought this might be a useful quick index of each of the sessions from Business of Software 2010, with a link to some further reading. If you would like to buy books, I have given you a link to do so through Amazon. I have an affiliate account with them and will donate any proceeds to sponsoring our ByteNight sleepout on October 8th in Aid of Action for Children. You can of course buy them in lots of other places.

Seth Godin: www.sethgodin.com

• Talk: Are you afraid to truly make an impact? The opportunity for linchpin organizations and the people who run them.
• Twitter Takeaway: Competence is a commodity – dull. Software allows genius to shine. Are you a genius? (I am).
• More reading: Linchpin: Are You Indispensable? How to Drive Your Career and Create a Remarkable Future

David Russo: LinkedIn

• Talk: Company Culture and its DNA: For Better For Worse, For Richer For Poorer…
• Twitter Takeaway: Corporate culture matters from the moment a company is founded. Here’s proof that if you have to change it later, you are twice as likely to fail.
• More reading: 17 Rules Successful Companies Use to Attract and Keep Top Talent: Why Engaged Employees Are Your Greatest Sustainable Advantage

Dharmesh Shah: http://www.hubspot.com/

• Talk: Building a great software business, notes from the field.
• Twitter Takeaway: EVERYTHING is about making customers happy. Measure everything. Our key metric at Hubspot is CHI – Customer Happiness Index.
• More reading: Inbound Marketing: Get Found Using Google, Social Media and Blogs (New Rules Social Media Series)

Eric Ries: http://www.startuplessonslearned.com/

• Talk: The Lean Startup – A Scientific Approach to Innovation.
• Twitter Takeaway: Why dead people are responsible for dead startups. A news science to make yours live.
• More reading: http://www.startuplessonslearned.com/

Scott Farqhuhar: www.atlassian.com

• Talk: From 0-$60million. The Ten Commandments for Startups.
• Twitter Takeaway: Be loud, proud, fair, awesome and different. Always be marketing.
• More information:

Jason Cohen: www.blog.asmartbear.com/jason-cohen

• Talk: The six prejudices of Jason Cohen. From geek to entrepreneur
• Twitter Takeaway: “That’s how it is done”, is bullshit. Make up your own rules & understand all advice comes with its own prejudices.
• More reading: The Best kept Secrets of Peer Code Review (Free book, free shipping).

Paul Kenny: www.oceanlearning.co.uk

• Talk: Engaging Dialogue
• Twitter Takeaway: Don’t rely on sales people for sales – you have the Founder’s Advantage.  No one can match your experiences.

Rob Walling: www.softwarebyrob.com

• Talk: The Primary Goal of Your Website is not to Sell.
• Twitter Takeaway: Visitors that come back to your site are far more profitable than one time visitors. The insider’s guide on making your website work properly.
• More reading: Start Small, Stay Small: A Developer’s Guide to Launching a Startup

Peldi Guilizzoni: www.balsamiq.com

• Talk: Do worry, be happy.
• Twitter Takeaway: Startup CEOs should worry about everything, but worrying can be a positive experience.
• More reading: http://www.balsamiq.com/company

Mark Stephens: www.idrsolutions.com/

• Talk: (Don’t) Panic.
• Twitter Takeaway: The world is much more complicated than you think. Don’t be a dork, be different.
• More reading: The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy

Eric Sink:

• Talk: Lessons Learned in Selling my Company to Microsoft.
• Twitter Takeaway: In M&A, you are not paranoid, they really are all out to get you. Get help for all the right things.
• More reading: Eric Sink on the Business of Software (Expert’s Voice)

Youngme Moon: www.youngmemoon.com/

• Talk: Different.
• Twitter Takeaway: Modern marketing makes mulchy products consumers don’t, or can’t care about. Different is better but it isn’t a recipe.
• More reading: Different: Escaping the Competitive Herd

