Elemental shows off the goods

On Wednesday, Elemental Technologies hosted Lunch 2.0 in downtown.

In addition to the usual suspects, I noticed a lot of new faces, which was great. This was partially a happy coincidence and partially by design.

Because Elemental builds software that, in the words of Julie Williams, Elemental’s Communications Manager, “masters the art of using massively parallel solutions to accelerate video conversion,” I figured our friends over at the Governor’s Office of Film and Television might be interested.

After all, they’re tapped into the Portland video community at large, all of whom, I’m sure have encoding and transcoding pains.

They were interested, attended and were even nice enough to send a note about the lunch to their mailing list.

Among the faces I recognized was Dr. Normal from Strange Love Live, who was positively giddy (for him); as the producer of SLL and memePDX and generally a video geek, he was excited to visit Elemental and see their software in action.

So, after about a half hour of noming and mingling, the festivities began. Julie welcomed everyone and introduced Andy Beach (@andybeach), VP of marketing, talked about the company’s background and Elemental’s GPU-accelerated technology.

Next up was Greg, a senior software engineer on the Elemental Server team, then Davy (@davystevenson), a software engineer building the Rails interface for Elemental Server, and finally Lisa, a product manager for Elemental Accelerator.

When, initially, the video for Elemental Accelerator played with no sound, someone on the Elemental team quipped “we do video, not sound”, which gives you an idea of the tone of the event, laid back, and yet, informative.

The 60 or so people crammed into the conference room had quite a few questions for the Elemental team after the presentations, more than I expected anyway. So, it seemed like the lunch attracted a targeted audience.

All together, about 100 or so people came to the lunch, some skipping the presentations to chat among themselves in the kitchen. The format worked well, and I had a couple people comment that this was their favorite Lunch 2.0 yet.

Thanks to Elemental for hosting.

Don’t forget these Lunch 2.0s, coming soon:

• None

That’s right, there are no Lunch 2.0s on the schedule. I have a couple hosts interested for January and February, but it looks like we’re done for the year, which may not be a terrible thing what with the weather and holidays.

If you’re interested, or know someone who might be, let me know here hit me up on Twitter (@jkuramot). Also, check out the how-to primer.

Big thanks to all the hosts who have hosted or plan to host Lunch 2.0.

(Image courtesy andybeach. Used with permission.)