My Silicon Valley Trip Wrap up- SES, Google Party & More

I just got back from San Jose, California also known as Silicon Valley for the SES Conference (Search Engine Strategies). Overall I had a wonderful experience. The weather was amazing and it was surreal to be in the mecca of technology & innovation. While I was there we passed the buildings for Adobe, LinkedIn, WebEx, Google (Which I’ll get to in a bit), Yahoo, Hewlett Packard, Cisco, Intel, eBay and more.

The trip began with some turmoil, not only was there a problem with the names down on our hotel reservation, but DHL, the company that was to ship our booth…Lost it! After a few hours of going back and forth with our hotel and hotels.com (where we booked the reservation) we finally got the room situation squared away…But we still didn’t have a booth!

The trade show was in less than 12 hours…What to do?!? We called DHL, but their last update was that the booth was somewhere in Fresno California. The somewhere didn’t help and they really had no idea where it was. So Ashley and I decided to unleash our creativity. We thought the best thing to do would be to make light of the situation, so we decided to head to kinko’s, get some poster boards, markers, double sided tape and bust out some skills we learned back in elementary school. We came up with a cool slogan….”DHL didn’t deliver, But IZEA Will!”

Funny enough, the whole lack of booth really worked out well for us. It was a great conversation starter and apparently made a lot of lasting impressions- We’re number One!.

After day one of the conference Google through a great party for everyone. They shuttled buses from the convention center to their “Campus”. They really did have a Campus, equipped with Volleyball Courts, lap pools, work out facilities, several cafeterias and tons of office buildings. For the party they also had open bar, great entrees, a DJ and lots of other cool stuff going on.

The next day Ashley and I went to Santana Row for a late lunch. We had some great Mexican food food and I got to pose with my Future Car, an Aston Martin.

Later that night we went to SearchBash 2008, hosted by Bruce Clay Inc. (Internet Consultants). Another open bar and some live entertainment…

I’ll have to say that everything with the trip was great…Except for the Final Decent into Orlando. That had to have been the scariest flight of my life. Flying directly over Tropical Storm Fay was not cool…Lots of bumps and dips. If I want those thrills I’ll go to Universal. I was soooo happy to be on the ground and I know Ashley felt the same way.

Now it’s back to work in Orlando…Lots of good things coming up. Stay tuned!