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The first NWA TechFest is held on July 8th. Modeled after and the sister event to Tulsa TechFest, the technical conference was a resounding success its first year. The Keynote Speaker was Murray Vince, Microsoft’s General Manager, OEM Division and the event hosted over 250 attendees. Session topics included: “Visual Studio 2010: config file transformations”, “Estimate Your Requirements With Planning Poker”, BCS, Enterprise Search, and “Your Data in the Cloud, Securely Using OData (The Open Data Protocol)”. The entrance fee was $2 or 2 cans of food. $269 was donated to the Jones Center and all the food was donated to the NWA Food Bank.

The second year our local tech fest was held on March 25th. Breakout sessions included: “The Creamy Goodness of Nuget!”, “ASP.NET MVC3”, Attack of the Cloud”, and “The CAP Theorem and its Consequences”. The entrance fee was $2 or 2 cans of food and those donations went to the NWA Food Bank.

Our third-year NWA TechFest was held at the UA Global Campus on August 24.  There were 48 breakout sessions, featured a keynote panel discussion, and the theme was “Tech Entrepreneurship in NWA”.  Organizer Mark Brandon said the message of NWA TechFest is “We want you to not be afraid to start your tech enterprise in Northwest Arkansas, we want you to in Northwest Arkansas, and we are here to help.”

Event year four was again held at UA Global Campus but much earlier in the year, on January 31. Mark Brandon returned to organize the event, along with Victoria Coppett, and the entrance fees and items collected once more were donated to NWA Food Bank.  The Keynote speakers were John…