About three years ago, Rashmi Sinha and her husband Jonathan Boutelle, along with Amit Ranjan, started a company that was going to let users share PowerPoint presentations over the Internet, much in the same way as YouTube gave people an easy way to share videos. I was skeptical of their service, SlideShare, and chose to ignore it. Boy, was I wrong. It seems there were a lot of takers for SlideShare’s service, which has now graduated from sharing mere slide shows to sharing all kinds of documents. The site has become a favorite of web workers, corporate workers and independents. Here is SlideShare by the numbers:

It attracts 20 million visitors, who generate 60 million page views every month. It has 1.5 million registered users. SlideShare, which is based in San Francisco with offices in New Delhi, has some revenues, but so far it has been like any other web-based service -– surviving on venture capital funding, including a $3 million Series A round from Venrock that it raised back in May 2008.Now SlideShare is getting ready to launch two services that will form the underpinning of its business model. The new efforts, offered together as SlideShare Business, are:

LeadShare, a self-service tool for capturing leads with all your documents and presentations. At the end of the presentation, a form pops up that allows you to sign up for more information. The form is available everywhere documents can be embedded. The service costs anywhere from $8 to $22 per lead.

SlideShare has a slew of new services on deck, and I got a demo of some of them — I’ll write about them as they get fully baked. “We are currently going to focus on small and medium-sized businesses, as large corporations need more customized options,” Sinha said.

LeadShare is a smart idea: It tries to update the lead generation business, which seems to be stuck in the dark ages. SlideShare’s fresh approach involves more proactive involvement from the viewer and is thus likely to result in higher quality leads. Now, let’s just hope I’m right about the company this time around.

Last week I shifted to a new laptop (a thinkpad X Series) with Windows Vista. I was dreading shifting computers in general and shifting to Vista in particular. But it turned out to be my easiest move ever.

I used MozBackup to shift my web browser. Given how much time I spend on a web browser, this being seamless was a big deal.

Next, I transferred all the files from my current laptop onto a Maxtor backup drive. From the Maxtor drive I copied all files to the new laptop. This too about two hours.

We use Google Apps at SlideShare, so all my email and documents are in the cloud anyway. I still download all my email into Thunderbird so that I have an offline backup (just in case). Tomorrow I will use MozBackup to shift my Thunderbird profiles to the new laptop and start downloading email again.

Every one or two hours, I come across a software I need (e.g., Microsoft Office, Photoshop, ScreenPrint). One by one I am downloading / installing that on to my laptop.

First experiences with Vista – its quite nice. The visual look and feel is nicer than for my old XP. I am still not quite used to the way that navigation works in Vista (especially finding and adjusting look and feel of the computer). I like the windows sidebar and the RSS reader and photo slideshows going through my photographs.

Looking back, a lot of the pain in shifting computers used to be shifting files and settings. Now that so much of my data is in the cloud, that paid is dramatically reduced.

Die internationalen Börsen stürzen immer weiter ab, selbst IWF Chef Dominique Strauss-Kahn spricht inzwischen nicht mehr nur von einer ernsten, sondern von einer gefährlichen Lage. In Großbritannien wird ein Gebet zur Finanzkrise auf den Internetseiten der anglikanischen Kirche tausendfach von verängstigten Menschen aufgerufen.

Michael Arrington, Chef von TechCrunch, einem Blog, das massgeblich mitgeholfen hat, das Phänomen Web 2.0 zu popularisieren, ruft jetzt das unrühmliche, aber notwendige Ende von Web 2.0 aus, bedingt durch ein Versiegen des Risikokapitals und markiert durch ein ignorantes Video einiger selbstverliebter Silicon Valley  Douchebags.

Auf netzwertig.com geht Andreas Göldi mehr in die Tiefe und beschreibt, was die weltweite Krise für die Startup-Finanzierung im Web 2.0 bedeutet. Neben der Analyse der Situation gibt er Jungunternehmern auch Tipps, wie man mit einem härter werdenden Finanzierungsklima umgehen kann. Ein Ratschlag lautet, nicht auf Verdacht grosse Plattformen zu bauen und das Businessmodell später zu überlegen. Marc Zuckerberg kann es sich leisten, solche Ratschläge zu ignorieren, hat der Facebook Gründer sein Venture Capital doch bereits vor der großen Krise eingesammelt. Im Interview mit der FAZ erklärt er, dass Wachstum Vorrang und ein Business-Plan noch Zeit bis in drei Jahren hat.

