360Conferences is heading to MAX

Well, me and John are going. Since we're the only employees in the venture, that means 360Conferences will be at MAX!

Luckily we bought our tickets early so the Sold Out-ness won't prevent our arrival. I'm actually speaking Monday and Wednesday on "Intro to Flex". Feel free to stop by and harass me. Otherwise, you can meet up with us on Wednesday night. We're planning a dinner where we'll yap about future 360Flex events and the upcoming RIACommunity.com site. We have lots of exciting news on both fronts. Drop a line to info@360flex.com if you want the scoop on the dinner location and time.

Ted has been hyping this as a turnaround for MAX. I surely hope he delivers on this promise of more community and developer driven stuff. John and I can't wait to see what our former conference cohort is doing with a conference that's just a ted (sic) bigger than 360Flex. :)

I'm looking forward to the Anatole, Joe and Steven "No Holds Barred" panel. A Russian, a Scot and a Bostonian all in the ring at the same time. How can it not be good? Pulling all sorts of crazy design patterns and framework goodness. There'll be free beer at MAX. My money is on the Scot for drinking them under. I may wear my kilt to show support!

John said he wanted to move into the AIRBus and we might try to hijack it. Don't tell anyone though. John made the key mold at the Denver stop. He'll be the lookout and I'll take the wheel. All I gotta say is if you hear the horn, get outta da way!

See you in Chicago! Rumor has it that roughly 70 360Flex'ers bought MAX tix with the discount code. So you 70 best say hi to us!

360Flex Europe...can't wait? Check out FlexCamp Italia!

Can't wait until early April for your Flex fix in Milan? Are you local (as local as you get in Europe) to Milan? Then why not go to the FlexCamp Italia on 19th October 2007?

It's going to be small and intimate, just like 360Conferences like it. Granted it's going to be really small, since it's capped at 50 registrations. However, check out the people you get to hang out with for the day.


Matt Chotin (Product Manager Flex)
Ted Patrick (Flex Evangelist)
Ivan Zambanello (Mars Spider)
Jaco Pixeldump (pixeldump.org)
Giorgio Natili (flex-developers.org)
David Wadhwani (VP Flex Engineering)

Heck, if you're east coast and want to hang with those 3 all day and chat Flex. It may well be worth the trip. Plus, you'll know your way around when 360|Flex Europe rolls into Milan.

360Flex recap, money, transparency

If you've missed the other times we've said it, "We're all about transparency... there's nothing we won't share with the community." Conferences shouldn't be a black box where those in attendance cough up a ton of money, and get X number of chochkies back, plus a badge, and a shirt, and go home. Conferences don't need to cost $1,500.

So before we start up in full swing for Italy, and East Coast (City, still TBD) we wanted to post a sort of wrap up on Seattle. If you were there, you saw the Wednesday Keynote, if not, here's some of what you missed.

First, what came in:
Sponsors: $56,000 (You guys rock, can't wait to work with you again)
Attendee registrations: $ 83,000 (what can we say? This is for you!)
Total: $139,000

What went out:

Food: $94,000 (it was yummy too)

• Sample cost - Soda: $4.25 each (How many have you had? And did you finish them?)

A/V: $27,000

• Sample cost - Power: $2,400 for three rows in each room

Conference Materials: $15,900

• Sample cost - Shirts: $8,000 (But they sure were nice)
  

Incidentals: $5,000

• Sample cost - Temps: $2,500 (Those surveys are worth that much and more)
  

Total: $149,900

Net Loss: $10K

That's only a few highlights... The point is things cost money. We have no problem spending it to make our events kick ass, but we gotta spend it wisely.

You can see that (right now) 360|Flex isn't a money maker. We're okay with that. We're approaching conferences as we would a project, iteratively. What didn't work last time isn't repeated. What did work, gets improved. Costs get refactored, trimmed and reworked.

So what did we learn?

1. WiFi at conferences is whack. We knew that going in, we tried to fix it, hopefully it was at least more usable than at most other conferences. We're still working on it. We're thinking we may need to invest in our own gear, since hotels swear they'll be able to handle it and then really can't.
2. Nice shirts are sweet, but really should have a sponsor to offset costs.
3. We're looking at purchasing some A/V equipment to offset costs. $24K to walk away with nothing? That's a bit whack.
   

We know of other developer events (no longer being held) that lost over $100K per show. Other bigger events lose between a quarter of a million to a million dollars per show. Yeah, 1 million clams... Not only do we think that's retarded, but we promise that never has been or will be our goal (Not the losing 1 mil, the doing an event that even COULD lose 1 mil).

There you have it.

