Amsterdam was an amazing experience, but no one blog post can do the city any justice. As I've previously mentioned, I was invited to speak at the Next Web Conference in Amsterdam only a few weeks ago - received an email invitation while I was down in Austin, Texas for the South by Southwest Festival, and decided that this would be a pretty cool trip.

Shortly after I accepted the invitation, I told you all that I'd slow down on my travels and take a break from all of this, but a few conferences get special exceptions: TED, South by Southwest, and the Next Web. There's no better excuse for a 17-year-old to fly out to Amsterdam by herself in the middle of spring break. I'll leave it at that :)

So i spoke! I gave my first real presentation to my first real crowd. I've spoken at Model U.N. and at the Supernova Conference, but neither was to an audience of more than 100 people. As I've also mentioned many times before, conferences are only as good as the people who attend. Next Web attracted only high rollers because it cost 750 Euros to go. The real quality was in the time I spent with fellow speakers at exclusive dinners and parties. So basically, if the conference doesn't offer super awesome parties or exclusive events, it's not something I see as worthwhile. Why? Because then you're less likely to make actual connections.

The long-term connections happen by investing time into out-of-the-office fun. For example, a guy from intruders.tv interviewed me on the first day of the conference. He was professional. I liked him. But then at one of the after-parties, we started the connect up as actual friends. Same goes with Robert Scoble -- I see him at conferences a lot, but big deal. The real fun happens in the hotel, at the dinner table, and at the after-parties.

This trip was good enough to tie with South by Southwest. Top five best events ever? This one's on the list. More to come!

Jessica Mah is a 17 year old entrepreneur, blogger, and sophomore at early collegeBard College at Simon's Rock.

She loves chatting with fellow students, readers, and entrepreneurs, so don't hesitate to email her or message her on AIM! Feel free to subscribe to her blog or stalk her twitter.

I've been to way too many events and conferences over the past year. Actually, it was a little over a year ago that I first flew out to see San Francisco! Since then, I've been a frequent at many meetups and dozens of tech/business related conferences. Here's my list of the top events I've been to and why they were so great:

1) South by Southwest 2008: Best Overall Conference

Words cannot describe how amazing the South by Southwest conference was. So many of you readers and friends of readers contacted me in order to convince me to go. I was skeptical, but after speaking to dozens of you, I was convinced to go. I only made it for the last three days, but I feel drained mentally and physically from the amazing experience. What made it so great?

First and foremost, the people were smart, courteous, and fun. They came to SxSW with an enthusiastic attitude. There were plenty of fun geeks and few "marketing" people. At the web 2.0 conference, there were way too many self serving biz dev people who were out to pitch and promote their companies. At SxSW, the geeks were there to have fun. Some people call SxSW the spring break for geeks. I'll have to agree.

Even when the day's conference is over, the day has just begun! There are sooo many parties to choose from. Each night, there were at least ten events to choose from. If the popular events had long lines, just start your own party! I'm definitely planning on returning next year. In a few months, maybe I'll gather a few friends and reserve the Presidential Suite in the Hilton. We'll throw our own parties :)

2) GeekSessions 1.1: Best Tech Meetup

This was definitely the best informal cocktail event I've been to for many reasons. Before going, I had envisioned it as being a high-caliber meet-up for super smart and super cool techies. My guess was completely spot on. Firstly, it was invite only. Like all good conferences, you primarily go for the people. If the people are good, the experience is good. Since then, Geeksessions has opened up registration for all and I've met fewer people since. Maybe it's just the fact that I know so many people who go there already!

Secondly, the conference organizers were able to manage the work-play balance that all events need. There's usually both an educational and a networking component to these events. The trick is not having too little or too much of either, and GeekSessions did that amazingly well. Strict 5-10 minute deadlines per speaker helps the situation.

3) Supernova 2007: Best Professional Cocktail Gathering:

The Supernova cocktail party, like every other event I endorse, had high caliber people socializing with each other. The conference was open to all. That is, to anyone who could afford the $2800 price tag. What's better than being in a room filled with free drinks, great appetizers, and seasoned entrepreneurs? The event attracted an older crowd, but most people knew what they were talking about.

Worst Event: PowerShift

I felt reserved about writing about the worst event I've been to, but I decided that it would be ok given that I remained objective with my reasoning.

