mesh video from Mark Mckay
Video whiz and all-around wild and crazy guy Mark Mckay, who won our mesh 2007 video contest and wound up doing a bunch of video for us last year, came out to a recent mesh meetup at the Irish Embassy and has put together a great little highlight reel for us (and if you haven’t got your ticket for mesh or meshU, you’d better get cracking — they’re going fast!).
Thanks a lot to Mark and to Rob Manne and the other folks at Edelman.
Tags: conference, mesh, mesh2008
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mesh meetup and meshU student tix
One quick reminder and one update on meshU:
The quick reminder is that we’re having a mesh meetup at the Irish
Embassy tonight (April 21) starting at about 7:30, so swing on by if
you’re in town and get some pre-mesh socializing in — the snacks are
on us.
The update about meshU is that we’re releasing a batch of 25
discount-priced ($30) student tickets for the day-long workshop event (more
info at the meshU site), so if you’re studying Web
design or development or programming or anything along those lines –
or know someone who is — be sure to book a ticket soon, because they
will probably go quickly.
To be honest, offering student tickets was something we meant to do
from the beginning, but it kind of slipped through the cracks during
all the planning of mesh and meshU — thanks to a number of our
friends and fans for calling us on it. We think it’s a great way of
giving back to the community, and helping the young Web developers and
designers of tomorrow.
mesh on!
Posted in mesh news, meshU | 3 Comments
New meshU speakers and sessions: John Lax and Kevin Hale
The details of speakers and sessions for meshU continue to develop, and some great stuff has gone up on the site over the past few days. We’re very pleased to announce that John Lax of Teehan+Lax and Kevin Hale of Infinity Box (the mad geniuses behind Wufoo) are now locked and loaded - details on the site, and we’ll be saying more about these sessions soon.
I’m excited about everything we have coming up, but meshU is really starting to take shape and it’ll be a blast. Nice words from John about the lineup: “I am planning on doing something really special for the presentation because, to be honest, I am totally intimidated by the other speakers.” Join us! Tickets are on sale here.
Tags: Infinity Box, John Lax, Kevin Hale, mesh, mesh08, meshU, Teehan Lax, Wufoo
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mesh08 keynote: Garrett Camp of StumbleUpon
A quick update to let everyone know that Garrett Camp, one of the founders of StumbleUpon, is coming to mesh 2008 as our keynote speaker for the business stream (you can see the other keynotes here, as well as some of the other great speakers and panelists we have lined up). We’re pretty excited to be able to bring one of Canada’s leading Web entrepreneurs to Toronto for one of mesh’s “keynote conversations.”
Garrett co-founded StumbleUpon in 2001 with several university friends while he was finishing his degree in software engineering at the University of Calgary. He and a couple of the other members of the StumbleUpon team later moved to San Francisco after getting venture financing, and last year the company was acquired by eBay for $75-million. Garrett is still responsible for StumbleUpon’s product design and strategy, and the service has more than 3.5M members.
mesh on!
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CommunityLend.com Gets Fresh Coat of Paint
Only time will tell whether Canadians embrace peer-to-peer lending as enthusiastically as consumers in the U.K. and the U.S. but Toronto-based CommunityLend’s new and improved Web site is impressive - clean, sharp, easy to navigate. Given that educating consumers is going to be a significant challenge, CommunityLend’s Web site will clearly be an important marketing and sales.
We’re excited that Michael Garrity, CommunityLend’s co-founder, president and CEO, will be participating at mesh one of our marketing panels. Given his experience, which includes being vice-president of sales and marketing with ePost, Mike is sure to provide some valuable insight.
Tags: CommunityLend, mesh
Everything old is new again
Our web guru Jeff Sarmiento has put together a sweet page of resources from past mesh events. It’s such a nice job I can’t help writing about it. We had a lot of fun in 2006 and 2007 - it’s great to have a quick way to connect to those memories. More links to video etc. will be going up on the page soon. Nice job, Jeff!
Tags: Jeff Sarmiento, mesh, mesh06, mesh07
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mesh Tickets Selling Like Hotcakes
Tickets for this year’s mesh conference have only been on sale for a week but more than 100 have been snapped up. Sure, mesh is still seven weeks away but the early bird catches the worm while the bird who waits until the last minute is often disappointed.
You can purchase your mesh tickets here, while tickets for meshU - our new workshop, hands-on event featuring speakers such as Pownce’s Leah Culver and Digg’s Daniel Burka, can be bought here.
