Wanna Be Practically meshU Family?
We created meshU in 2008 because the community told us they wanted an event that offered hands-on workshops about Web design, development and team management.
The past two years have been terrific with great speakers and an enthusiastic reception from attendees. We’ve also had some great support from sponsors – without which meshU and mesh couldn’t happen.
To support meshU, we’re rolling out a new sponsorship package called “practically meshU family”.
What you get when you join the family is five regular tickets to meshU, your logo on the Web site and at MaRS, and a table-top for your use during the event.
More important, a “practically meshU family” will let us open the student tickets category by 10 more tickets. In essence, you will be sponsoring 10 students who wanted to attend meshU but couldn’t.
This year more than ever before, we’ve received a lot of requests for additional student tickets, but the event can not sustain itself if we open up additional tickets in this substantially discounted category.
That left us thinking that maybe there may be folks in the community that believe in meshU and thought that they could help others so they could benefit from these tickets. Hence, this category was created.
If you’d like to become “practically meshU family”, please contact info@meshconference.com.
Tags: conference, mesh, meshU, sponsorships, students
Posted in meshU | 2 Comments
What’s meshU? Who Should Go?
I had coffee earlier today who someone who told me that she thought the difference between mesh and meshU was that mesh is for adults while meshU is for young’uns looking to learn about technology.
It’s not an accurate description but I embraced it as much-needed constructive criticism given we haven’t done a great job of really explaining meshU and why people should attend. So, here’s meshU in a nutshell:
We started meshU in 2008 after getting a lot of requests from mesh attendees to create an event that would deliver hands-on workshops about new ways to design and develop Web sites, as well as insight into how to manage teams developing and designing these services and applications.
The workshops at meshU are led by some of the Web’s best and brightest people. These are people who are talking the talk and walking the walk. They are people starting and building leading-edge Web sites and online businesses, which means they bring real-world insight and experience to the table.
This makes meshU is a place where attendees can walk away with new insight, knowledge and information about how to do their jobs better, more efficiently and more successfully.
If you’ve been to meshU before, there’s a lot of discussion happening and a healthy amount of note-taking.
Here are the top reasons to attend meshU:
1. Gain insight and knowledge from people such as Bill Buxton (our keynote speaker) Joe Stump, Dan Martell, Sean Ellis and Isaac Garcia – knowledge that you can bring back to the office and put into action right away.
2. Build new relationships with people within Toronto’s Web community who are developing and designing services and applications, or managing teams making it happen.
3. Support meshU, and its role in providing workshops that provide a different and unique perspective.
Here’s where you can buy meshU tickets. If you’d like to support meshU by sponsoring, you can contact Stuart MacDonald at info@meshconference.com.
Tags: bill buxton, conference, meshU, Toronto, workshops
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meshU Speaker Spotlight: Dan Martell
At the meshmarketing conference last October, Dan Martell rocked the house with a presentation on how to build Web sites that convert into business. We were so impressed that we asked him back for meshU, a one-day event for Web designer, developers and entrepreneurs that happens on May 17 in Toronto.
Dan, a Canadian living in Silicon Valley who co-founded Flowtown.com, will be doing a workshop on “Lean Lean Product Development: Learning is the Killer Feature”.
Here’s a summary of what he’s going to cover:
“In todays world of open source, cheap computing power and APIs, it’s not if you can build it, but should you build it. The #1 startup killer is running out of time to “figure it out” before you get traction. Lean product development is the methodology that allowed companies like PayPal, Yelp, Ardvark and up and coming Flowtown.com (profitable in two months) to pivot into their market to become a dominate player.
There is a science behind the approach and in this talk I’ll go over customer development, feature prioritization, split testing, product metrics and agile development as approaches to increase your probabilities of succeeding as a startup.”
Dan is just one of the great speakers we’ve lined up for meshU, including our keynote speaker, Bill Buxton. For more information about the event, visit meshu.ca. Here’s where you can buy tickets.
Tags: conference, dan martell, flowtown, mesh, meshU
meshU Speaker Spotlight: Sean Ellis
When the opportunity to have Sean Ellis do a workshop at meshu presented itself, let’s just say we were stoked.
Sean is extremely well-respected within the start-up community and his blog, Startup Marketing Blog, has a large following.
Ellis just doesn’t talk the talk; he also walks the walk. His resume includes leading the marketing from launch to IPO at LogMeIn and Uproar. He also helped bring the popular Xobni service to market as its interim VP, Marketing.
Sean is now founder and principal at 12in6 Inc., which has helped startups such as Dropbox, Eventbrite and Lookout (Khosla Ventures) transition to high growth companies.
Sean is one of the four people doing workshops within the meshU management stream. If you’re a startup, and looking for insight and advice on how to go from zero to 60, you’ll definitely want to catch Sean’s workshop.
Here’s where you can purchase tickets to meshU.
Sean Ellis at Lean Startup Circle Meeting from David Binetti on Vimeo.
Tags: mesh, meshU, sean ellis, startups
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Bill Buxton to Keynote meshU
For the last couple of years, meshU has been a well-kept secret – a one-day event featuring hands-on workshop about Web design, development and team management.
We hope to change meshU’s low profile by introducing meshU’s inaugural keynote speaker, Bill Buxton.
One of the world’s most influential designers, Bill is currently a Principal researcher at Microsoft Research and the author of “Sketching User Experiences: Getting the Design Right and the Right Design”.
His experience also includes time as a researcher at Xerox PARC, a professor at the University of Toronto, and Chief Scientist of Alias Research and SGI Inc.
