The AWS Blog

The message rang clear to anyone that attended the ConnecTech Detroit launch party on Wednesday night: “This is not just another boring technology networking group.”

People poured off the elevator into the Ignite nightclub well before the official start-time of 5:30pm. The huge, dimly lit club with thirty foot long fires burning inside glass walls provided the perfect backdrop for an evening focused on igniting the passion for technology in Detroit.

As the hours passed and the venue filled to near capacity, the assumption that the board of directors had made months ago was validated: Detroit is an area that is home to many innovative business people that live in the technical space, and they’re all excited about being able to get together, share knowledge, tell stories, network, and learn.

My personal desire to be involved in something like this was also met. I chatted it up with an IT Director who turned me on to a great open-source VoIP platform that I’m looking forward to testing out, caught up with a podcasting expert that I have been meaning to reconnect with for a long time, hung out with a friend who owns a company that provides a website search solution, and got a demo of a great mobile phone application that blew me away.

These are the conversations that I love having, and I’m confident at this point that the organization is going to help me have them more often.

Thanks to everyone that turned out to help us launch the organization, and those who put the event together!

Here are links to more photographs from the event, and the ConnecTech Detroit website for info about upcoming events and how to become a member.

P.S. The Sunday edition of the Detroit Free Press has a great article about the event in the business section, and there’s also a nice write-up in Matt Roush’s Great Lakes IT Report (GLITR).