Tomorrow (Thursday, January 12th) me and some other members of the isocket entourage are going to be mingling and showing off our stuff at the SF Fashion+Tech event. If you’re going to be there it would be great to chat with you about the problems we’re solving with isocket and how we are helping fashion advertisers and publishers (like Zimbio, Lookbook.NU, fffabulous and What I Wore) manage their direct advertising awesomeness.

We’ll be sponsoring the drinks, rocking out a demo table and as always we’ll have plenty of schwag to hand out so leave us a comment below or hit us up on Twitter if you’re planning on going so we can connect up.

You shouldn’t have any trouble finding us, just look for the guy with the blue mohawk (that’s me on the left and Dom, our advertiser concierge, on the right).

Every now and then we decide to let Dom out of his cage and lucky for everyone in the city of Los Angeles we’re sending him to BlogWorld. Dom and I will be heading down to SoCal from our headquarters here in the Bay Area (the best part of California, duh) with intentions on meeting everyone awesome that we possibly can.

He actually got so excited about it he gave himself a mohawk — seriously.

Knowing ahead of time that meeting everyone at BlogWorld is really hard to do (since we still haven’t mastered the art of being in multiple places at the same time) we thought that it might be nice to let all of you know exactly who we would like to meet up with and talk to in a “hey, let’s do business” kind of way.

If you happen to be one of these people or you know someone in LA or at BlogWorld who is, please give us a shout on and let us know. We always love meeting up with cool and interesting people and that’s pretty much why we’re heading down to the city of angels in the first place. Here’s who we want to meet –

1. Web Publishers Who Are Doing Direct Ad Sales - If you run a website, blog or any other type of online platform and you’re selling your ads directly to advertisers, then we need to talk. We can make you more money and make your life easier in the process. If you’re to the point to where you feel like you should start selling your ads directly, then give us a shout, too. We’re more than happy to help you dive into the world of controlling your ad sales destiny.

2. Advertisers Who Buy Ads Directly From Web Publishers - There are plenty of benefits that come along with advertising directly with a website or a blog (more control, advice on creative, direct relationship, guaranteed rates and campaign schedule), but finding the right place to advertise and buying each campaign individually can be a big pain and a huge hassle. Through our self-service interface at our advertising marketplace BuyAds.com we can turn this pain into a piece of cake. Just let us know what you’re looking for and we’re more than happy to help you find and buy the right advertising to reach the audience you’re looking for.

3. Media Planning Systems, Advertising Rep Firms and Advertising Buying Tools - With the recent announcement that we’re building the ad industries first programmatic platform for guaranteed Class 1 inventory we’ve started to work with all different types of API partners. If you have a tool or service that you think could benefit from programmatically accessing and buying from our publisher inventory then we would love to talk with you more about it…over a couple of beers, of course (I mean, it’s a conference, right?).

4. Web Publishers And Advertisers Who Already Use Us - This one’s pretty much a no-brainer. If you already use isocket as a publisher or BuyAds.com as an advertiser, then you need to let us know so that we can hang out and buy you some coffee/beer/lunch/dinner/etc. Seriously, I have the company credit card and I’m not afraid to use it.

To get in touch with Dom and I you can email us at support-at-isocket-dot-com, hit us up on Twitter (@isocket) or just say hi to us when you see us walking through the conference somewhere. We’re excited to connect up with all of you and we’ll see you in LA!

We’re going to SXSW! For those who aren’t familiar, South by Southwest Interactive is a 5-day conference where ~15,000 geeks, entrepreneurs, bloggers and hackers come together to learn from each other and have some fun.

The isocket Customer team (John, Ryan, Jason, Amanda) are going to be there from Thursday through Monday. While Hup and John are veterans to SXSW, Amanda and I are newbies and together we’re going to be the Ultimate Make-Advertising-Suck-Less Ninja Force.

If you’re an isocket publisher, have advertised with us or are just curious about how you could train for the 100 pushup challenge – come say hi! We’d love to buy you coffee, a drink or a meal and chat about how we can make buying and selling advertising easier and more awesome.

We’ve met some really cool folks at other events like BlogWorld Expo and we’d love to connect with you at South by Southwest. The best way to get in touch is probably via twitter – we’re @isocket.

We’ll be stepping up our game to the next level. I mean, Hup and I did perform in front of hundreds of folks with a live band at The Palms Hotel during BlogWorld (and yes, there were handstand pushups involved) so who know’s what’s going to happen at SXSW? Hang out with us and find out!