We’re really excited that Bill will be meshU’s first keynote, and that he will set the stage for an amazing day.
If you’re looking buy meshU tickets, you can register here.
Tags: bill buxton, keynote, mesh, meshU
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Why Mike McDerment’s Stoked About meshU
I’m excited – let me just put that out there.
I’ve spent the past seven years building FreshBooks (a Web business), and the past five years involved as one of the organizers of the mesh conference series. Over the past three years, I have also played a key part in organizing mesh University (or meshU, a one-day conference for people who want to learn more about building online businesses.
So why am I excited? Let me tell you about this year’s meshU line-up.
First, there are three important component you have to get right when building an online business: the design, development and management (of things like sales and marketing). This year, meshU will be hosting top-notch talent – people have helped build kick-ass Web apps. You may not have heard of them all but you don’t want to miss out on what they have to say.
Building a dev team? Who better to learn from than the chief architect who took Digg from nothing to something – Joe Stump, who just struck out on this own.
What about low cost marketing activities to acquire users? Have you heard of services such as Box.net, Xobni, or logmein? These services are all known for having touch-less sales cycles, and many are using freemium products. As well, they are among the most successful products that aren’t called Google, Yahoo!, Facebook or Twitter.
I’ll bet you didn’t know that one person had key role in making all these products viral by helping to design their registration processes: Sean Ellis. Don’t miss your chance to learn from Sean.
While we’re on the topic of sales, let me tell you about one of my favorite entrepreneurs. He’s hugely successful and you’ve probably never heard of him. He’s Isaac Garcia, the founder and CEO of Central Desktop, a massively successful online project management service. You may not know about Central Desktop but Isaac has built one hellevua business that’s based on profitable high growth. He’s going to teach you how to run an inside sales team. For any venture capitalists out there, get your portfolio companies to this one.
This is the first installment of the meshU lineup. It’s just the tip of the iceberg as we haven’t put the spotlight on the designers coming. Please pass along this post along to anyone you know who wants to build a Web business. At $289, meshU is a steal for this kind of high-quality content – get your ticket now.
Tags: isaac garcia, joe stump, meshU, sean ellis, Toronto
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Thanks!
With a few days of sleep under our collective belts, we – Mark, Rob, Stuart, Mathew and Mike – would like to thank everyone for making mesh ‘09 and meshU ‘09 such great events.
We want to thank attendees for their enthusiasm, energy, curiosity and willingness to participate. As much as we spend a lot of time trying to come up with great content, it’s what our attendees bring to the table that makes mesh so amazing.
We want to thank all of our speakers for their time and effort. From top to bottom, we were impressed with your enthusiasm and generosity in spending so much time engaging with everyone.
A big thank you to all of our sponsors such as Microsoft, Edelman, CIRA and CNW. mesh couldn’t happen without you. Thanks to Sandra MacDonald for all your work with our sponsors.
Thanks to our volunteers for helping make everything run so smoothly.
Thanks to everyone at MCC Planners, particularly the amazing and tireless Sheri Moore, for making mesh and meshU run so seamlessly.
Thanks to our technology partners – mDialog, FileMobile, Sweet Caesar, Viigo, Rypple and Flip – for delivering tools and services that made the mesh experience that much better.
Thanks to Roz Allen and Mark McKay (and Stuart Macdonald!) for doing such an amazing job filming, editing and posting so much video.
Thanks to MaRS and Allen Gelberg for being such a great hosts.
Last, but not least, thanks to our wives, partners and children for being so supportive, patient and understanding!
If you have feedback on what you liked about mesh, what could be improved and new things you would like to see, you can do it here.
Day 2 Feedback Links
We received some great feedback yesterday (via Rypple) during and after the first day of mesh.
If you haven’t left feedback, it’s easy. All you do is click on one of the links below. You’ll then see a page where you can leave your thoughts about a particular speaker. The feedback gives us a better idea of what you liked, what you didn’t like, what worked, what needs to be improved, etc. All this information will help us make mesh better.
Keynotes
Paul Kedrosky/Howard Lindzon
Bonin Bough
David Miller
Panels
Managing Your Ad Buy
Managing Your Online Persona
The Benefits and Risks of Building for a Platform
Boostrapping a Startup
Managing a Community
Using Online Word of Mouth
Workshops
Social Media Analytics
Legal Bootcamp for Web Startups
Search Engine Marketing
How to Integrate Social Media into Your Marketing Plan
Tags: feedback, mesh, meshU, rypple
Posted in mesh09 | 4 Comments
We’d Love Some Feedback
We’d love to get your feedback about the keynotes, panels and workshops – what you liked, what you would have wanted to see more of/less of, what worked, what didn’t, etc.
We’re using Rypple, a cool local start-up that has a user-friendly service that makes leaving feedback a snap. To provide feedback, we’ve created a different URL for each keynote, speaker and workshop. All you need to do is visit one of the URLs below:
Keynotes
Mike Masnick
Jessica Jackley
Panels
David Usher
Hyper-Local Media
Future of the News
Using the Web for Good
Workshops
Professionalizing Pro-Video
The Nuts & Bolts of iTunes
Social Media for Non-Profits
Monetizing Media
Social Media 101
Using Social Media for Social Good
mesh on iTunes
Behind the scenes, mDialog has been working on a cool service that will let you watch mesh videos on your iPod, iPod Touch and iPhone.
The application just got listed on iTunes, and you can download it here. You can also get the high-def mesh video podcast here.
Tags: itunes, mdialog, mesh, meshU
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