Thursday, April 19, 2001

The Cyber Scene in Denver ~ by Suzanne Lainson

On April 19 I had to choose between attending a United Kingdom Tech Forum Series (http://www.invest.uk.com/) at the Denver Convention Center (featuring Don Gips, group VP global strategy for Level 3) and attending Cooley Godward’s (http://www.cooley.com/trademark) Powerful Brands seminar in Westiminster. Both sounded appealing, but location won out. Westminster is closer to Boulder. The seminar was a very good overview of the issues involved in trademarks.

That evening I attended an open house at ad/design firm ProMotif (http://www.promotif.com). One of their projects was to design the multimedia promo for the Metro Denver Network’s Convergence Corridor campaign. When we registered online for the event, we had the opportunity to create our own personae to be printed on our name tags. We could select from a variety of options including gender, hair color and style, clothing color and type, etc. It was a cute touch.

The office is in the World Trade Center, near the Brown Palace. John Robinson, director of business development, makes the commute each day down from Boulder, where the company had been located. Over wine and cheese, I had a chance to catch up with Jon Hurd, a friend from the Conference on World Affairs. In 1994 the first website ProMotif produced was for Jon's company, Granville-Phillips, which was bought by Helix Technology (http://helixtechnology.com) in 1998. I also talked to John Caprio and Brian Smith of Sonant Communications (http://www.sonant.com), Rebecca Shanks, talent manager for Creative Assets (http://wwwcreativeassets.com), and Jae Binder of Simple Communication.

Then, as the sun was going down, I headed back up to Boulder.

One final note: I’ve been hitting lots of parties in brand new buildings lately and I think the lighting in women’s bathrooms has gone from bad to worse. Between being too dim to allow you to use the mirrors and so unflattering as to leave you wondering why you bothered to get up that morning, the lighting is enough to trigger a revolt (and I am encouraging women to do so).