In barely five weeks the 5th edition of the PICNIC Festival (aka PICNIC ‘10) will take place in Amsterdam and this is your chance to buy your ticket before they eventually go sold out. (read on to find a special benefit for you!)
PICNIC ‘10 brings you the opportunity to Redesign the World – through lectures, labs, workshops, pitch sessions, discussions and a special business program.
To make an impact, we need some help. So we’re asking you — yes, YOU — to roll up your sleeves and Redesign the World with us at PICNIC ‘10. Are you up for the challenge?
Of course we can’t possibly redesign the whole world in three days, so we’re limiting our focus to Life, Cities, Media and Design. The high-impact changes these areas are undergoing provide real opportunities to make a difference. PICNIC ‘10 brings you a platform to create new solutions for a better world.
Redesign the World, the City, Life, Media and Design at PICNIC'10
As a reader of ConferenceBasics, you’ll get a 15% discount on 1-day and 3-day tickets by using the promocode Conferencebasics15 (note: it’s case sensitive).
On the afternoon of Friday 24 September we’ll be hosting Drinks at PICNIC, a closing networking event dedicated to the attendees, speakers, partner and special guests of PICNIC ‘10. Entrance will be 15 euro (with the all-you-can-drink formula) and as a special treat to my readers, I’ll be paying myself for the drinks to all of those that purchase a ticket to PICNIC’10 using the aforementioned promocode.
So what are you waiting for? It’ll be about inspiration, making stuff, meeting new interesting people and chilling-out in Amsterdam all in a very different setup from your typical conference. I bring you an invitation to PICNIC with a special discount and free drinks on Friday evening. What are you bringing?
Click here for more details on the tickets and here for the program highlights. A (growing) list of speakers is available here and I suggest you keep an eye on the news, twitter, facebook or linkedin for the latest updates!
Disclaimer: I’m the marketing manager of PICNIC’10.
A pic from 2009 that gives you a hint on how Drinks at PICNIC might look like
A "Turk" chess machine that inspired the name Mechanical Turk
Compiling, completing and sharing all the relevant links (like twitter and linkedin profiles, personal & company websites, etc) of the speakers and attendees, or performing other long & mechanical tasks for your conference might seem as a particulary time-consuming burden of your event management activities… but not anymore thanks to Amazon’s Mechanical Turk!
Marshall Kirkpatrick (Linkedin, twitter, web), Co-Editor and Vice President of Content Development at ReadWriteWeb, shares how he recently did just that and much more for the TechonomyConference while spending just one night and 50 usd. His tips are especially useful for conference organizers and event bloggers alike.
Let’s say you are going to, or hosting, a conference and you want to make a good impression with the attendees and organizers. One way to do that is to create useful and thoughtful original content and resources regarding the event.
Thanks to tools like Mechanical Turk, Google Custom Search and of course Twitter, you can now do incredible things around conferences that would have been very inefficient to do before.
With the aid of Mechanical Turk Marshall did the following:
A Twitter list of all the conference attendees who use Twitter - for keeping track of what people were saying during the event and stay in touch in the future
A Twitter list of women and a list of people from outside the United States participating in the event – to create a special view into the conversations of some groups of people who can get lost in the noise of the [sometimes homogeneous] audience
A Google Custom Search Engine that searches the archives of all the websites of the organizations the conference attendees work for – as reference for the blogging during the conference
Read the original article, including detailed how-to instructions, here.
Conferences are a totally different beast when it comes to photography. Duncan Davidson (LinkedIn, journal, twitter), the photographer that -amongst other things- has covered the last six major TED events, shares some practical tips that matter when reporting what happens at conference. From equipment that can handle high ISO or high shutter speeds to setting correctly your white balance right from the start, these tricks will help you improve the photos of your next event.
Duncan’s goal as a photographer is to “catch the speakers on the stage and try to communicate a little bit of the emotion in place at the event to those who may not seen it and even for those that have seen it to try to communicate a different viewpoint than they might have had”.
At TED Global 2010 he also used a special camera case to reduce the shutter sound (see photo). This is particularly relevant in events where the sound of the camera’s shutter might become really disturbing, especially during moments of silence.