Dan Bricklin: www.bricklin.com/

• Talk: What have I learned in 40 years of developing software products that people use?
• Twitter Takeaway: The Dalai Lama of Software development speaks, the geeks listen. Extraordinary insight.
• More reading: Bricklin on Technology

Derek Sivers: www.sivers.org/

• Talk: I sold my business and gave the money away.
• Twitter Takeaway: Happiness comes from many directions and rarely from money.
• More reading: www.sivers.org/blog

Joel Spolsky: www.stackoverflow.com/ www.fogcreek.com/

• Talk: My Venture Capital Year
• Twitter Takeaway: A CEO’s job is to ask his people one thing, “What do you need?”.
• More reading: Joel on Software: And on Diverse & Occasionally Related Matters That Will Prove of Interest etc..: And on Diverse and Occasionally Related Matters … or Ill-Luck, Work with Them in Some Capacity

Having taken and blogged more notes in three days at the Business of Software Conference this week in Boston than I did in all my time in college, it has been really nice to get so much kind feedback from event participants, real and virtual. As I tried to get the blog published before the clapping had died down at the end of the session, (I knew that if I hadn’t they would just get added to the endless to do pile that is my life), the notes aren’t as organised as they might be. they still aren’t much more organised but at least you can access them from one blog post instead of scrolling through the blog.

I would love to hear your views on key lessons from the event. Thanks.

Remember Pets.com? We have always thought that someone was going to do that properly one day.

Many Congrats to Ivan and Andrew who have just announced a £5 million series A funding for MedicAnimal.com, the round was led by Iris Capital. The cash will allow MedicAnimal.com to grow its e-commerce business, offering a comprehensive selection of veterinary and animal products. Iris Capital joins a group of private investors in the UK and Europe.

MedicAnimal.com was founded as a socially responsible alternative in pet health care by Ivan Retzignac, CEO, and veterinarian Andrew Bucher, its Chief Veterinary Officer. Together, they have already managed to position MedicAnimal.com at the forefront of the British and European online veterinary retail market.

If you go to Cambridge Science Park tonight, don’t be surprised if you come across bodies lying on the ground. Tonight is Byte Night and 55 people who work in Cambridge’s technology scene will be going to the Cambridge Science Park this evening to spend a night sleeping rough in support of Action for Children.

Our team includes David Mardle, Tim Ferris, Bill Thompson, Alex Kelleher and Vero Pepperel. They will be joining myself and about 50 other people in Cambridge as part of national Byte Night which involves over 500 people across the country who will raise about £ 500,000 for Action for Chilldren to combat youth homelessness.

You would still be welcome to join us or, failing that, you could ‘outsource’ your involvement by making a donation, however large, to sponsor our team. We are hugely appreciative of all the support that we have received so far. Thank you but we would love some more. Please consider giving time or money to help. Thank you.

Action for Children helps nearly 156,000 children, young people and their families through nearly 420 projects across the UK. Go to http://www.virginmoneygiving.com/team/ByteNightMiscellany to find out more about the work of Action for Children, to see one of the more eclectic teams to participate in ByteNight and and MOST IMPORTANTLY, to sponsor us online.

Thank you very much for your support and think of us tonight.  http://www.virginmoneygiving.com/team/ByteNightMiscellany

Thank you.

BOS2010 is awesome. Anyone taking part is very lucky. Its an incredibly well organised family. People arrive with open minds and the intent of talking, listening and learning. Participants are a special group. The speakers extraordinary. Any one of them would be the kind of keynote that people would talk about for years to come.

Content was extraordinarily dense – boom! Light-bulb moment. Boom! They kept coming.

I decided to blog each session. Stupid! For most events this would involve a paragraph a session. But it became a passion…

Lots of different presenting styles, different experiences, but everybody ended up, organically, saying the same things:

• Only play if you’re really passionate about something.
• Decide how you can inspire passion about your business – customers, workers, investors, the press.
• Passion will make you different.
• Its OK to be passionate about sales.

Thanks @NeilDavidson