Carl Youngblood told us of his experience as the sole technical person in a small construction loan wholesaling company. He's building a Rails application to automate the process and using an Indian outsourcing company to do much of the work under his direction. I was fascinated to hear how he had managed to set up an outsourcing contract and managed the work as a small shop.

I mentioned that Yukihiro Matsumoto, or Matz, the creator or Ruby will be giving the colloquium in the BYU CS Department on Oct 19th.

Eric Smith gave us a run down of Control4, his home automation company. This is Eric's second successful home automation start-up, so he knows this business. They're working on voice recognition right now. Using voice to turn on lights is boring, but using voice to search big media databases is a real win. Eric mentioned that they're doing streaming video with MoCA. I'd never heard about it, but it rides on top of the coax in your home at a frequency above cable, so that it doesn't interfere.

We had a pretty interesting discussion of AdSense, splogs, and new competitors to AdSense like Microsoft's Ad Center. This is an area that is interesting on a variety of levels, so everyone gets to participate.

Several people in attendance had used Asterisk to set up business PBX systems. I mentioned my fun controlling Vonage dialing from OS X's address book and my further desires to control phone routing based on my presence information. No one was actively using it at home or with Vonage, but Carl Youngblood recommended Nerd Vittles as a generally interesting blog with lots of cool things to do with Asterisk. I plan to spend a little time reading the archives.

As we were talking today, I decided that the unconference principles apply to the CTO breakfast beautifully.

• Who ever comes is the right people
• Whatever happens is all that could have
• Whenever it starts is the right time
• When it is over, it is over