PowerShift was basically a conference to combat global climate change. I'm all for fixing this problem, but the conference itself was despicable in relation to the dozens I've been to. I can probably predict why: The attendees were of low caliber. There were 6,000 attendees, none of them paid more than $25 for their conference badge, and most had very little background in global climate change and activism. I know this because I asked many attendees the following questions:

- how do you know global climate change is happening?

- what do we do to fix it?

- why should conservative money-obsessed republicans worry about this issue?

Most people came off as being ignorant and self-absorbed "activists." And yes, there is a negative stereotype for activists, and yes, most people at this conference fit into that stereotype. If anything, I left that conference learning why politicians feel reserved when dealing with teenage activists. I'm a liberal democrat, I believe that we need to fix global climate change, and I believe that rallying against the "rich republican capitalists" is the wrong route to take.

One may counter-argue my reasoning by saying, "isn't the point of a conference for people to learn?" Sure, but half of the learning happens in the networking with your knowledgeable peers! And if most of them aren't, you're at a loss.

But to the people who organized my top three rated events: Good job! I've since decided to cut back on my event-going to do REAL work, but I'll forever be loyal to the select few events that are able to attract brilliant minds. I'm quite confident that we can already add the TED conference to the 2009 list. :)

Plenty more to come!

Jessica Mah is a 17 year old entrepreneur, blogger, and sophomore in college. She's currently the founder of a startup, managing editor at Startupism.com, and Jessicamah.com.

Has it ever occurred to anyone that the rich and famous sometimes enjoy being treated like normal people? They're constantly in the spotlight, fighting to maintain their reputation for being whoever they are. It's a mental drain on them. They can't tell who's a true friend because they're such hot sh*t. If you want to be a genuine friend of someone notable, don't set an expectation of that person and don't treat them differently from how you would treat any other *normal* person.

Firstly, it's ignorant and sometimes rude to create an expectation of someone based on minimal information. For example, I first moved to Scarsdale, New York in the beginning of 7th grade. I was on my first school field trip visiting this historical mansion. Before even starting the tour, our two tour guides began poking fun at the fact that we were from "Scarsdale." [Wikipedia] We were walking into the big mansion when they said something among the lines of, "oh.. .you Scarsdale kids should have your chauffeurs driving you to the entrance!" At that point, I was quite confused, but I quickly understood that these tour guides were stereotyping Scarsdale kids for uptight snobby rich kids. What the tour guides didn't know was that most of us were relatively average on the socio-economic scale. They continued poking fun at us throughout the entire tour. My peers were good kids, no matter how wealthy some of them may have been. If anything, creating such an inaccurate expectation would cause us to be snobby kids.

After speaking to many many people, I'm starting to think that the rich and famous may be just as nice if not even nicer than those who poke fun at the rich and famous. There are two types of people: those who are made fun of and those who make fun of others. The former group is starving for attention and wants more as soon as the media starts feeding it to them. Without the spotlight attention, however; they are relatively normal people! The latter group may be insecure. When you make fun of a celeb, you do it for one of several reasons. Either a) you feel bad for the celebrity, b) you need a dinner table conversation, or c) you're insecure with yourself.

Another example! My hair dresser used to work at Barney's New York (a very high-end clothing store) and helped many celebrities build their wardrobes. One of his clients, for example, was the mom of Paris Hilton. At first thought, you'd think that she's an irresponsible mother and snobby rich woman who spends her day complaining about her broken fingernails. However, she's a nice woman. She's a smart woman. She's the type of person who completely removes all expectations you have of the rich and famous. My parents told me how they met Mrs. Hilton during fashion week. My parents and a few of the Hiltons were sitting next to each other and they made friendly without having to mention the crap we read about in the tabloids. Like my last example, I'll hold the belief that creating a (negative) expectation for the rich and famous is a self fulfilling prophesy.

If you want to be a real friend of a rich celebrity, talk about topics non related to what they're famous for. You're obviously free to mention what made them famous, but true friends of celebs have way better things to talk about. Lose the premature expectations you have of people and you'll find yourself making many more friends than you ever have before. :)

Jessica Mah is a 17 year old entrepreneur, blogger, and sophomore in college. She's currently the founder of a startup, managing editor at Startupism.com, and Jessicamah.com. In her free time, she enjoys the prospect of being an underage angel investor while partying like a rock star.

