One of my favorite events last year was Fortune's Brainstorm, a paella of a conference held at the end of June that had a marvelous mix of speakers and attendees. Much smaller than the AspenIdeas Festival that followed it in early July, Brainstorm had the same high quality speakers - in fact, some percentage of overlap with AspenIdeas - with a more intimate audience. But for some reason, Fortune decided not to build on that high-quality platform, and instead this year has given Senior Editor David Kirkpatrick free reign to create a tech event in San Francisco.
iMeme is a first-time conference with a first-rate list of 84 speakers, ranging from the well-known - the CEOs of Cisco, Salesforce.com, Facebook, Qualcomm, Sun, and Real Networks - to the lesser-known, but still stellar: Motorola CTO Padmasree Warrior (one of the smartest and most eloquent technologists I've met), Tesla Motors' Martin Eberhard, Rocky Mountain Institute's Amory Lovins, and Sheryl Sandberg of Google.
Kirkpatrick's given a good overview of the event in his recent newsletter. In the interests of full disclosure, I should probably mention that David is a good friend. But I suppose that should almost go without saying, since I consider most of the producers of the top tech events to be friends, from Demo's Chris Shipley to Supernova's Kevin Werbach to D's Walt Mossberg. That hasn't stopped me from saying where I think these events need to improve, though.
The upside of picking SF, of course, is that its proximity to Silicon Valley means that it's much easier to gain speaker commitments. The downside is that it makes for more of a check-in and check-out event, unlike more the retreat-type atmosphere of the remote tech events in places like southern California and Phoenix. Part of iMeme's challenge will be keeping the audience interested and engaged.
I'll be posting from the Ritz-Carlton in San Francisco starting Thursday morning.
gB
Recent Comments