Insgesamt optimistischer als Göldi schätzt bei Robert Basic ein namentlich nicht genannter Gründer die Situation ein. In Zeiten begrenzter Etats könnten neue Formen gegenüber klassischen Alternativen sogar profitieren. Das gelte sowohl für Werbung, wo Performance Marketing sich gegenüber reichweitenbasierten Kampagnen durchsetze, als auch bei Software Lösungen für Unternehmen.

Dieser Einschätzung kann ich mich nur anschließen. Wenn man Web 2.0 nicht nur auf den Endverbraucher Markt beschränkt, sondern Web 2.0 Lösungen für Unternehmen (Office 2.0, Enterprise 2.0, Cloud Computing) mit ins Kalkül zieht, eröffnen sich vielleicht gerade durch diese Krise ganz neue Chancen.

Nebenbei: c/o operative eröffnete heute vor zwei Jahren mit einem Beitrag zur Übernahme eines Video Sharing Startups durch einen großen Suchmaschinenbetreiber.

Technorati Tags: finanzkrise – web2.0 – startups – venture+capital – enterprise2.0 – cloud+computing

Few days ago I tried first time India based Zoho and truly I was surprised! The service portfolio is amazing. Usability is simple and when exporting presentation to PowerPoint format, everything worked very well. This is how they describe what they are all about:

Zoho is a suite of online applications (services) that you sign up for and access from our Website. The applications are free for individuals and some have a subscription fee for organizations. Our vision is to provide our customers (individuals, students, educators, non-profits, small and medium sized businesses) with the most comprehensive set of applications available anywhere (breadth); and for those applications to have enough features (depth) to make your user experience worthwhile.

Zoho is a division of AdventNet Inc led by Mr. Sridhar Vembu. According to recent article in The Economist he is confident that “In the world of corporate IT, the low-cost revolution is very much unfinished business.” And he is right.

Now the latest rumors tell that General Electric is planning to adopt some of the Zoho’s services to its employees’ desktops worldwide. If the rumors are true, about Zoho can add 400,000 individual users to its customer list. That would be something, wouldn’t it?

The Getting Things Done panel discussion at Office 2.0 is now online. Watch David Allen, Neil Mendelson of MindJet, Kevin Merrit of blist and our very own Doreen Hartzell discuss how Office 2.0 tools can support Getting Things Done.

Video here: http://office20.com/docs/DOC-1096

10 things I can do in the cloud I couldn’t a year ago.

10. Everything on the go. iPhone. It has opened up mobile computing. Can do pretty much everything from the mobile phone now. Email. Document access. Review presentation on way to talk on train. Hopefully soon give cloud hosted slides from phone too. Can get normal work done from phone at airport without hauling out the computer. Impact about what is coming and what to expect.

9. Search all my mail. Google’s move to cloud computing really started with GMail. Has 14 GB of mail. Can save everything. “Do you know Bob?” Search email and find old communication from years ago. (externalize nonessential memory?) But can still access the actual content in the traditional ways if desired through preferred clients. Important for enterprise clients who are attached to their desktop applications because they already know how to use them, even if they have complaints about the shortcomings of a given tool. Hit sync when boarding is called at airport, process it all in the air, sync upon land to send.

8. Chat with customers and partners in any language. Real time translation on chat. Collaboration can cross boundaries – not just within a company, but internationally. Invite a chat bot natively within GChat. Invite a foreign language speaker. Start chatting as normal and get live translation sent with your messages. Very useful for international chatting, can also teach the translator by sending feedback if the translation is not very good.

7. Collaborate simply and securely on projects with sites and documents. Shared document space creates single repository. Can then grant journalists and others access when launch documents are ready, they can track changes and revisions until time to announce. Makes a lot of version tracking obsolete.

6. Organize all business travel by email. Tripit.com

Accepts confirmation messages and it parses your itinerary components and aggregates them into a single itinerary. Adds them to you calendar too via iCal feed you can subscribe to. Has iphone optimized mobile interface as well. Makes confirmation numbers easier to find, when at a check in desk. Built on existing, widely adopted technology: email. Also allows sharing to track and notify others about where people are if on the road.

