I ran into Ryan Melcher in Santa Cruz the other day. Ryan heads up emerging technologies for eBay. It was great to see him and his family.
Ryan and I were at IUMA together back in the day. Then he came to work for LVL/i-Storm before going off to Winamp then eBay. He's a tremendous talent and I'd love to get him here at Yahoo! That thought reminded me of when Yahoo! nearly purchased eBay (or was it the other way around?) back in 2000, but Jeff Mallett and Meg Whitman couldn't come to terms with who would run things. Funny, I wonder how different things would be if that actually happened. Especially for Y! Shopping.
Anyway, if I can't get Ryan to come up to Y!, then at least maybe we can get something going in Santa Cruz like a BarCamp or some other kind of regular gathering of geeks. Mashup Santa Cruz, perhaps. I'm going to contact UCSC to see if there's any interest up there. Since it's May, we may have to wait until the new school year, but it couldn't hurt to start early. I need to contact Jon Luini too. T'see if he wants in.