Ok... fine.. I'll admit it: Very frequently, I write a blog post about something that I dislike or expect to dislike. Several days later, I would then write about the same topic and have a much more positive opinion. Harvard Model United Nations just so happens to be one of these things.

After all, I've been to over 30 conferences now. I've only paid for two of them. Therefore, who could blame me for having such high expectations on what is a good conference versus a bad conference? Of all the events I've been to this year, I'll probably place Harvard Model United Nations in my top 5 list for all conferences I've been to. Impressive!

The first question is, what makes an event better than the others? The speakers, the topics, the food, the atmosphere? Wrong! The quality of the attendees takes precedence over everything. If there are good speakers, you could probably read their interviews on the interwebs. If there are amazing topics at the conference, I'm sure that any average joe could probably find it in the local book store. But people are different - in order to make lasting connections/friendships or whatever you'd like to call them, you must physically be present at the event.

Next, what is considered to be a high-caliber conference attendee? You could look at this from many different perspectives. Firstly, no sales people, and absolutely none of those silly network marketers! If you're paying hundreds/thousands of dollars to go to a conference, (I'm not one of them!) then you probably expect the sales people to be completely rid of. A good conference attendee may not necessarily be a wealthy celebrity. In fact, these people may be so popular that they'll want nothing to do with you. That's why it helps to have invite-only events. In the example of Harvard Model United Nations, only undergrads from colleges came. There was no application from attendees, but the expectations of a "Harvard" conference weeded out the lazy kids who didn't really care about debating and negotiating on world issues. As you may have read, I recently got accepted into TED - often described as a "group of remarkable people that gather to exchange ideas of incalculable value". The incredible value from this conference comes from the fact that most TEDsters are of such a high-caliber. This is the precise reason why invite-only groups are of such high value. Events such as TED don't only want smart people - they want attendees who are open to helping others with their interests and aspirations. And at the Harvard Model United Nations, there was no option to sit passively in the back. Sure, many people did it, but plenty more motivated students sat in the front and played an active role in the committee sessions.

Picture of me and my fellow "early-college" classmates at Harvard Model U.N. I'm the Asian down below if you couldn't guess that much.

Conferences need to manage the work-play relationship. For example, having too many workshops and/or keynote speakers can be boring! When I first wrote about the Harvard Model United Nation Conference, I mentioned how I saw plenty of people falling asleep at the opening ceremony. The basic idea is simple: bring in a charismatic keynote speaker or don't bring one at all! My opinions are controversial, but I hold my belief that a boring keynote speaker will do nothing but help set a *boring* attitude to the rest of the conference. This means that the conference had a rocky start, but quickly picked up pace when the attendees were thrown into action. After the committee sessions ended, the conference organizers threw cocktail parties, delegate dances, and more! Of course, the attendees threw their own private parties that nobody can know about. Whoops.

Overall, it was an amazing experience. Great people, great work-play balance, and all of the other good things that go along with having a grade A event. (minus the super boring keynote speaker) Don't be misled: Sure, this was a kiddie conference and I'm still one of them, but it seems essential that any good event must bring in quality people who are engaged in both learning and helping fellow attendees. Harvard Model United Nations, TED, and any "un-conference" are particular good at achieving this.

Plenty more to come! I can't wait to report on Northern Voice 2008.

PS - I wore formal attire throughout the conference. First time ever. Now THATs impressive!

Jessica Mah is a 17 year old entrepreneur, blogger, and sophomore in college. She's currently the founder of a startup, managing editor at Startupism.com, and Jessicamah.com. In her free time, she enjoys the prospect of being an underage angel investor while partying like a rock star.

Interacting with people and building relationships makes me tick. Running a company requires great communication skills and requires that the partners are able to make amazing connections with people they need to meet. I've found myself meeting shy tech engineers at random events, and those are the ones very likely to fail. On the other hand, I've met so many non-geeky San Francisco engineers who need to get out of the office and socialize. Who said nerd stereotypes had to be true?

Brings me to my next point... I was looking for a technical co-founder for my company, and I met some really nerdy guys in the process. They might have been amazing coders, but their lame personalities drove me insane. I finally found this guy, Alex. He's probably reading this blog post, but whatever: On our first meeting, I could tell that we'd click. He was by no means a stereotypical nerd. If the guy enjoys going out and having fun sometimes, he meets my social criteria for a co-founder.

