Los Angeles Hacker News Meetup

This month at LA HN we're mixing up the format a bit, we're going to only have 2 speakers + a round of lightning talks.

While our speaker slots are full we're definitely still looking for lightning talks. If you'd like to give a 5 minute talk about a topic of your choosing contact info@lahackernews.com with a brief description of your talk.

Featured Speakers

Anshul Amar - Opinionated Software

In this talk Anshul will discuss news, op-eds, graph databases, and other inspirations for his current startup. Also, he'ss discuss how working in healthcare IT led to becoming obsessed with opinions and why opinions--the stuff in op-eds, blogs, programming language flame-wars, opinionated journalism, etc.--get a bad rap, even though they can be both fun and useful.

He'll talk about how opinions can be modeled as a directed graph and how graph techniques and Bayesian networks can improve the experience of reading and understanding opinions. And he'll also talk about how his current startup, Unfold, was inspired by these ideas and about their progress so far.

Rebecca Shostak - The Real 4-Hour Workweek: Turning Your Great Idea into a Viable Business

Rebecca will talk about her experience in taking that idea you have right before you fall asleep, in the shower, or on a napkin at a restaurant into a viable business using web-based marketing techniques and approaching business strategy in a new way.

5 Minute Lightning Talks

Aaron Stannard - Aaron recently launched http://captainobvio.us/ , which made the front page of HN. Aaron will give a quick overview of building the site and some of the issues he faced.

About our speakers

About Anshul Amar

Anshul Amar is currently co-founder, CEO, & chief coder of Unfold Inc., a 5-month old social news startup. Before founding Unfold, he was CTO of Castlight Health, a 3-year old healthcare startup that WSJ recently named the "Top Venture-Funded Company" according to some strange criteria. He was also an early employee and architect at Athenahealth, which went public in 2007. Prior to that he was a film and television editor for several years after graduating from Harvard with a degree in Physics.

About Rebecca Shostak

Rebecca Shostak is an illustrator, graphic designer, and web entrepreneur. Rebecca was the youngest person to become an Adobe Design Achievement Awards finalist in 2005 for her digital illustrations, and since has won numerous awards for her work. In 2008, Rebecca founded Wild Magnolia Design, the world's first eco-friendly wedding album manufacturing business. Using the knowledge and internet marketing strategies learned from Wild Magnolia, Rebecca went on to co-found The Shoppe Designs Inc. (www.theshoppedesigns.com (http://www.theshoppedesigns.com/)), a purely web-based business selling marketing templates, cards, and other digital download tools to wedding and portrait photographers with a unique business strategy. Rebecca has garnered much success from The Shoppe and currently plans to use her growing knowledge of web-based entrepreneurialism and residual income to inform her ever-growing list of new business projects. Rebecca graduated from UCLA with a BA from the Design | Media Arts department.