7 Minute Miles

My First Minnebar


Today was my very first Minnebar conference, held at Best Buy’s Richfield headquarters. I signed up on the recommendation of my friend Jake and thought that Pash and Charles would be there too, but they may have dropped out (or I just missed them).

Big crowd for the event, which filled up the entire visitor lot (the helpful Best Buy security staff opened up the employee ramp for overflow parking). I picked up my name sticker (above) and a free Minnebar T-shirt. They also had lots of free food and drink: bagels, muffins, pizza, cookies, water and soft drinks. Rumor was there was also beer at the end of the day, but I skipped out before the end.

The Best Buy campus is really nice – lots of meeting spaces and amenities for their employees (store, banking, coffee shop, food). This event could have used better signage, but it was fairly easy to figure things out by just walking around. The marquee sign above the theater was a nice touch.

I attended a variety of sessions in the morning: monitoring tools presented by a manager from bestbuy.com, an e-books publishing session about PressBook, a non-profit technology roundtable that included the CEO of CaringBridge and a session on building communities using BuddyPress. I ran into Jake’s wife before that last one and we all had lunch together. There were three more sessions in the afternoon, but I decided to meet up with Megan for a trail run instead.

Thanks to the sponsors for helping underwrite the event – it was great to experience all of that at no cost. It would be nice to see more local big companies have speakers (Target, 3M, Cargill), but I’d definitely go back again…

Originally published by DK on April 6, 2013 at 7:45 pm in Longform, Technology


flourish icon