The Remarketer

Network Computing Magazine hosts an annual “Best of Interop” awards program at the Interop Las Vegas show in the spring for the best new products offered by exhibitors at the show. This really helps the casual networking specialist sort through the hundred of exhibitors and products offered.

Vibrant noticed an important category missing in the awards though and took it upon ourselves to dig up the best “Schwag” or “Tchotchkes” that we could find on the Interop expo floor. I’m really not sure how this was previously overlooked!

Please take a look at the three finalists below and vote for your favorite.

Interop Las Vegas 2007 was a successful show for Vibrant. We met many current networking clients as well as hopefully several future ones. There are definitely many end-users and resellers interested in used Cisco, used Servers and the secondary IT hardware market.

The show was very active with close to 20,000 attendees, 450 exhibitors and all varieties of stunts, costumes and give-aways. Vibrant gave away two Night Vision Monoculars (to spot our great Cisco deals ). The winners guessed the correct number of Cisco Thing-a-ma-jigs in a fishbowl (38), which drew many questions and were actually old school cable management kits. Congrats to our two winners!

What is a Twitter hunt?

It’s a simple treasure hunt, except the clues are given out via Twitter. In our case, we’ll be giving out $200 in chips to the person who can find Vibrant’s own Lindsi Gish somewhere within Interop Las Vegas at the Mandalay Bay Convention Center.

Between 2 and 4PM on Wednesday, May 23rd, clues will be given out every 10-15 minutes via Vibrant’s Twitter profile (www.twitter.com/vibrant) regarding the profile and location of Lindsi. The first one to find her wins.

What is Interop?

Fun news today at Vibrant Technologies as our CEO, Jennifer VanDerHorst was recognized as one of the top 40 “accomplished professionals” under the age of forty in the annual special section of the Minneapolis St. Paul Business Journal. She was chosen out of a field of 280 nominees for this prestigious list.

Thanks to Heidi Carpenter of Fafinski Mark & Johnson, P.A. for nominating Jen.
The write-up was spot on in describing Jennifer’s entrepreneurial spirit and detailed how she has started and continues to run two tech companies as well as Holland Center for children with Autism.

Describing Holland Center:

An “I Love Minnnesota” meme has been started by Aaron Weiche of the Find Buffalo Blog and we’ve been tagged by Patrick Schaber of Transition Networks and local marketing blog, The Lonely Marketer!

Spring is a great time of year to kick off this meme, because if it had been launched in February instead, I’m pretty sure I would have come up with the reasons why I wanted to move to Cali instead! Despite a giant CO-2 encrusted snow pile still melting at Eden Prairie Mall, I’m feeling MN again, so here we go:

There are endless numbers of tech bloggers online, but finding those that cover enterprise IT is a bit more challenging. For the past several months, I’ve been compiling a list of the best that I could find.

Quick observations: Sun is the runaway blogging leader. HP has a ways to go, as does Cisco, but they’re finally getting there. Storage Execs are your buddies in the blogosphere, as they go by their first names (i.e. Chuck’s Blog, Dave’s Blog, Hu’s Blog, etc…)

General IT Bloggers
- Some great writers and thinkers covering Enterprise IT of all flavors:

Things have been quiet at The Remarketer the past week, but we’ve been quite busy behind the scenes. Blog posts are on the way here soon, but I just wanted to list some of the opportunities that we’ve been lucky enough to have get in the way.

Hiring

As a growing firm, we’re almost always hiring, but lately we’ve encountered some terrific candidates and have been appropriately engaged. At Vibrant, growth is a priority, but only if it’s smart growth with the right people. We met a lot of those right people in recent hires including Bruce, Dede, Nicole, Mike, Patrick and Kolby (and hopefully a few more that we’re still in negotiations with). On a shout-out Friday, I just wanted to send a warm welcome to our newest team members.

Last week, Sun Microsystem’s Project Blackbox (aka The DatacenterMobile) finally made a stop in Minneapolis, but alas, daycare couldn’t be lined up and I didn’t make it over to the St. Thomas campus to get a tour. I don’t feel like I completely missed out though, because TechnologyEvangelist.com offered a great video of Sun’s Twin Cities visit.

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Find out where Project Blackbox is now.

At Vibrant we’re quick to offer top dollar for your used IT hardware, but we definitely also encourage users to consider donation as an option (we do so ourselves when we can). There are many organizations out there who could use enterprise IT hardware and many who have equipment to spare, so here are a few sites that can pair up the two:

Share the Technology

We’ve used this site to connect with organizations and schools in need of server, storage and networking donations. As a 501(c)(3) non-profit, they’ve provided a free public-access database since 1996.

To celebrate the end of the shortest (yet longest) month of the year, to do some fun team-building and just to have fun, Vibrant hosted its first Video Game Happy Hour.

We had video games (Boxing & Tennis on the Wii, Guitar Hero projected on a 15′ wall, DDR, Parapa, NES, etc…) set up throughout the office. Face-melting guitar heroes and old-school Super Mario gamers alike found a game to their liking and all had a blast. Our Mac-whiz Lindsi Gish put together the above comic book photo-log of the evening.