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Uma das grandes vantagens de ser alumnus da Draper University é que temos acesso gratuito à eventos que seriam exclusivos ou muito caros de participar. A LAUNCH Conference, por exemplo, só tinha ingressos VIPs disponíveis e ao custo de $1,000. Mas graças aos contatos da Draper University consegui participar gratuitamente. Legal né?
A Conferência contou com a presença de muitos palestrantes incríveis, como Marc Benniof, fundador da Salesforce e grande evangelista pela idéia de as empresas doarem 1% de seu tempo, equity e software para causas do bem que sejam da escolha dos funcionários.
Para minha surpresa e satisfação, lá também encontrei com o brasileiro Pedro Sorrentino, que tinha um blog sobre empreendedorismo onde pregava para sermos "1% melhor a cada dia". Falei pra ele que era leitor dele e o seu blog foi uma grande inspiração.
Lá também tive o prazer de conhecer pessoalmente o Peter Thiel, autor do livro "0 to 1" e comprei uma cópia assinada do livro!
A cópia abaixo será dada como prêmio para um dos mentores do Edudream algumas semanas após o lançamento. Para concorrer, basta se inscrever na lista aqui.
Por fim, o evento também foi uma ótima oportunidade para nos conectar com outros empreendedores que tinham idéias interessantes. Por exemplo, o da foto abaixo é uma estufa hidropônica que cria vegetais em menos tempo e de forma mais eficiente. Muito legal, né?
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Considering we just got back from MicroConf and a month ago we went to the Launch Conference I thought it'd be good to compare / contrast the two very different conferences.
Tone
MicroConf
Tagline is "The conference for self-funded startups." A big emphasis is the "self-funded" part. This conference is all about how to grow or launch your company by funding it yourself through company generated revenue or working part time until you can quit and focus it on full time.
Launch Conference
Tagline is "The best place to launch your startup, raise money, and learn about starting a company." From my experience there definitely seems to be more focus on the "raising money" part as most of the startups there seem to have raised money or were actively looking to raise funding (either seed or venture capital).
Size
MicroConf
Total attendees around 250. All of us fit into one larger sized conference room at the Tropicana Hotel (Cohiba room to be more precise). The conference organizers, Rob and Mike, purposely limit the number of tickets to keep it more intimate.
Launch Conference
Total attendees around 10,000 or so (give or take a few hundred). They rented out the entire San Francisco Design Center Concourse. The first half of the building was dedicated to the Demo Pit where companies could setup a booth. The second half was dedicated for the main stage pitches and talks. The conference organizer, Jason Calacanis, wanted the conference to be open and accessible to as many as people so size is much larger.
Speaker Topics
Microconf
Because the focus of the conference is on self-funded startups (many of which were software as a service type businesses) the talks were more strategic and tactical in nature. For example one of my favorite talks, Rob Walling's talk, was entitled "How to Validate Your Idea and Launch to $7k in Recurring Revenue" where he step-by-step went through how he validated his most current company, Drip (if you're interested in the talk you can check out slides).
Launch Conference
Because of the size of the conference Launch is multi-track with different "stages" having a wide range of different talks. Topics include startups "launching" a new feature or product (the conference is called "launch" after all), panels about raising money, and various higher profile speakers. The tone is definitely a lot less tactical and meant to be more aspirational (as in "maybe one day I'll raise millions of money too!").
Audience
Microconf
I'd say 80% of the audience were developers and software engineers. Many have or are doing software consulting while bootstrapping their startups as a side business. Contrary to what you think of "startups" (ie college kids building it out of their dorm) many of the attendees were older (over 30), married, and with kids. Because of their situations and background their seemed to be a focus on creating a business that can generate revenue in order for them to quite their day job.
Launch Conference
Considering there were thousands there it was harder to connect and talk with everyone, but it was definitely a more varied crowd. Some people were just checking it out to get inspiration, others were designers, others programmers, and then some were students. The types of businesses that had demo booths was also varied. Things from a tread mill you can play games with on your Occulus Rift to an app for sharing your fashion. A majority of the companies that were there seemed consumer focuses which is the antithesis of the attendees of MicroConf
Conclusion
It's definitely not a choice between "whether I should attend one conference or another." It's more a matter of what you are looking for in your company / startup. The downside of MicroConf is that it is much more expensive than Launch. MicroConf cost us about $800 per ticket vs Launch which was $49 per ticket. While the ticket price is higher for anyone seriously looking at growing or starting a self funded startup I can't think of a better conference to be surrounded by like-minded people.
