Biznik is proud to announce the date for Seattle’s 2008 BizJam event on Thursday, July 10, 2008.

BizJam 08 is Biznik’s second annual “indie” business conference. The event includes a day of educational workshops and organized networking opportunities, followed a fun social networking soiree in the evening.

Target audience: Entrepreneurs, freelancers, consultants & small business owners.

Expected attendance: 350+

Speakers at BizJam 07 included:
- Scott Bourne, president of Podango Productions and founder of Netradio
- Ron Sukenick, founder of Relationships Strategies Institute and co-founder of the Indiana Business Network, currently known as BNI
- Scott Berkun, author of The Myths of Innovation (O’Reilly 2007)
- DL Byron, author of Publish & Prosper: Blogging for Your Business (New Riders 2006)
- Michelle Goodman, author of The Anti-9-to-5 Guide (Seal Press 2007)

Statistics: 4000 members of Biznik in Seattle, 8000 world-wide; an average of 40 new members joining per day. Current web traffic: 340,000 pageviews per month; 60,000 visits per month, 33,000 unique visitors per month.

Reach small business people and indie professionals by SPONSORING BizJam 08.

Networking events, online advertising, hands-on demonstrations and onsite marketing promotions are available, along with a limited number of exclusive corporate sponsorship opportunities.

Detailed list of benefits will be available soon. Please contact Lara Feltin - lara (at) biznik.com - for more information.

We teamed up with filmmaker Len Davis during BizJam last June to create this video, which explains what Biznik is all about and features footage from BizJam Seattle and interviews with many event attendees. Check it out!

There’s an old business saying that goes something like: “Never eat lunch alone.” If relationships are your most valuable asset in business, and I believe they are, then that’s great advice. But how do you find someone to grab lunch with when you’re self-employed? Biznik member (and BizJam volunteer) Brian Dorsey has an idea: he’s created a website that makes it easy to find a lunch partner for those of us here in Seattle. Here’s how it works: enter your email address into the site, select the date you’d like to have lunch, and use a nifty Google map to draw a circle of how far you’re prepared to travel to have lunch. Then sit back and wait for the site to put you in touch with someone matching your criteria.

But Brian himself does a much better job introducing this service in this five-minute video, shot by Bryan Zug (thanks Brian!) during his Ignite talk at BizJam on June 9. Check it out:

We’re not quite ready to start posting podcasts of the BizJam sessions that were recorded on June 9th. But Joe Shirley, who hosted “Ditch Your Vision, Launch a Revolution” at BizJam, made a recording of his own, and has posted it on his blog, where it’s a 13 MB download. We’ll begin releasing podcasts of sessions ourselves here, once we receive them from the production company, which will be no later than July 9th.

BizJam was the first full deployment of Waggle Labs’ Pathable name badges, and bloggers are buzzing about them. Here’s a few links to blog posts about the Pathable badges that we used at BizJam:

Pathable at BizJam: It Works!

Pathable In-Person Social Matching

Social software applied: Pathable

So what we’d like to know is: What do YOU think of them? Let us know by posting your comments here.

I’ve posted the first photos taken by official event photographer Malcolm Smith on ShareMyAlbums.com, which is the official photo sharing site for BizJam. Here’s the link:

http://events.sharemyalbums.com/PublicEventView.php?event=28&u=2247144826

You can also join the Biznik group on ShareMyAlbums.com, and upload your own photos. We’d love to see them! You can join from the event page link above.

BizJam would not have been the success it was without our awesome volunteers who showed up at 7am to move tables and chairs, worked the registration tables, moderated the rooms, set up the evening venue, and cleared the remnants of a good party at 3am.

Heartfelt thank you to all contributed in this way - you’re awesome!
Alim, Natasha
Belknap, Holly
Butler, Colleen
Carney, Dolores
Carver, Joe
Chappell, Karen
DeJong, Paul
DiStasio, Cat
Dixon, Ben
Dorsey, Brian
Eachus, Penny
Eizen, Sara
Gardner, Christa
Gormezano, Keith
Gorrin, Karen
Haldimann, Nadja
Hale, Jessica
Heath, Sarah
Hussain, Sandy
Johnson, Sarah
Kallock, Emillia
Kaplanian, Lee
Maling, Monica
Mamane, Rachael
Mathern, Bryce
Mooradian, Bethany
Nachbar, Rob
Sayles, Jacob
Sekendur, Banu
Sinclair, Scott
Stanislaw, Jody
Stauffer, Adrin
Veraguth, Viviane
Williams, Gwen

We’ve posted a SurveyMonkey online conference evaluation form for those of you who attended BizJam last Saturday. Please take the 10 minutes or so that completing the survey takes, to share your thoughts with us about how we can improve the conference. Also, you can leave feedback on each of the specific sessions you attended. Here’s the link:

Click Here to take survey

Here’s some links to some of BizJam attendees who have blogged about their BizJam experience. If you know of more, add ‘em to the comments so we can spread the word.

BizJam was Jammin’! Penny Eachus’ blog.

Social software applied: Pathable Scott Berkun on Pathable name badges used at BizJam.

Crossing Paths at BizJam DL Byron, on Pathable badges.

BizJam Seattle SEO Google Ranking Slides Thomas Schmitz posts slides of his SEO workshop at BizJam.

200 Entrepreneurs Matt Heinz, “Matt on Marketing” blog.

Negotiate this! Michelle Goodman, who called BizJam “a rocking indie business conference.”

Can you Risk It? Rachel Whalley - on Scott Berkun’s keynote at BizJam.

Lara and I want to send out a huge “thank you” to everyone who was involved with BizJam - from the more 200 people who attended the event, to the 40+ volunteers and 20+ speakers - this was truly a community-wide effort. And the results were amazing. We’ll be posting the names of all the volunteers who helped make the event possible shortly, and giving a full report of the event, along with photos, soon.