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Geek extraordinaire Fred Davis shared the coolest, wackiest gadgets of 2009 at SofTech’s 5th Annual Gadget Night. Fred is Co-Founder and CTO of Grabbit, and an award-winning tech journalist, entrepreneur, and gadget enthusiast.  His past lives included stints at Ziff-Davis, Wired, and CNET.  Fred’s annual presentations to SofTech are among my favorites.  He was accompanied by his fiancé, Lisa Padilla, host of  Lisacast.com.

iPhone 3G

Joining me during last night’s introductions were Suzanne Skyvara, of Women in Consulting’s North Bay Chapter, and Harry Chapman of the Bay Area Consultants Network, as both of these organizations helped host the event.

Fred talked about cell phones (iPhone, Palm Pre, and Motorola Droid), eBook Readers (Kindle 2 and DX, and rumors of Apple’s upcoming entry into this space), netbooks, HD TVs and associated products, digital still and video cameras, and other miscellaneous gadgets.

The Duracell Instant Power Charger, at $15.99, would be a great stocking stuffer.  If you have a lot of hungry mouths to feed, ask Santa for a Chefstack Automatic Pancake Maker, which can crank out 200 pancakes per hour.  Just the thing for those 6th grade sleepovers!

Chefstack Automatic Pancake Maker

And for the tech fan who has (almost) everything, there’s also the Husqvarna Automower (a Roomba on steroids!) 

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Ron Lichty spoke to SofTech recently.  His presentation, Making Your Software Development Hum, contained a lot of useful information for software professionals.  Since I manage DesignMind’s custom software development and database teams, I found this topic particularly interesting and valuable. 

Ron learned his trade at companies like Apple, Schwab, Berkeley Systems, and Avenue A/Razorfish.  He’s Co-chair of SDForum’s Emerging Technology and Software Development Best Practices Special Interest Group.  I’ve known Ron since the dot-com boom, and over the years have seen him leverage his large development community following to raise a lot of money for charity, an effort I’ve always admired.

Software development is difficult to be good at individually, and even harder to perfect as a team.  This is a discipline where you have to deliver something that works, and if you don’t, it’s obvious.  What’s not so obvious, though, is whether you got the job done as well as you could have.  It’s worthwhile to look over Ron’s slides and see his suggestions for making your software development efforts more productive and enjoyable.

If you missed Ron’s presentation to SofTech, he’ll be presenting to the East Bay Innovation Group on October 7, 2009.

You can learn more about SofTech’s upcoming meetings here.  SofTech is a San Francisco Bay Area business and technology networking group.

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