Do you like to spend your mornings discussing trends and inspiration while saving your afternoons to ruminate on creative ideas? Then the PSFK Conference in San Francisco sounds right up your alley. Following on the heels of successful conferences in NYC, London and L.A., the trendspotter’s fifth meeting of the minds taking place at the Fort Mason Center this Thursday July 17th and will feature some truly innovative speakers and panelists who run the gamut from NASA to FunnyOrDie.com. The lineup is packed with Spear favorites like Amit Gupta and Jen Bekman. Bay Area JS.com readers, go forth and learn!

I was browsing around the site reflecting on how far we’ve come and couldn’t help but notice the wealth of inspiration and content we’ve got in the SpearTalks archives. So, I figured I’d round them all up for easy consumption. Whether you like fashion, technology, art, or just about anything else– with nearly 40 incredible interviews, there’s something for everyone thanks to our very own Carmel Hagen. Go, dive in, it’s just a click away.

You've come a long way over the past year as evidenced by the fact that you shaved your goatee and stopped using a nightlight. However, we know that sometimes you get nostalgic for the days of yore when your face fuzz was all the rage and soda pop only cost a nickel. If only there were some kind of time machine or time capsule to take you back to that precious time in your life. Well, we might have just thing and while it's no Delorean or time traveling phone booth, it'll certainly allow you to relive your sordid past. Our old friend Amit Gupta and his team at Photojojo has created a photo time capsule. The new feature digs through your Flickr page, selecting the most intriguing selections from a year ago and sends them to you in a weekly email. The application chooses the most worthy images based on views, comments, and favorites, so you won't get any of those artsy nudes of yourself that you've blocked out of your memory. The best thing about the time capsule is that you don't need 1.21 Gigowatts to activate it, just some photos and a Flickr page.

I am sure many of you wasted countless hours voting on HotorNot during college…maybe you still do. Using the same “face-off” model, CommandShift3 pits one website against the next; conceived at the loosely-organized, totally awesome coworking experience known as Jelly, you won’t be able to rate sites on loading times or ease of use but rather just the landing page via a series of screenshots, but we’re totally fine with that — if the desire strikes you, you can click though easily enough. Thanks to Adam Varga, Erin Sparling, Lee Semel, Amit Gupta, Dan Lurie and Darrell Silver for allowing us to pass anonymous judgment on hundreds of websites, without feeling guilty about it at all.

If we hadn’t taken a peek at SpearTalks alum and friend Amit Gupta’s holiday wishlist, we’d have never guessed he was so into gadgety, geeky stuff. Okay, so not really, but here’s what he told us he’s all hot for this holiday season:

I’d really like to spend the holidays hacking together some ideas for emerging hardware and software platforms…

Chumby [ed note: don't we ALL.]
A box full of Bug Labs new hardware
Android emulator plus a real phone that will run it.

And a geeky friend who wants to spend a week over christmas figuring out and building some awesome new apps or services in those environments!

Amit Gupta is an entrepreneur. If you read Rolling Stone, The Wall Street Journal, Wired, or any other combination of America’s best publications, your eyes have probably skimmed the same pages that some of Amit’s more popular projects have graced. Photojojo, the friendliest photography* newsletter around, and Jelly, the co-working sessions that help creative types get even more creative, are perhaps the most popular examples of Amit’s endeavors (and definitely the most written about).

Popularity aside, the best thing about Amit’s brand of entrepreneurialism is not how it tends to win fast friends — or even how it seems to win media attention as soon as each new project has a homepage. The best thing about Amit’s entrepreneurialism is that it actually solves problems. While this has always been purpose of the profession, one would find it hard to debate that- more often than not- the “problems” solved by such ventures are ones that people didn’t know they had in the first place, making the motives of said ventures too obviously financial. I'd venture to guess that I stand with thousands of others when I say that Amit does what should be done with a talent for entrepreneurialism: He helps people. Whether it's having fun, making money, or gifting their Facebook friends with a digital form of Chlamydia, Amit's ideas help people do what they like to do better, and that's exactly why we love him.

Joshspear.com: What do you find so exciting about entrepreneurialism?

Amit Gupta: I’ve had internships and I’ve volunteered, but I’ve never had a full-time day job. READ MORE…

A quick heads up to California readers (okay, maybe just Bay Area readers), I’ll be speaking at the Community Next conference coming up in a few weeks. Aaron and I are actually kicking the day off (gasp) with our signature Brand Utopia schpeel. The whole concept of the day is around the Present and Future of Online Communities, we think it’s going to be great fun and very useful for others. I was humbled to be invited to speak alongside the other speakers like Jeffrey Kalmikoff of Threadless, James Hong of HotorNot, Guy Kawasaki, Amit Gupta and many, many others. If you’re in the area and want to come, use the code SPEAR to get $45 off the early bird price (there are only 4 early bird tickets remaining, go get em!).