Startup Grind Coming to Lansing!

I'm stoked to announce Startup Grind is coming to Lansing in January 2015!

Startup Grind is a global (55 countries, 125 cities) startup community designed to educate, inspire and connect entrepreneurs.

Powered by Google for Entrepreneurs, Startup Grind recently launched in Lansing. Our first event will be in the second half of January 2015 featuring a rocking local entrepreneur. I hope you join us!

We host monthly events for Lansing entrepreneurs.  Each event features a successful local founder, innovator, educator or investor who shares personal stories and lessons learned on the road to building great companies.  We offer yummy food + drinks and spend an hour filming an informal, intimate fireside-chat-style interview with our awesome person of the month followed by a Q&A and mixer.

Each event gets archived on www.startupgrind.com – some of the past interviews were with biz legends like the founders of Nest, Capital One, Pinterest, Stripe, SoundCloud, Words with Friends, Intuit, Indiegogo... the list goes on and on.  These interviews are a unique peek behind-the-scenes at the life, journey and insights of those who have gone before, and are incredibly engaging and inspiring events.  Startup Grind was recently featured in Forbes magazine and is quickly becoming known as the Ted talks of the entrepreneur world.

Lets Build This Together!

I'm excited to be involved in bringing Startup Grind to Lansing. To take full advantage of this opportunity it is important to involve the community.

Please email me to get involved!

• If you want to attend our first event.
• If you want to volunteer to help.
• Ideas on how Startup Grind can help Lansing.
• Local media contacts to help spread the word! (name & email or phone)
• Speaker suggestions (include speaker name, company, contact email,  & contact phone number)
• Sponsor suggestions (include company name contact name, contact email,  & contact phone number) Ideal sponsors are those who are avid supporters of the local entrepreneur community or those who have services founders can benefit from. 

I'm already working hard with a team of people to line up killer speakers and put on valuable events. This is going to be an exciting addition to the already vibrant Lansing business community!

David Smith
Director, Startup Grind Lansing
www.linkedin.com/in/davidssmith/

Apple Migration Assistant - Days to Minutes

I had a frustrating time using Apple's Migration Assistant. After some Google searching and the help of local vendor, Capitol Macintosh the process was quick. After the migration I was amazed at how seamless it was. I've checked all the apps I thought would be difficult like Inkscape and Gimp, but they transferred seamlessly.

The process worked so well that on my first login after migration all my windows were open just like I'd left them. It was just like using my old system.

Quickly Migrating Data

Context

I recently purchased a new Macbook Air since my previous one had a bad screen.

I was excited to upgrade from 4 GB RAM To 8 GB RAM, but not looking forward to installing my apps and getting the system configured like my old one.

Updating in Minutes instead of Days

I found out during the migration both computers are unusable. This is a problem when the process takes many hours or even days over WiFi.

Following these steps would have migrated me in under an hour instead of days:

1. Get a Thunderbolt Cable
2. Update both systems to the latest version of OS X.
3. Turn off sleep mode (Energy Saver)
4. Turn off WiFi on the new system (to ensure the process is using the Thunderbolt cable)
5. Plug in the Thunderbolt Cable to both systems.
6. Restart the old system and hold the T key on the keyboard.
7. Launch the Migration Assistant from the new computer.
8. Follow the prompts.

Other Tips

1. If you need to stop the migration assistant press Command Q.
2. If you need to restart the migration assistant and it keeps continuing where it left off restart the system.
3. While migrating the computer goes into a special mode and can't be used for anything else.

Rant

Why oh why did Apple make this process so difficult? After I put in a couple hours of trial, error, and Googling it worked great. But why hide this information? Computers are great at sequencing tasks and knowing not to go to sleep in the middle of important operations. 

There are no prompts are hints to discover how to massively speed up this process. It is frustrating I had to learn everything by trial, error, and the help of local Apple Authorized Servicer Capitol Macintosh to understand the best way to transfer the data. How hard would it have been to put the 8 steps above into software to walk users through the process?

I won't go deep into the usability issues, but for starters putting total estimated time up front via various methods (WiFi, Thunderbolt, etc.) would have helped loads.