Get out of your typical conference circuit and have a chance to meet new/different people!

I’m blogging from my room at the Mandalay Bay hotel in Las Vegas, after just arriving from Philadelphia. Both the eBay Developers Conference and the Hyperlinked Society conference are not typical for me. Ttypical conferences for me would be Demo, PC Forum, SuperNova, BlogOn, Web 2.0 Conference, AlwaysOn, Under the Radar and the boatload of events we have in Silicon Valley, and of course Loic le Meur’s Les Blogs in Paris.

However, you have a feeling to always hang out with the same crowd – and even it is always a renewed pleasure to bump into my good friend David Hornik (the world champion for tech conference attendance), it is nice to get to meet new people. It is why I actually enjoyed a lot attending the Hyperlinked Society conference in Philadelphia. It allowed me to meet a number of academics, bloggers and executives who are out of my regular circle.

After the reception of the conference, a group of 14 (strangers – except for my friends Gabe “Memeorandum” Rivera and Tony “Healthline” Gentile - whose birthday is today) got together for dinner at a nice restaurant in Philly. I got to meet Hitwise’s analyst LeeAnn Prescott who is one of the bloggers of the company, which puts a lot of very useful  bits of information about Internet usage trends “for free”. Also at the dinner was Microsoft Research Sociologist Marc Smith, who spoke during one of the panels. We had a great conversation about our phone (he also has a Cingular 8125) and why it could have been the best phone ever (for us), and what he was up to. We have also decided to hang out on the Microsoft Campus that I will visit the day before Gnomedex. And there were many other useful and interesting discussions that I won’t mention because I want to hit the pool of the Mandalay Bay :-).

The same reason led me to book my spot for Ted 2007, at the strong recommendation of David Hornik, Reid Hoffman and Loic le Meur. I also hope to be invited to Yossi Vardi’s Kinnernet 2007, so that I can hang out with Israeli entrepreneurs over there – something I have not done since 2003.

If there are other non-tech conferences that you find worth your intellectual while, feel free to recommend them in the comments.

Comments

[Graeme Thickins]

Jeff, will you be attending Supernova?

I'm curious if you were at PC Forum,
the last conference I blogged. I see
Supernova has some of the same
speaker/panelists and topics...

Graeme

[Gareth Wong]

I have only been an enterpreneur since 2001/2, and have been to many conferences in Telecoms, Technology, security, and shifted into gaming gambling, and finance in the last year or so.

The trend I notice is that there are just too many conferences these days, and consequently, cost vs. benefits sometimes does not meet, esp. for some non-proven events.

Therefore, I founded CXO which is the anti-thesis of conference, as we do not have speakers, no vendors, no sponsors, but purely 'qualified' CXOs from any industry that fits the criteria, and they can join and meet other qualified and quality people without agenda, and be true to themself and network without being under any kind of pressure (except time!).

See http://www.CXOEurope.org

or for the american friends, you can go to http://www.CXO.org

This maybe similar to TED, but I have never been, so cannot comment.

Hope to meet you Jeff in person soon,

BR
Gareth

[Metrics 2.0]

Jeff,
Will you be attending any conferences in the Northeast in the coming months?