I took part in Startup Weekend Bangalore in March 2011. For a few months before that, i was unsure of whether to take the plunge and quit my job, but the event is what made the decision absolutely clear. 2 months later, i turned in my papers.

Secondly, the idea i pitched (crowdsourced traffic info) was just something in my head amongst 30 other ideas. The event gave me a lot of validation/feedback. And even though i was considering other ideas/startups when i quit, by August I made up my mind to pursue this idea further.

4 of my teammates from the event continued to discuss the idea with me. 2 of them have written some code. And now 1 has quit his job and joined me fulltime. All these folks were complete strangers to me at the event, and now all of them are good friends.

Apart from this were the networking benefits – i met a bunch of great startupy folks at the event, a couple of experienced guys, and also got VC contacts (for what it’s worth, haven’t followed up on them yet)

BTW Our website is different from what we pitched at the event, so just checking out the sites from the event is not good enough.

I’ve been to a couple of other events, they have not been as dramatic as that one, but they’re good fun and good for networking. (Also very good for working with people in close quarters and understanding if you can work together – better than any regular interview!)

A contact form allows the person who wishes to communicate a message, to do so, without opening an email client. This lowers the barrier to communication by eliminating steps.

If you are running a business, this alone is reason enough to have a contact form. You want the complete attention of the potential customer. Once their email client is open – you have lost them. They see that they have tens or hundreds of emails to work on, click the little X and forget about you.

More to the point: if your potential design customers are confused by a simple contact form on a website, you may have the classic signs of a stereotypical bad “client from hell”.

Forms allow me to ask questions to guide the person. Why do you want to contact us? We’ve got multiple products, how can I be sure you’re going to mention that? Preferred method of contact if we can’t do it via email? Preferred time for correspondence?

If I could guarantee that an email was going to contain as much information as I need to figure out how to respond, I would drop contact forms. Until then, absolutely not.

The days of getting an email with no subject because they clicked on the mailto link and started typing, and didn’t include their contact information, what they are interested in or even a small detailed description of their inquiry are over now that we can make a very simple contact form with checkboxes and radio buttons that make it very easy to filter the request and to have required fields that make sure the information I need to make a decision is present.

Using an obfuscated email just makes it harder for someone since they usually can’t just click the link and send the email. Granted some ways of presenting the email allow it to properly be clicked and sent, having someone need to cut and paste and remove the or the . or whatever other way you’ve tried to disguise your email just makes it harder for the person to contact you.

Unless that’s your goal.