We conceived, built and launched a micro-product in 4 hours in a hotel room today! Here’s the story…

I have a confession. Today is me, John and Ryan’s first official day at the 2010 BlogWorld Expo, a conference all about blogging and we started it off by hacking together a website. Now, the whole point of coming to a conference is to meet people and do that face-to-face thing. But we got a really good idea and we had to execute it – what else would you expect from a bunch of geeks at a tech startup?

Ryan and I were talking about ways to get exposure and attention at BlogWorld while adding value to the attendees. What we concluded was that at the conference, everyone would be asking each other “What are you looking to get out of BlogWorld?”. This questions helps us understand who we’re talking to and whether we can help them, or ask them a question or connect them to someone else.

But there are tons of people at these things and you won’t get a chance to meet all the cool people you’re looking for. So we decided to create a site where people could post what they were looking for and find others based on stated interests.

And that’s when WhyICameToBlogWorld.com was born.

In about 4 hours we:

• bought the whyicametoblogworld.com domain name
• created a self-hosted wordpress installation
• registered the twitter handle @whyicame2bwe
• discovered & implemented TweetGrid, a real-time twitter search tool
• crafted the viral loop we’d use to get attention & share our message
• figured out how to run javascript on wordpress via the inline plugin
• experienced and recovered from a couple bug/failure issues
• and launched!

Ryan and I are customer facing guys at isocket but we both have technical chops too. I’m proud to have hacked together this site with him – how many sales guys do you know who could pull that off? =)

We eventually went down to the panel and met some folks interested in monetization – including the very cool Darren Rowse of Problogger who said his readers would be pretty interested in isocket.

I’m going to call that a good day.

Last week isocket flew out to New York to give the East Coast some love. We attended Pubmatic’s Ad Revenue Conference – where people were talking about hundred million dollar ad campaigns. It was exciting to see what major players in the industry were up to and what trends to capitalize on.

But we also know that there is a huge opportunity to work with publishers who aren’t getting a bajillion pageviews or working with 10 ad networks. That’s why we threw a meetup up for some of our favorite folks – the smart, savvy and kick-ass bloggers of Brooklyn.

These folks are at the cutting edge of hyper-local news. They’re writing compelling content that’s informed by their involvement in the community – and they’re finding ways to monetize that content. Here at isocket, we firmly believe in creating tools to empower publishers to take their financial future in their own hands.

Some of the awesome peeps we got to meet:

• Nicole - the founder and editor of Brooklyn Based, she puts out an email 3x a week that reaches over 13,00 subscribers.
• Hide - the multi-talented man behind DumboNYC (an isocket publisher!). He generously donates his ad dollars back to Brooklyn art community.
• Nicole and Colleen – the two gals who run Brooklyn the Borough, a beautiful webzine-like site that covers Brooklyn culture.
• Eric – the graphic designer of the thoughtful and fun creature that is Gelf Magazine (an isocket publisher!).
• Trevor - the cofounder of neighborhood platform NearSay – among other things they’ll aggregate a bunch of NYC “daily deals” into a single email.
• Claude – one of the editors at Brooklyn Heights Blog (an isocket publisher!). Their team has put more orders through our system than just about anyone.
• Jennifer - an ex-NYTimes consultant turned researcher at CUNY who is working with Jeff Jarvis (who we also met) to develop a sustainable hyper-local news community in Brooklyn.
• Ning and Kael – the guys who power the tech for Brownstoner (an isocket publisher!) We salute the geekery they’ve built over at BlankSlate.
• Shane – the mustached managing editor at the beautifully designed OVERFLOW Magazine – where print still draws breath!
• Chris - the happy recipient of an isocket t-shirt who runs The Skint and sends out a daily email of awesome and cheap things to do in NYC.

Thanks for showing us a good time New York! We’ll be back but meanwhile, keep being awesome!

So excited – John and Jason are visiting NYC this week for an ad conference and to meet some of our East Coast beta testers. We started off thinking “hey, let’s invite a few of our great publishers for a drink”, then it snowballed.

So if you’re around Brooklyn this Friday night, come out to say hello and let us buy you a drink! It’ll be informal – just some good company and free isocket swag! We may be joined by some special guests as well

Who: Anyone! Definitely stop by if you’re interested in isocket, ad sales, blogging, whatever – but anyone is welcome.

When: October 8th, 7pm – 9pm (show up any time)

Where: Rebar – 147 Front St, Brooklyn. Yelp link. We’ll be hanging out in the general bar area.

Why: Why not? You all are amazing – please let us meet you and absorb some of the awesome. Hopefully it will rub off.

Although we tend to stick around the office most of the time, there are a few things that can pull us away from our computers. You know, things such as walking our dogs around Burlingame, taking trips to the local Pez Museum and going to job fairs. Of course, one other thing that we really like going to are the tech events that seem to be going on all the time here in the Bay Area (which is why we all love living here) — especially the really good ones, which are sometimes hard to find.