Duncan Davidson showing his Nikon Ds with a special case to reduce the noise of the shutter
Your vote can take me to SXSW! South by Southwest, the festival dedicated to music, film and interactive technology, gives the opportunity to members of the community to propose panel sessions that will be then exposed to a ponderated voting round by the staff (30% weight on the final decision), the board (40%) and the members themselves (30%).
After my positive experience running the workshop on “The Future of Conferences” at the Lift Conference in Geneva, I decided to up the ante and propose a full session on the new paradigm of conferences which are still governed by solutions to problems from the past.
Until recently, organizing a good event consisted in getting a room, a bunch of speakers and an audience. The scarcity of access to quality or updated content was enough a motivator to make people meet. Now, thanks to the Internet we are meeting (physically) more than ever, but our main drive has changed. The focus has moved to offering a remarkable experience. While content is still important, your event or conference has to also be useful, relevant and/or entertaining.
Event organizers have to bring new abilities to the room and concentrate in the crossroads of interaction design, psychology, technology and customer service. Do you still need a big screen? Do you need to have all the attendees or event the speakers in the same room to generate positive interaction? How important is it to have a functional venue, and iPhone app or offer basic commodities like Internet access, a cheap bag full of meaningless (for the attendee) SWAG or free coffee?
Together we’ll explore some of the challenges and possible solutions to organizing this new breed of events that embrace modern technology and create a new kind of experience.
My presentation aims to answer the following questions:
What has changed in the world of live events?
How can interaction and experience design be applied to live events?
Is content still the supreme driver in live events?
Which constrains from live events have changed and how should we address them?
How to apply technology (Internet, mobile, RFID, etc), social networking and other advancements to events?
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Last June I met Jay Cousins (twitter), a “maker” and member of the collective Open Design City based in the Betahaus in Berlin, who is experimenting with home-cooked bioplastics and different products that can be derived from them. Jay and his group follow the philosophy of Open Design*.
At DMY 2010, the international design festival that [...]
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My friend and South African technology journalist & writer Simon Dingle (web, twitter, facebook) recently tweeted the following:
“Thanks for coming to our event. Here, have a bag of rubbish.” (original tweet here)
How many times have you participated to an expensive or so called high-profile event and during/after it you got a cheap congress bag full [...]
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Bump (web, twitter), the mobile app for Android and iOs mobile platforms, has recently upgraded its service by adding your LinkedIn profile to the information you can share (or “bump”) with other people.
As the official website describes, “Bump is a quick and easy way to connect two phones, simply bump them together. Share contacts [...]
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On July 12-16 2010 TED Global took place in Oxford, UK. The main theme was “And Now the Good News” and it gathered about 700 attendees and more than 60 speakers on the main stage (not including side events).
This was my first “big” TED (so now I ain’t no TED virgin no more!) and in [...]
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A good speech depends on several factors, for sure it’s not enough to invite/hire a good speaker. While she might have good public speaking skills, willingness to engage with the attendees or the [good] habit of practicing her presentation over and over again, some of the variables necessary for success are external to her.
It is [...]
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Mobile ticketing systems have been around for some years but yet were too complicated for attendees and often required a big investment by the event organizer. Both constraints kept them doing things the good ol’ way but as advanced mobile devices (smartphones, tablets, etc) become ubiquitous, the possibility of eliminating paper tickets move closer to [...]
RT @dconstruct: Check in to one of the dConstruct venues on Gowalla to be entered into a free prize draw to win SXSW tickets and an iPad [link]12 hours ago
RT @richardsona: Video of my TEDxTaipei talk about why the world needs more misfits is now up! http://bit.ly/b4aYOz[link]2010/09/01
RT @TEDxTransmedia: Last few seats going for TEDx #transmedia on 30 September - going... going... gone? Register here.. http://bit.ly/ ... [link]2010/09/01
RT @toodrew: RT @FuturEverything: Calls for entries for FutureEverything Award, Festival, EU festivals commission, 4 new jobs http://bit ... [link]2010/08/31