Attendees, this is where your $360 went. Thanks for coming

Sponsors, this is where your money went. Thank you for your support, since without you guys, our little conference would not be possible.

360Flex had BlueString before Techcrunch

In case you wondered what our "BlueString" lanyards were all about, click the links below:

http://www.news.com/8301-10784_3-9778736-7.html?tag=more
http://www.techcrunch.com/2007/09/17/aol-launches-bluestring/

We coulda one up'd Arrington, but we didn't want to steal the poor guy's thunder. Therefore, we told AOL to go ahead and wait 'til Techcrunch40 to launch. Alright, so maybe AOL decided that, but in our minds...that's how we remember it. :)

It's awesome to see a behemoth company like AOL embracing Flex. Here's a little more info on what they're up to:

We are getting ready to release more applications into the wild on the AIR platform as well as a Flex 3 based version. BlueString will have an AIR version in the near future and a lite version of the Xdrive management tool in AIR will probably be out before that. We are presenting at FITC "Concepts on AIR" where we hope to show off two main concepts; our idea of an AIR platform for the Storage Service Provider (SSP) arena and what we think will be the first Flex based enterprise application talking to an AIR application.

There you have it. And you thought BlueString was just a silly name for our lanyards. :)

360Flex bids farewell to Big Larry

In case you haven't heard, "Big" Larry Snyder from Midnight coders has passed away. For those of you that visited the exhibit hall or were in the Grand Hall when we gave away a WebORB license, you'll remember Larry. He was the "wise" gentleman with the winning smile and infectious friendly attitude.

When you start a business, you always wonder what kind of folks you're going to meet. I'm lucky to say that we've worked with nothing but quality people so far; People who have integrity and heart. Larry had the biggest amount of each of those. He struck me as the kind of guy who'd take you on your word and a handshake. More importantly, you'd want to keep your word and handshake just to not let down Larry's faith in humanity.

I used to work with my grandpa growing up. I spent Saturdays helping him run his lawn care business. One day, I showed up dragging my feet with a lazy attitude. My grandpa told me, "If you feel lazy, don't come to work. If you act lazy, you bring everyone else down." From that day forward, I went to work with a smile and an earnest desire to get things done. I can tell, just by the few days I spent with him, that Larry not only shared that attitude but lived it out to its fullest.

Larry, it was a pleasure meeting you. Hopefully, you'll keep on eye on us from your well-earned spot up above. Keep us honest and keep us friendly. We'll miss you.

360Flex Video Downloads: First batch is up

Did you have some tough choices to make? Mike Morearty or Doug Schmidt? Mansour Raad or Mark Piller?

Well, the second guessing of your choices can come to an end :)

We promised video downloads of the sessions, and we're ready to start delivering. Bryan Zug, the camera man in Emerald I (the big room), has been hard at work, transcoding, thiscoding, and thatcoding so that each video is viewable, and not super huge.

We're still working on getting the videos up. It's a slow process, but we've got a few up, and more will be coming almost over time.

Check out the 360Conferences Cruxy download site.

Each video is under the Creative Commons Attribution license. We don't believe in DRM, and we think people (for the most part) do the right thing. If you want to download a session and hand it out to all your friends, feel free. However it'd be nice if that didn't happen, since the money from video sales don't just line our pockets. In fact, the fee for each session download is split among us, the session speaker, the provider, and Bryan, our videographer (who did all the recording, encoding, etc for FREE).

So don't be a punk, and hand out the session videos. If you do have a dev team though and would like a bulk purchase, there will be a "bulk" option soon. It's the same download as the "single" but gives you the right to share it with up to 10 people. If you want more than 10 licenses, drop us a line at info@360flex.com to work out a rate. Obviously a 100+ team gets a different rate than a 10+ team. Or if you feel the need to give more for a session, feel free to paypal some money to payment@360flex.com and put the speakers name in the subject. (You may need to do that for any entries that don't have the "Bulk" listing yet.)

Single session download prices:
Single User License - $3.60
Bulk 10-User License - $13.60

If you have special requests for the order on which you want them uploaded, drop a note in the comments. We'll try to put the most requested ones up first.

360Flex Milan Update

Planning for Milan is already well underway, and our short list of venues is getting shorter very quickly. We'll have one locked down pretty fast. After that, the hard part starts, putting on a better event than Seattle. :)

9/1 registration didn't happen, because the whole of Italy is on holiday in August. (We kinda didn't realize that when we gave the 9/1 deadline). We wouldn't register for an event without a venue or confirmed dates, so we don't expect you to. Milan registration will open on 10/1 with our locked down hotel and dates.

Update: For Jesse and the rest of you planning to come from the States, we're shooting for early April.