Event Blogging at WebInnovation08-Experience

It was a good experience attending webInnovation 08 at Mumbai this week (8th May 2008). Live blogging the event was even greater experience.

Live blogging was a good new experience for me. Enjoyed every bit of it. But there were some challenges too- the conference room didn’t have any power points where I could charge my laptop. It is impossible to live blog whole day on battery- I had two of them- a 4 cell one and another 6 cell one, together I could manage for half a day and by charging during lunch time I could extend life of laptop for some more time post lunch. Still, if Hotel could have provided electric sockets (which I asked but they said they don’t have) it would have been good. Tata Indicom Plug2Surf was performing decently during initial hours but post lunch the connectivity was very bad. Because of these limitations and because the fact that I had to take down notes while speaker is speaking, I had to sideline several activities like approving comments, editing/improving posts etc.

Below: Myself with Kaushal Karkhanis, fellow event blogger.About the event: As I was a sponsored delegate probably I am not supposed to speak negative, but don’t want to suppress my observations. Participation was good, but many speakers were from companies that had sponsored the event. That happens with all the events- you can’t deny 10-15 minutes of presentation time for companies who have shelled out lakhs of rupees to sponsor the event. But a delegate who has paid Rs 7000 is, in all probability, won’t be interested in attending advertisement sessions of products/services being promoted by the sponsors (as the information will be available on the company website, why should one pay to attend such sessions?). Nevertheless, most of the sessions were good-the one on raising VC money by Bikas Birai of iViZ, on demysitifying the web 2.0 by Amit Somani of Google India, about email marketing by Dominic Powers were personally interesting to me.

Don't know what happened at other 2 tracks. In this event there were three tracks- Business, Technology and Enterpreneurship, all running parallelly. Since I cant be in 3 places at once, I chose to attend Business track. Don’t have much idea what happened at other 2. There were supposed to be 6 event bloggers (me one of them) but I guess only 2-3 turned up. Only Myself and Kaushal live blogging and Siddig live twittering the event. As 3 tracks ran parallelly, any delegate is guaranteed to miss 2/3rd of the event. If organizers can arrange for transcripts of the talks given by other speakers to all delegates it would be good.

The event didn’t get much visibility in print media- I was in Mumbai airport next morning and couldn’t notice event reported in any of the leading papers- DNA, Indian Express, Free Press, BusinessLIne and Asian Age. Infact Yahoo launched its new gen search features "GLUE" in WebInnovation 08 event but they held a press conference in Bangalore to release this news, so all papers reported this launch, but without any mention of the webinnovation08 event. Would have been good if Yahoo could hold the press con in Grand Hyatt, Mumbai (where the event was going on)

I spent most of my time listening to speakers at the Business Track, noting down key points and publishing it as a blog post next moment. Now I feel it would have walked around and interviewed few people as well. Will try this next time.

Right-with Kiruba Shankar at the event-He giving admin rights to us so that we can approve comments that were pouring in on the event blog site.
I wish to thank Kiruba Shankar and other organizers for this opportunity (of contributing as an event blogger). In fact I was answerable to two stake holders in this-The organizers of Webinnovation who invited me with a complementary registration for which I was required to live blog the event and another stakeholder who has provided travel and accommodation, to whom I had to take back some value out of the summit. Hope I will be able to meet their expectations.

The conference bag sponsored by WebEx was good.

Be sure to watch this video on start-ups

Event ended a bit ahead of schedule and I could go for a drive around Mumbai City.

Update: I mailed Kiruba seeking some feedback on my work, so that I can identify where I can improve next time. Seems he is too busy to respond. It doesn't feel good when you're denied some basic feedback on your work.

Related: Manipal Media Students Convention * Mumbai visit-Other observations