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Happenings this week

So this week, I have a product management/marketing roundtable on Tuesday am, held thru the NorCal BMA. It’s a breakfast (yes that does mean early in the morning) meeting at Scott’s in Palo Alto from 7:30-9am. They put the coffee on the table and the conversation is always great - come wake up with us! This month’s session brings Steve Mezak, serial entrepreneur and seasoned product guy (CEO of Accelerance) to lead the discussion on the thorny issue of ‘how do you build customers what they want when you’re doing something new and they don’t know what they want yet’ - which Steve nattily summarizes under the real title of “Building Products for Naive Customers”. It’s sure to be an interesting morning. For details or RSVP info see here.

There are other things going on Tuesday, but I’m abstaining. I’ll look for blog reports on the VLab event on Open Source and Churchill Club’s event looking at the brightest new leaders in the valleya.

Back to things I will be at - this week there are the twin Stanford sessions (blogged previously) on Wednesday. This week I’ll be at the iPass session at ETL. I’m interested in hearing Ken Denman speak on their business model and company evolution (I find I’m always surprised when I hear their name, it comes from an element of their work that I did not expect). However, for some of you the session at SHL with Paul Hartzog of panarchy might be the cat’s meow.

After that, but still on Wednesday, we have Malcolm Gladwell, author of Tipping Point, at Books Inc. in Mountain View (301 Castro) to give a reading from his new book, Spark Blink (sorry I had KQED’s Spark program on the brain. A bunch of us are meeting up to hear him and then get Mexican food at some nearby restaurant afterwards (will update with name when get it back - hopefully it will be the little one on Dana Street).

Now that the Future Salon moved its Digital Identity session to 28 Jan (was to be this Friday), my week looks a little less cluttered.