Why do people go to conferences?

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When organizing a conference of this size it is always nice to hear from people how much they enjoyed the last version and how to improve this years event. In the end it is all about inspiring everybody and make sure that everybody is having a good time.
Kathy Sierra, of Creating passionate users, said at SXSW that people attend conferences because personal contact with like minded people stays important (I believe that personal contact is more important than ever). On a conference there are loads of bloggers, podcasters, twitterers and people making pictures and videos that are online available before you know it, so why would you go to a conference? She asked. Personal contact with peers is one answer, the other answers is the discussion and inspiration of the speakers (and probably another is that your competitor is their as well talking to press and having fun with bloggers, so you cannot not be there).

Some great conferences are out there: Web2.0 Summit, Web2.0 Expo, SXSW, Supernova, FOOA, TED, Where2.0, DEMO, VON, and some 20 others where the whole scene gathers to discuss, inspire and do business.
One problem though… These conferences are all in the US. What do we have in Europe?
FOWA in London, LeWeb in Paris, Reboot in Copenhagen, and The Next Web in Amsterdam (of course).
I believe these conferences are all contributing to the entrepreneurial spirit in Europe on their own way, which is not only a very good thing, but also very necessary. It is great to see people signing up from all over the world (16 countries and counting) to meet each other here in Amsterdam, to get inspired by true visionaries and to do business.

Entrepreneurs, VCs, developers, thought leaders, journalists, bloggers, tech writers, twitterers, looking forward to see you all in 10 weeks.

This entry was posted on March 23, 2007 at 5:34 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.