All of the co-founders represent the company, and when it comes time to making business deals and raising venture capital, it really helps to be sociable. I can't see anything more embarrassing than having to bring my super nerdy, boring, shy co-founder to a lunch with the people who can make and break our company.

Fact is, you'll be spending a good part of your work life and possibly personal life with this co-founder. It's a marriage, and once you propose and s/he agrees, you're committed until the very end. How it ends depends heavily on the relationship. The end may be an acquisition by Google for a bagillion dollars or just a divorce that was inevitable.

So what should I say to the geeks who are reading this? Hmm... get yourself a copy of How to Win Friends and Influence People by Dale Carnegie.

Jessica Mah is a 17 year old entrepreneur, blogger, and sophomore in college. She's currently the founder of a startup, managing editor at Startupism.com, and Jessicamah.com. In her free time, she enjoys the prospect of being an underage angel investor.

Over the recent months, I've found my inbox flooded by annoying Linkedin.com invitations to connect. Few thoughts for you current and prospective linkedin members:

1) Stop sending me linkedin invitations to connect if we haven't yet chatted! There seem to be a few type of linkedin users: One being the recruiter type, trying to connect with everyone possible. Another being the type of who only accepts friends, and lastly, me: the type who accepts acquaintances.

I make my decision to accept/reject after asking myself two simple questions… "Do I feel comfortable enough to ask for an introduction to a 2nd degree connection through this person?" and "Do I feel comfortable forwarding intros from this person to someone else I know?" If the answer is no to either one of these questions, I'll reject the invitation.

2) Currently, I only have 271 connections. (which is nothing compared to many others I know) On Facebook, I have 77 friends in the San Francisco network and 38 friends in the Silicon Valley network. After business related networking events, I often come home with 15-25 business cards. I'll immediately add people who I felt super comfortable speaking to. For the remaining 80% of the new business cards, I'll look up every person, check out his/her websites/blogs, and send an email. If there's a mesh, I may send a linkedin invite their way. If not, no big deal. At the end of the day, I archive 2/3 of the business cards I collect.

An interesting thing I noticed… when people I contacted looked at my blog, they were more likely to show interest in befriending me. When I check out the personal blog of a new acquaintance's business card, I'm more likely to continue a conversation by email.

3) There's a distinction between Facebook and Linkedin for most people. Over the summer, I was getting lots of random Facebook friend requests, so I beefed up my security settings. (then my close friends complained about not being able to search my name)

I make a huge emphasis on separating my personal life with my professional life, and Facebook security settings allow for that. This isn't to say that business connections can't be my Facebook friends, but I'm not going to add business connections to my Facebook unless I really felt comfortable sharing my personal details with that person.

So is there really a competition between Facebook and Linkedin? I'm definitely feeling some competitive vibe, but the two have different purposes to them. They're different, that's all. That's why I have both! I favor Facebook over Linkedin, but that's because Facebook holds all of my close relationships. On Facebook, I can see all the new things my friends are up to. Linkedin seems more like a digitized way of managing resumes and emails.

4) How practical is Linkedin? A lot of my friends complain about its uselessness. They basically view it as a way of showing off how many business connections you have. That's just a waste of time. Linkedin, like many amazing things in life, is only as good as one makes it.

When I first got my account, I used my first few contacts to get introductions to other cool people. My first contact was Frederik Hermann, the director of global marketing at Jajah.com. After that, I proceeded to get in touch with plenty of other entrepreneurs/execs, including Marc Benioff, CEO at Salesforce.com. (and I was somehow getting replies! )

If you'd like to add me to your linkedin, sure! Please just send me an email, ring me on g-talk, or something... It just doesn't make sense for me to call complete strangers "business connections."

Jessica Mah is a 17 year old entrepreneur, blogger, and sophomore in college. She's currently the founder of a startup, managing editor at Startupism.com, and Jessicamah.com. In her free time, she enjoys the prospect of being an underage angel investor.

Yay, after many long hours of driving, I'm finally at Power Shift - a conference on combating global climate change.

I'm sitting in a panel that discusses fighting global change in local communities, and here are a few things I got out of it:

1) When making an argument for creating a sustainable world, make it relevant to the group of people you're talking to. How does it benefit them?