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It’s time again for 15 minutes of fame
Now that mesh tickets are on sale, we’d like to get an early start on 15 Minutes of Fame, the mesh session that introduces you to web entrepreneurs and their startups. On each of the two conference days we do a 15 minute segment with three deserving entrepreneurs and/or their startups, who get five minutes each (hence the 15 minutes) to talk to the attendees about their idea and why they are the best thing to happen to the Web. Last year’s winners were Octopz, DemoFuse, FiveLimes, Conceptshare, SneakerPlay and Wild Apricot - there’s video, too.
Head over to the sign-up form and make your pitch — in 250 words or less — about you and your company or idea, and tell us why we should give you five minutes in front of the mesh crowd. If you get selected, you get a free one-day pass to the conference as well as those five minutes of glory. Of course, past winners aren’t eligible, and you must be this big to apply.
Posted in 15MOF, mesh news, mesh08 news | 1 Comment
Time to get your mesh on!
Despite a distinct lack of spring weather in Toronto at the moment, there’s definitely something in the air — and it’s the warmth of an approaching mesh conference! A lot of people have been emailing and Facebook messaging and Twittering and so on in recent weeks, asking us when we were going to launch mesh 2008 and start selling tickets, and the answer is: Right now.
Hopefully you have the dates (May 21st and 22nd) blocked out in your calendar, and now is your chance to lock up those tickets. The sales window is open, and tickets are $469 each, which we at mesh humbly believe is pretty competitive for a two-day Web conference. We’ve also expanded the number of student tickets to 30 this year, so that more students can mesh with us.
Right now, we can tell you about several keynotes: author Matt Mason, whose new book The Pirate’s Dilemma looks at the implications of digital piracy; Club Penguin co-founder Lane Merrifield, a Canadian who helped build a virtual world for children that was bought by Disney for $350-million; and Ethan Kaplan, the head of technology at Warner Brothers Records, who is intimately involved in the evolution of the modern music industry.
We also have some great panelists and other speakers lined up as well, including University of Toronto philosopher and author Mark Kingwell; the CEO and founder of Techdirt, Mike Masnick; media blogger Rachel Sklar from The Huffington Post; digital-copyright expert Michael Geist; Internet researcher Nancy Baym; the founder of RedFlagDeals.com, Derek Szeto, Blip.tv founder Dina Kaplan, CommunityLend CEO Michael Garrity, Agoracom founder George Tsiolis and a host of others. We’ll be adding more as we get closer to the conference, so be sure to keep checking the site for new names and photos.
As mentioned before, we’ve also added a new feature to mesh this year called meshU, a full day of hands-on workshops and panels for startups, web designers and developers of all kinds. It’s on May 20th, the day before mesh. We’ve got some great speakers and workshop leaders lined up for meshU as well — including Avi Bryant of DabbleDB, Pownce founder Leah Culver, Ryan Carson and John Resig. For more details and a link to where you can buy tickets, check out the meshU site.
Mesh on!
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Book those mesh 2008 dates, and get ready for meshU
Has it been eight months already since mesh 2007? According to the calendar, it has - and yet, it seems like just yesterday we were meshing with Mike Arrington, Jim Buckmaster, Richard Edelman, Tom Williams, Austin Hill and an atrium full of eager participants at the MaRS centre (there are pics here if you want to check them out).
We’ve been getting bombarded with emails about this year’s conference, with many of those coming from people wanting to block the dates out in their calendars. So without further ado, here they are: mesh 2008 is scheduled for May 21 and 22. Info on ticket prices, keynotes, panelists etc. will be coming soon. So book those dates!
In addition to mesh, we’re also planning a little something extra - something we think (and hope) will meet a growing need in Toronto: the need for practical, down-to-earth information about tools, knowledge and expertise for startups, web designers and developers of all kinds.
What we have in mind is a one-day event - which we’re tentatively calling meshU - that will be filled with small, focused workshops by those who have earned their stripes in the startup game; people who can talk knowledgeably about everything from interface design to using Amazon’s S3 distributed server network.
This one-day event - which is scheduled for May 20th, the day before mesh - will be taking shape over the next few months, and we’re hoping you can help program it by telling us what kind of content you want and/or need.
Got an idea for a panel? Let us know. Have an expert you think would lead a great hands-on workshop? We’re all ears. Post a comment here or send an email to stuart@meshconference.com and let us know what you have in mind. More info coming soon on workshop leaders, ticket prices, etc.
Mesh on!
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