I spent Friday hanging out at the St. Louis Innovation Camp. I saw a bunch of great talks and was able to both reconnect with old friends and meet some new interesting entrepreneurs. In all, it was a great day. I’m speaking tomorrow on innovative software development and I can’t wait to have a great conversation about it. Many kudos to Brian Blanchard and the rest of the Innovation Camp team for a great first event!

I kicked off the day hearing Michael Groner talk about Appistry’s CloudIQ platform. I’ve known the Appistry guys for a long time but it was good to hear how they continue to evolve. It’s nice that the cloud market has finally caught up to what they’ve been doing for years. :)

After that I caught the next two sessions with Bob Lozano and Jim Brasunas talking about company formation and evolution in startups. Bob is an old friend and I really enjoyed hearing his thoughts and stories. There were a lot of great interactive questions from the crowd as well.

During lunch I got to talk to Ryan Bell from Twaitter (changing names soon) which is a really cool platform for tracking analytics and metrics from your social media. If you’re trying to use social media as a tool for marketing, this is pretty cool. I was impressed with Ryan’s ideas and enthusiasm and I’ll be watching to see what they do next.

After lunch I saw Kyle Cordes talking about his lessons from building and selling a Software as a Service company and, as always, Kyle delivered an insightful and engaging talk with lots of room for thought.

Then I caught Lisa Rokusek and Jeff Struve talking about hiring and HR. I learned a few interesting tips about using Google to better search LinkedIn and about Jigsaw which I’d never heard of before. Lots of interesting questions and I enjoyed the section on developing an on-boarding plan for getting me thinking.

Finally (for me), I saw most of Ken Sipe’s talk on rules for revolutionaries. I wasn’t sure what to expect from this, but as always Ken brought the combination of great material and his formidable speaking ability to make a great talk. I never pass up a chance to see Ken speak.

If you missed any of these guys, most of them are doing these talks again Saturday so you still have a chance!