Lucky for us we have some friends who just happen to be putting on a couple of awesome events that are coming up later this month, which makes it a little easier to decide whether we should take the tome to go or not. The two events that we know we’re going to be making appearances at later this month are Brian Zisk’s The Future of Money and Technology Summit on April 26th and Franck Nouyrigat’s Bay Area Startup Weekend in San Jose on the weekend of April 30th. In fact, we like the Bay Area Startup Weekend so much we’re an official sponsor (which we’ve done a few times before).

If any of you out there are planning on attending either of these events, please let us know so that we can connect up while we’re there. We’ll be easy to spot, just look for a bunch of guys wearing these shirts.

Here are some more details on these two upcoming events and if you have any questions about either of them, please feel free to ask us in the comments and we’ll help you out.

I know that we don’t talk much about our investors, but I thought that this might as good a time as any to start. To everyone’s surprise (well, not really), Dave McClure, one of our investors who is never too scared to get his groove on, decided to show off some of his interpretive dancing skills at the Chic Meets Geek event last week in San Francisco.

After being on the mic for a few minutes he decided that his time would be much better spent dancing than talking.

“I might be a geek, but one thing I can do is bust out the moves like nobody’s business.”

Personally, I would have to agree with him, but take a look at the video below or check out this direct link to UStream if you want to decide for yourself.

This past weekend John and Zak had the opportunity to speak at the Teens In Tech Conference, which was held at Google’s San Francisco offices. They met a ton of great people throughout the day and were super excited that they had the chance to positively impact so many young entrepreneurs. Both John and Zak both started their first businesses in their early teen years, so they jumped at this chance to give back to an excited group of kids who are ready to take on the world with new ideas and innovations.

A few of the highlights of the conference included meeting a 16-year old who had a full business plan put together for a new airline he wanted to start, getting some sweet swag (ex. a sweet, new RickShaw Bag) and of course the one thing that tops them all — getting to meet The Woz (the co-founder of Apple, Steve Wozniak).

The Woz was there to check out what all of the kids were up to these days and was more than happy to sign several MacBooks throughout the day. Check out the video below or over here on ReadWriteWeb to see John get interviewed and to see the Woz in action.

A huge thanks goes out to Daniel Brusilovsky for putting all of this together and for inviting us out to join in on all the fun.

A couple of days ago we all headed out the Palo Alto JobNob Happy Hour in search of some talent that can help fill the void left by our current job openings. In other words, we hit the road to find some energetic, awesome and talented developers who are looking for an opportunity to help us build a product that will rock the world of online advertising. Is that too much to ask? We don’t think so.

The event was super packed and we were amazed at the insane amount of job-seekers who were literally lined up around the block just waiting to get in. After we made our way in though the masses and mingled for a while it was time for John to hit the stage, where he would have 60 seconds to pitch the crowd on what isocket is all about, what we have to offer and what types of talent we’re looking for. Considering that he was the first one to grab the mic (he was actually #2, but #1 didn’t show up), I think that he did a great job telling everyone about what we’re up to. Also, don’t forget that he only had 60 seconds to do his thing, which goes by even faster when you’re the one up there on stage.

Be sure to heck out the video of John on the mic below or over here on YouTube.

Also, on a side note, I snapped a few pics of a couple of the more interesting pitches that I heard after John finished up and wanted to let you know about them, too.

The MyLawsuit.com guy leaded off with. “Have you ever tried to file a lawsuit? Where would you start? Would you go to the Yellow Pages? Maybe call one of the late night infomercial guys that you see on TV? Finding your way around a lawsuit is tough and here at MyLawsuit.com we’re making it a much simpler process.”

I’m not sure if this is such a great thing for people to have access to? I would hate for lawsuits to become even easier than they are now, you know? However, I’m sure that this is a great business, so I should probably just keep my mouth shut. Moving on…

I thought that MingleVine (their JobNob profile) was one of the more interesting businesses to pitch on stage. I guess that they really caught my attention because they don’t really have anything to do with tech — they’re actually a wine carrier turned board game that makes drinking wine more fun and social than it already is. Hard to imagine that drinking wine can get much better than it already is (especially here in wine country), but it sounds like they’ve somehow figured out a way to do it.

Overall, the JobNob Happy Hour was definitely worth going to and presenting at. We met a few really solid developers who could potentially join our team, not to mention we also met a lot of other cool people who are doing really exciting things around the bay area. If you’re either looking to hire or be hired, I would highly suggest that you keep an eye out for the next time the their Happy Hour rolls through town. Just be sure to get their early, there’s going to be a line.