For example, this girl from Sugarland, Texas had a discussion with her mayor on how to create a sustainable city. Ended up that the mayor had many of the ideas she offered, but didn't want to make them public because it could possibly upset the large and powerful oil industry. To make it work, keep in mind how it may or may not benefit the individuals you're talking to.

2) Connections, connections, connections. Find allies and don't be afraid to ask them questions. Students always seem so freaking hostile towards business executives and government officials. There is some truth behind their thinking, but hostility doesn't solve problems. Once again, look at everything from THEIR perspective. Suck out as much info as you can and use it for your mutual benefit.

When I meet with founders and management at companies, I ask them about their business. I ask them about their ideas and why they do what they do. I ask them why they don't do X, and more often than not, they've thought of the idea and found a reason as to why it wouldn't work. (or they're in the process of implementing that X) At the end of the day, I give them good or bad press via my blog. :)

3) It's important to be able to measure everything. Set goals and measure your improvement by solid numbers. This way, you know what's most effective, what's best to invest more time and money into, etc...

For example, in regards to advertising, it's important to have necessary data: who's visiting your business, where are they coming from, etc… this is why TV advertising doesn't work. You have no way of distinguishing if your customer is coming from a TV ad or from word of mouth. Google AdWords, on the other hand, offers you control over everything. You can cap your spending to any amount of money, you can specify the physical location your visitors are from, you can specify certain keywords, etc…

4) Garnering support is all about targeting communities. Get huge groups of people excited about a common cause. I'll write tomorrow about their conference marketing… but I must say, it is borderline manipulative.

In a nutshell, the conference would recruit "campus coordinators" who would take charge of organizing the conference trip to Power Shift. Basically, the conference organizers made these campus coordinators feel super important and gave them the noble responsibility of bringing as many people as they could to this conference. Brilliant.

The bottom line? Everything about this conference has SO much to do with business, whether it be related to marketing, communications, etc… If you want to combat global climate change, be a doctor, be a fashion designer, or whatever - you're going to be using business related skills. If you want to help stop global climate change, look at the source: big and powerful corporations.

Jessica Mah is a 17 year old entrepreneur, blogger, and sophomore in college. She's currently the founder of a startup, managing editor at Startupism.com, SimonsRockers.com, and Jessicamah.com.

I've always thought about how teenagers are dieing for attention. Kids have aspirations to be movie stars and singers. Teenagers spend all of their time modding up their myspaces and facebooks. Web 2.0 geeks are doing publicity stunts, trying to get themselves onto valleywag, and some are doing the lifecasting thing. (Justin Kan, Justine Ezarik, ZoomrTV, etc...)

Everybody wants to feel important. Everybody has a different way of doing this. There are no true exceptions to this rule that I could think of. Let's look at the goth crowd. They brag about being able to slit their wrists everyday. But even that can be considered "being an attention whore" because it certainly gets attention!

Many people have multiple personas. I'm not sure if this is entirely accurate, but let's look at our good buddy Robert Scoble. He gets a LOT of attention from everywhere, but I'm sure that he acts differently around different people depending on the situation. Around his wife and son, he's probably much more low key. He probably takes the role of being a responsible father and husband. Cool. Now when he's walking out of the Apple store with the first sold iPhone at that store, he's going to come off as an attention whore. I don't blame him one little bit :)

And all of this attention is good. Bad press is good press. (to some extent) Robert (Guy) Kawasaki, a prominent angel investor and author of many good books, welcomes and encourages all bad press. Guy wants bloggers to tell readers about his stupid lame website, truemors.com . He doesn't care about the review! (or so he claims)

As for personal branding, I think being the right type of attention whore is important. Let's take a more accurate example of an attention whore - ME! For one, I have a blog. For two, I have a ustream. For three, I just act like an attention whore, period. I'll occasionally get emails from my blog readers telling me that I'm turning into an arrogant attention whore, and I tone it down a bit. This is the same with my friends.

I'll be honest - I act differently when I'm in the Bay Area. I try to be more polite and professional when I'm networking. This isn't to say that I do a really good job at it, but I'm not the same me that I am in college. When I'm in San Francisco, I pretend to know everybody and I pretend that everybody knows me. Whether or not this is true, I'll leave to you.

