unConference 2009: Heads up, what’s new, what’s different, what do you want..

Mar

11

posted by Mohan Belani on Wednesday, March 11, 2009 at 5:20pm Categories: Blog

We’re currently working on unConference 2009 that is slated to happen on 16th May. It will be a full day event, much longer than the last one, taking place from 9am till 6+pm. Last year, we took a slightly different approach by combining an exhibition, keynote presentation, user generated breakout sessions and startup pitches. While we received good feedback for this arrangement, we also got a lot of constructive feedback on how we could further improve the breakout sessions, make the scedule more flexible and improve the pitching sessions. And of course, people wanted to see much more new startups! We listened to all the feedback, brainstormed and came up with an improved version this year. While it still ain’t perfect and needs a lot more tweaking, bear with us and provide us with more feedback so that we can all have the best unConference so far.

Here’s a quick snapshot on what’s different from last year and this year.

Keynote Session
unConference 2008: We had a sponsored keynote session by Microsoft. The speaker talked about marketing and some cool stuff Microsoft was working on.
unConference 2009: This time round, we’re planning on flying in a speaker from overseas. Someone who understands web technology and has a global (or maybe regional) perspective on what’s happening with the web scene, trends developing in the various regions (like how China has been booming with virtual goods and USA is still lagging behind) etc.

Breakout Sessions
unConference 2008: We had 6 breakout sessions in total. They were sporadic and topics were all over the place. Feedback for this was that more breakout sessions could have been catered for and some congruence in the topics would have been good too.
unConference 2009: This time round, we’re catering for much more sessions, more than 10 hopefully, if we can find them! We’re trying to group sessions together such that there’s an overall theme. This may be difficult but we will try our best. You can access the breakout application form and start posting your sessions now.

Startups Pitching
unConference 2008: We received all sorts of feedback for this. Some really good, some really bad. Some attendees felt that it was a great platform for startups as it allowed them to reach out to a large audience and receive dedicated attention all at once. However, others felt that the startups were not ready and the session was too draggy. We agree with both sides.
unConference 2009: We’re changing it slightly this time round. We haven’t fully decided if we’re going to open the pitching session to all startups, but we’re pretty sure that we’re not scraping this section out completely. This time round, we’re having the startup pitching as a separate sessions where attendees interested in the pitches can go view them, while the rest engage in the exhibition etc. We hope this will cater to the various interests and will give attendees more freedom on what they want to engage in.

Exhibition
unConference 2008: This was probably everyone’s favorite part. Everyone loved the startups featured, nothing bad here :)
unConference 2009: We’re taking a bold step forward this time round. We’re trying to reach out, not just to local startups, but to regional startups as well. And this time round, we’re increasing the numbers to 30! We hope to get as much quality applications as possible. We can’t do this along and we need your help, so keep your eyes open for the good one. Startups interested in the exhibition (no fees) can apply here.

So what else is there?
1) We’re bringing in case studies this time, maybe 2 sessions. We believe that its important for startups to share how they did something important (it can be good or bad), so we’re working with startups (or ex startups cuz we’re not discounting those who have failed) who have an interesting case to share with the attendees.
2) We’re trying to see how to liven it up a bit so we may introduce a music element. More on this as we firm up the details
3) Deeper schedule that allows more choice with more tracks and options (keynotes, breakouts, case studies, pitches, exhibition).
4) What else would you like to see that we may have missed out? Send me your feedback!

Interested in hosting a breakout session (no sales pitches please)? Send us your application now!
Got a startup that you want to exhibit? Do it right now!
Any other feedback? Send me your feedback!
Wanna volunteer and be part of the community team? Let’s chat!

We’re still working on the website so as soon as it’s up, we will update all of you on it. :)

We’re looking forward to this and we hope you are too.

7 Responses to “unConference 2009: Heads up, what’s new, what’s different, what do you want..”

IGDA Malaysia Chapter » Unconference 2009: Calling all Startups/Projects said :

[...] More information here. http://www.e27.sg/2009/03/11/unconference-2009-heads-up-whats-new-whats-different-what-do-you-want/ [...]

- April 1st, 2009 at 10:03 pm
Arul Prasad said :

Nice chat, that one.
Btw – “fusion Garage is a true example, but they had their roots way back in 2002. ”

I beg to disagree. Fusiongarage was born in Feb 2008 – After about a month or so of discussions at McDonalds and BurgerKings. The founder might have worked on another startup back in 2002, but we also had an architect, who had been in the industry for 25 or so years. Does that mean we had our roots in the 80’s ?

Most probably am gonna be there as well. Will c ya there!

This comment was originally posted on Armchair Theorist

- May 13th, 2009 at 7:43 pm
Neng Giin said :

One-up for the Team!

This comment was originally posted on Armchair Theorist

- May 13th, 2009 at 7:45 pm
Jon said :

Thanks for dropping by, Arul! It’s been a while since RIAction.

See you at unConference!

This comment was originally posted on Armchair Theorist

- May 13th, 2009 at 9:44 pm
Mohan said :

Nice one there!

@Arul: I had a nice chat with Chandra some time back on Fusion Garage etc. When I said “they had their roots way back in 2002″, I was referring to Chandra’s passion in OS and mobile. He had been tinkering with the idea of a “browser without an OS” way before Fusion Garage, in the early days of Radixs. It’s through iterations of ideas, testing and failing etc. that finally brought him to Fusion Garage (which kinda happened by accident too.. hehe) and how all this started way back in the Radixs days..

This comment was originally posted on Armchair Theorist

- May 14th, 2009 at 12:33 am
Abi said :

Nice interview.

Honestly, why does it matter if gothere.sg (which is definitely the best startup in Singapore, IMO, for many different definitions of best) cannot scale to other countries? It doesn’t matter. As DHH from 37 Signals points out in this wonderful talk[1], you don’t have to sell for a billion dollars to be successful or more importantly, happy. You can be just as happy with a million dollars a year and no VCs forcing you to have an exit strategy. Singapore alone is big enough to sustain one really good player in the “mapping market”. And I think gothere.sg can definitely scale to other countries (albeit with a lot of data collection and other work) but obviously, they don’t see the need to yet. Mapping is an exciting field and even big companies like Google or Microsoft haven’t figured out a half-decent interface yet.

[1] http://www.omnisio.com/startupschool08/david-heinemeier-hansson-at-startup-school-08

This comment was originally posted on Armchair Theorist

- May 14th, 2009 at 11:13 pm
Jon said :

@Abi, I think then the central question really is, “Can Singapore alone really be big enough to sustain one really good player in the mapping/online directory market?”

While you may think so, I think many like myself and Mohan will feel otherwise. (Of course, none of us are actually in the mapping industry, so we are all talking out of our ass )

But seriously, remember the days before gothere.sg ? Streetdirectory.com was the de facto online directory for Singapore with practically zero competion. And while their product may not be as elegant as what we see gothere.sg is today, it was pretty decent and very usable.

Even then, they saw an immediate need to diversify into a bunch of other stuff like real estate listings, classified listings, and expanded overseas into Malaysia and Indonesia.

The point is, we may be overestimating how much money is there to be made in online mapping – I mean, this is an area where not even Google nor Microsoft is able to fully monetize yet. And these are international players with a presence in every country.

Much less if you restrict yourself to a market of 4.6 million people covering only a land area of 700 square kilometers.

This comment was originally posted on Armchair Theorist

- May 15th, 2009 at 12:10 am