Daniel M. Clark

#asw10

Day Two Finale:

Yesterday wrapped up with a couple of exciting events (notice that I’m not blogging the evening events because, well, I’m too busy having fun!).

The first that I attended was an affiliate launch event held by GTO Management at the ESPN Zone inside the New York New York hotel. The program launched was FanDual.com, and after a presentation explaining this new concept in fantasy sports betting, we were given access codes worth $25 each to try it out. We signed up with new accounts, and chose our NBA rosters to do battle with - the results will be known tonight after the games complete. Knowing nothing about basketball, I choose my team at random, and only laid down $5 of my $25 balance. Should my team win, I’ll take down $9. Now, I’m not much into sports, but who knows? Maybe this could be something that I find I’m interested in over time. Certainly many of my Geek Dads Weekly listeners are sports fans!

Funny story: on the way to New York New York, I was sitting up front in the cab. There were four other passengers: Kim Rowley and her brother Mike and Mike’s girlfriend Amber, as well as Matt McCabe, my Affiliate Summit Mentor Program mentee. When we arrived, I covered the cab fare (about $10), and when the others insisted on splitting it with me, I told them that rather than that, they should all put one dollar in a slot machine once we got inside, and that I would split the winnings if anyone hit. Kim and Mike both hit and cashed out five bucks each, covering the cost of the cab! Not bad!

Not so funny story: I handed the cab driver a twenty, and he seemed to think that he deserved a nearly ten-dollar tip, because he didn’t make any moves to give me change. I actually had to ask him for change. Look, I’m not a cheapskate or anything (as my hotel bill will surely attest… I’m scared to look at it upon checkout), but a ten-dollar tip on a ten-dollar cab ride? Don’t think so.

We had a blast at the GTO event, then headed back to the Rio for the Affiliate Summit Trivia Tweetup event. Lisa Picarille channelled her inner game show host (she was right on target) and set up four teams to play Trivial Pursuit on the Nintendo Wii, projected onto a very large screen. Each team ended up with 6-12 people on it (some folks came and went, and I’m not convinced people didn’t float to different teams throughout!). I was on Team 2 with Shawn Collins, Jen Goode, team Captain Michael Coley of ABestWeb, among others. We took an early lead, filled up our little pie thing first, and headed to the middle to win the game. Each other team had three pie pieces or less, and it looked like we had it in the bag… then we missed nearly every other question thrown our way, each team filled up their pies, and Team 3 performed a spectacular upset to win the game. In competitive sports parlance… it was sick. Congratulations to Team 3! During the event, it was announced that the winning team’s members would receive complimentary Gold passes for Affiliate Summit East 2010 in New York later this year. At the end, Missy (who might have been a tad tipsy) announced that everyone who participated and made it to the end of the game would receive a pass! How generous is that?!

I headed up to my room after the Trivia Tweetup (nobody was sure what made it a Tweetup, other than a few people saying they’d be there via Twitter!), which leads to…

Day Three! The final day of Affiliate Summit.

I’m once again missing the Keynote - Brian Clark of Copyblogger this time - to take the time to catch up on email, respond to offers I was made yesterday, and update my blog here. My day looks pretty great so far, with a session or two to attend, and more great events later in the evening (including one held at the VooDoo Lounge here at the Rio - very cool).

More updates on the way!