Back in college, I'm a tad different. Actually, I'm very different. I don't try to act professional, because I'm not. I'm an immature, supposedly down-to-earth, Abercrombie teenager college kid. When I'm with my friends, I pretend that my business doesn't exist. I keep my friends in college separate from my friends in San Francisco. For personal branding purposes, I'm going to keep my two personas separated from each other.

I hang out with a friend named Poncho. He walks around campus in nothing but a thong. If someone was to get an award for being the best attention whore on earth, Poncho would win. By being friends with an attention whore, I'm turning into one myself. When I hang out with attention whores in the web 2.0 scene, I'm turn more into an attention whore too.

Now all of this is fine, but it really screws with first impressions and expectations. I've had people read my blog, think of me as an arrogant attention whore, then email me only to think of me as a totally different person. Some people think I'm too cool to talk to them because I'm an attention whore. I hate that. Just as bad is when someone only wants to make friends with me because they label me as an attention whore. Now if I make friends with other attention whores, I know that we're all good to go.

There's so much more I want to write. I love you guys, but I really really want to go to lunch and be an attention whore around my college buddies. More to come...

Jessica Mah is a 17 year old entrepreneur, blogger, and sophomore in college. She's currently the founder of a startup, managing editor at Startupism.com, SimonsRockers.com, and Jessicamah.com.

I've been to over 50 different meetup groups to date. (many of which I just stop by, say hello, then leave) During my winter break, I'd go to meetups everyday, cramming as many as three events on a given evening. After coming to San Francisco, that number has dropped to about three a week. Afterall, I do have something called school and business to attend to.

I first discovered Meetup.com back in January of 2007. My friend Jeff Solomon told me to come to San Francisco, surf Meetup.com, and find web 2.0 entrepreneur events that I could go to. And so I did!

If you don't know already, Meetup.com is a website that helps people "who share their interest or cause, and form lasting, influential, local community groups that regularly meet face-to-face. " Meetup memebers include everyone from web 2.0 geeks to dog lovers to wine tasters to tennis players to President Bush haters.

So here are some of my thoughts and feelings about meetup:

1) Meetups are an amazing way to meet like-minded individuals. You'll meet both cool people and lameos.
2) Entrepreneur meetups often have way too many people selling you their business. If you don't want to talk to them, kindly ask for their card, skake their hand, then move on. [Refer to my "Productive Networking" Post]

Picture of people at April's SF Newtech Meetup

3) New Meetup members are often the ones looking awkward and confused - kind of like the boys who couldn't get a dance at those lame middle school dances

4) Meetup Organizers are frustrated that not enough people come to their events. That's because you actually have to WORK to get people there! I put in a good 3 hours of work just to get 70 people to show up.

5) The type of people depend on the location. San Francisco VS Palo Alto makes a huge difference. Of course, it's mostly older people at the South Bay events.

6) Look for food. Meetups are exhausting and often happen during dinner hours. If you know they'll have free pizza and beer, go for it!

7) If the meetup sucks, leave. Half of them suck, so don't waste your time if you could be more productive with your time.

As the school year approaches, I'll be going to fewer meetups :( I've met so many close friends at events such as SF Beta, Geeksessions, Stirr, and Newtech. If you're interested in my event schedule, I'll be posting a Google Calendar soon.

More to come!

Jessica Mah is a 17 year old entrepreneur, blogger, and sophomore in college. She's currently the founder of a startup, managing editor at Startupism.com and Jessicamah.com.

I'm yet to spot an attendee who's under the age of 40. Welcome to Real Estate Connect, the conference for older, not-incredibly-tech-savvy people who hope learn about the web 2.0 revolution and how it could help their businesses.

I only got to attend one session today, presented by Pierre Calzadilla and Alejandro Foung of Trulia.com. Their topic was "Agent 2.0" and tried educating these 50+ year old real estate people about web 2.0 community websites and how these sites can bring agents more business. They did a fantastic job describing Yelp, Linkedin, and Trulia Voices to the web 2.0 challenged.

Trulia seems to be the really cute company of the conference. There's so much stuff I want to to write about with Trulia!

I briefly spoke with Rich Barton of Zillow.com, so expect a writeup about them soon.

More to come!

Jessica Mah is a 17 year old entrepreneur, blogger, and sophomore in college. She's currently the founder of a startup, managing editor at Startupism.com and Jessicamah.com.