If you are looking to do something in the consumer space and not working on something that can make you money to bootstrap the business Launch Conference is probably your cup of tea. However, if you do plan to go down the consumer route be prepared for a sad, long, and potentially soul crushing journey... but I'll save that for another post!
Our friendly neighborhood games festival, Launch, has announced it's speaker line-up for this year's conference on 13th and 14th November.
Taking place at Birmingham Science Park (a mere 15 minute walk from our own humble Gamer Camp Studios), LAUNCH is now in it's 3rd year, with tickets via Eventbrite (http://launchconference.co.uk/register/) starting at £125+VAT.
Launch Conference on the very first day of the web2day, opening the event for two days of conferences and talk about digital & web in Nantes.
With :
Ludovic Simon (Atlantic 2.0)
Adrien Poggetti (Atlantic 2.0)
Eric Boistard (Stereolux)
Jean-François Gendron (CCI Nantes/Saint-Nazaire)
Patrick Rimbert (Nantes)
Fleur Pellerin (Minister of state of innovation & digital economy & small businesses)
Some picture here :
Find more pictures on our Portfolio !
The videos of the different conferences & talks are coming step by step on this blog. Please be patient !
And save the date for the next edition in Nantes, on June, 6 & 7 !
If you attended the @LAUNCH conference in San Francisco at the end of last month, or saw the startup pitches online, you probably remember hearing about daqri, the new augmented reality startup that “wants to be the Youtube of AR.” The one that’s making augmented reality experiences as easy to create as uploading a Youtube video. “Big deal,” some people say. “The world isn’t ready for augmented reality yet, so AR startups are just for geeks.”
If you are a geek and have been following the evolution of augmented reality, you know that the software to create amazing augmented reality applications has existed for over ten years now. In 2010, the hardware finally caught up. Smartphones like the iPhone 4 and Android devices finally had enough computing power to be able to handle augmented reality applications on the go. We were thrilled! We sat back and expected to see uses of AR run free and multiply all over the world. This incredible technology was finally going to get the attention and creativity it deserved! But nothing really happened. The same few companies who own the majority of AR technology in the world innovated over the years, but its still only accessible to a very small percent of the population, many times costing hundreds of thousands of dollars for each use of AR. We’d been imagining a world populated by AR for over a decade. We finally got tired of waiting for the rest of the world to catch up, so we created daqri.
The question of whether the world is ready is an important one. We’re trying to help answer that question by opening up the doors. Real innovation can only take place once augmented reality gets in the hands of as many people as possible. Augmented reality is a BIG new medium that we think will change the world in countless ways. We want to make that dream a reality.
daqri may well turn out to become the “Youtube of Augmented Reality” – only time will tell. For now, we wanted to highlight some key points about who we are today that didn’t get covered in our quick @LAUNCH pitch or the media coverage that followed. The whole daqri team is absolutely bananas about the product we are building, and can’t wait for you to try it. Here’s why:
1. daqri is egalitarian
Our biggest goal is to make augmented reality accessible to everyone. daqri aims to shift the augmented reality industry into the future by opening up the creative possibilities of augmented reality to anyone, without having to write a single line of code. In order to meet this goal, we’ve ensured that our platform is affordable, easy to use, and as useful as we can possibly make it. We’re committed to keeping our services open to everyone, and to taking user feedback seriously to make this product the best it can be.
2. daqri has the technology chops to back it up.
Unlike almost every other AR startup out there, we have our own vision scientists and we built all of our technology from scratch. We’re agile, prepared for growth, and beholden to no one when it comes to setting the price of our product.
3. daqri is not just about QR codes.
We currently have the recognition software necessary to build an augmented reality experiences on top of many different kinds of markers and glyphs. These are customizable and can include any type of imagery you want. In the not-too-distant future it will include object and facial recognition. The reason we are focusing on QR codes for now is that they are easily accessible and recognizable to everyone.
Thanks for your interest in daqri, if you’d like to sign up for the beta please do so here. If you share our vision and think AR is sexy too, stay in touch!
