I'm working on organizing an event with Tech@NYU called DemoDays and it would be very helpful to hear your thoughts about the HackNY Summer Speaker Series.

Thinking about all the talks and lectures you attended during HackNY, who were your favorite speakers? And what were some of the venues you particularly enjoyed visiting?

Thanks for your help!

I was only involved with one of the talks - the one I gave on "technology selection and adoption" at the Kellen Auditorium at Parsons. Great venue (once you figured out the Death Star like AV controls) and a really great audience - very smart and engaged. Not sure how much help that is, but . . .

Indeed! I believe we got to hear moot speak there in my year. That venue did stand out in my mind, so I'm glad to hear you got a positive impression from it as well.

I forgot there was a talk the day moot was speaking, ugh :(

I really liked Joel Sipolsky!

Something that the HackNY speaker series had that DemoDays hasn't really, is speakers whose primary purpose is to present special knowledge. I'm not sure if this is appropriate or desirable for DemoDays, but it's probably useful to point out.

Joel Spolsky, Chris Poole, and Josh Knowles, etc. were these awesome people experience about creating successful products and developing as a promising young hacker person.

Other speakers had interesting and related knowledge to impart that we may not have necessarily had. I missed her talk, but heard Whitney Hess talking about UX was awesome. USV offered interesting insight into the world of VCs. Jenny Wortham talking about how to build a relationship with the press was incredibly useful.

</$0.02>

Two more cents:

Not everyone has brand new MacBooks (or even Macs, or PCs with HDMI ports). Make sure the venue has VGA adapters for demos that can't run in the browser.

foursquare--

Yeah, in retrospect, we should add a "do you need your own computer? What kind of adapter does it take?" question to the demo sign up form.

When I first saw the Joel Spolsky's talk on the calendar, I somehow read it as Joshua Topolsky and was totally bummed when I showed up. That being said, by the end of his talk he was my favorite speaker of the whole series.