In Vegas, Live-Rummaging Bid-Fest Brings in the Horde by David Gosse on November 30, 2011

Point, click, rummage sale.

#VegasTech is on a hot streak, sporting over 200 local tech startups, multiple incubators in the works, angels who are downright jittery about defending their turf from outsiders and big data guys who are setting up the most incredible infrastructure on the planet. Oh, and the #VegasTech horde is double rainbows and unicorns amazing. The scene is infectious. Vegas has struck gold right in the heart of downtown.

One of those nuggets is local Las Vegas super-crew www.rumgr.com. The team @dylanbathurst, @raycmorgan and @alexcoleman have made it stupid-easy to sell stuff locally. Simply download the Rumgr app, take a picture of whatever it is you want terminated from your residence and wait for rummagers to take it off your hands. No complex listing requirements, no shipping and handling, no approvals/denials, you don’t even need to list a price for the item (although we are a little worried about seeing some of JJ’s junk on Rumgr).

Sounds harmless enough, but what makes it a game changer? Can Rumgr really put Vegas on the tech startup map? The new chapter of Mobile Monday Las Vegas which launches on December 5^th thinks so.

The event is going to be at UNLV and is expected to be sold out. The speaker roster and product demo line-up is fan-boy worthy. Rumgr will be showcasing their product via a live auction to help raise money for MOMOLV.  To kick off the night, Rumgr is setting up a dual projector screen presentation to educate the audience:  how to download and use the app on one screen while displaying the items that have been donated for the live auction on the other. This is a real-time, real-community event where passionate #VegasTech supporters come out not just to listen to another presentation, but to actively support their homegrown startup and get involved.

Numbers matter in the startup world and sadly, Vegas does not have a large early adopter community like Silicon Valley. Getting to 10,000 users in this town is like trying to get a psycho-hoarder to purge. So Rumgr is taking full advantage of every opportunity to not only support a worthy cause but innovate and draw users in by the droves. Local wine snobs have donated a number of frou-frou bottles of Bordeaux and the crowd expects to get a deal (Ha! Throw in a buffet and maybe). Match the frenzy of an “I wanna be popular too” auction (bidders get to see their profile pics on the big screen, winners will be heroes), with the loyalty of the locals that attend every #VegasTech event thrown at them and the Rumgr app will be taken to a whole new level.

It is entirely expected that everyone in attendance will participate. That kind of magic goes viral. Think of the application on a global perspective. Events happen each and every day all around the globe. They all need something to spice them up and they all desperately need more money and more audience participation. Oh yeah, the “new” term for that is social media – a big thing with the search engines nowadays. Getting an audience or a community to love you and tweet, fan and plus your way to stardom is not easy (#SEO). For most actions, there are very few social reactions. But Rumgr has found a way to get total audience participation at each event they attend and that translates to Google ranking gold.

I’ve seen it all too often. Huge money is spent putting on events, trying to be innovative and elevate the audience to some new state of consciousness only to receive nothing in the way of social mentions. And that’s what everyone wants right?  Attendees have already become too lazy to even tweet or it’s no longer cool to simply announce to the world that I’m at this “super awesome – conference” that is just like every other conference happening at this exact moment. It’s all just noise.

But bring the whole room into a collaborative social action, a competitive show-boating bid-fest and the social fun is written on the wall.

Rumgr is getting its early adopters in a very smart way. A true win-win-win in a town where #winning is a pipe dream the locals are all too well schooled in. Now, some savvy Las Vegans are investing in tech, which could well be the other game in town. Like Rumgr, comprised of some smart ex-Zappos c0drs who get simple-stupid and are the life of the party. It’s a winning combination.

Vegas tech is a whole new kind of wonderful, people. Check-change, we’re cashing in!

2011 – The Year of the Entrepreneur by David Gosse on February 1, 2011

The Dow closed today above 12,000 for the first time since June 2008. I believe that we will look back at this decade as the beginning of an economic revolution as important as the scientific revolution in the 16th century …

Crowdsourcing, Crowd Funding & Now Crowd Wisdom by David Gosse on February 23, 2010

By now we have all heard of crowdsourcing and crowd funding – the concept of social collaboration on specific projects or networks. But what about taking it a step further and putting a voice to that crowd to actually empower …

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I love fresh brewed coffee. I use a french press every morning and brew a super strong cup using different small batch roasters that I find from all over the web. Old Bisbee Roasters is by far the best coffee …

New! Twitter’s Retweet Feature (BETA) by David Gosse on November 6, 2009

Twitter just launched its new “retweet” feature in limited beta rollout. Below is the screenshot of the feature when first enabled in my Twitter account. As mentioned in Twitter’s recent blog post “Retweet is a button that makes forwarding a …

Boba Fett Still Rules by David Gosse on September 22, 2009

Few of us 30-40 somethings haven’t been impacted in some way by the Star Wars movies. Who didn’t play Luke Skywalker or Han Solo as a kid, saving their Princess Leia from the evil Empire? However, as most of us …