5. collect data in forms and dump to spreadsheet. (Google Spreadsheets – “Create new form” menu option) Drag and drop to reorder questions. gives embed code. Live tracking as results come in as well has spreadsheet copy for later use. Dynamically updates spreadsheet in the background.

4. Build any scalable business application on the cloud platform. Google app engine, force.com, AWS. Not just small applications. On demand large processing without major infrastructure costs.

3. Online templates for documents, spreadsheets, presentations.

2. Run fast, secure, stable web applications. Broswer is the gateway to the cloud. Chrome is a speed, usability leap forward. Geared for next generation web applications. Sergey asks the developers daily when the Mac version will be ready, so it will be okay for us Apple people soon. Run browser as application window that interacts with OS like desktop software. Can kill individual plugins and tabs without closing whole browser application. Order of magnitude faster javascript engine over IE.

1. Video sharing in Google apps. Mac, Phone and flip cam mean 3 videocameras being carried around all the time. Lots of opportunities for sharing and communicating. 3000 sign ups a day at Google, huge growth in usage and adoption.

Updated: Video of David Allen’s keynote is now online.

Why read GTD?

surf on top of stuff, not in it. Get things out of your head, and feel happy to relax because you know what’s

Not inherently organized, how much easier to make things happen. Consult – flake or consultant are what you do then.

Gadget freak – anything small black and expensive: want it. Try it, see if it works later. Had come from small companies, figured the big companies had all this productivity worked out. In reality, the busier and more responsibility, the more they felt overwhelmed

Externalize your commitments. Clarify what it means – outcomes and Park results in a system with hard clean edges. Add in a reflective review process. Put everything in perspective and align it with your goals.

Offload brain’s core processor so remind and remember aren’t required to work in your head: avoid multitasking and let yourself focus. Brain is very good at analysis and pattern recognition – very powerful. But isn’t threaded. Needs to focus on one thing powerfully. Mind has to know there are placeholders for everything (decisions already made) somewhere, or it will keep spinning them back into your thoughts and interrupt your conversation.

You’re in the zone when you are focused on one thing clearly.

Not about just written things, about extended your mind and externalizing.

Tools:
1. Capture what is rattling around your head. Identify what is pulling at your psyche. Don’t force decision making when you’re capturing those thoughts.

why getting organized often doesn’t work – can’t capture and evaluate and make decisions and prioritize all at the same time.

Jott is great.
David Allen notetaker wallet (office 0.5: paper and pen)
Write it anywhere, even your arm, just so you can get to it and process it later.

Having lists in and of itself doesn’t help: you have to empty that list every 24 hours or so.

Paper or electronic – don’t just collect lists.

2. Clarify meaning.

3. Organize what you’ve clarified.

How to collaborate with a team: what tools to interact.

You can’t legislate system. He doesn’t know what other people have a system. Judge on results. Set standard of “don’t let stuff slip”

Lotus notes, email. Lots of Lotus databases at the office. The interesting part is who’s responsible.

Common language is powerful – “I have 6 waiting items with you – can we review and/or renegotiate our agreements”

Don’t meet without desired outcome, don’t leave unassigned next actions

Personal preference for electronic and paper will still matter, people will just double their efforts to also use their own system in addition to the mandated one.

Uses discussion databases, have distributed systems to find out where the discussion and decisions last ended. Don’t want to click more than 2-3 times to categorize something. Internally has template for Lotus notes for their internal data along GTD model. “Will hear more about this soon”. Downside is requires someone fairly savvy to operate, hard to establish protocols and standards for what data to have input and legislate that as a team.

Must have common standards and agreements. Each database has a specific owner. Must have ownership, or stuff just lingers. And becomes a waste of time. It’s about your best practices, not the specific tool you’ve chosen.

Have tracked allergies, even, in home database, to schedule trips to avoid it. Has “quotes” database too.

Growing company with 6 divisions, moving CRM to something bigger than ACT as company grows is a new challenge. Scheduling employees around the world, etc.

Online may not be the next big thing. Interested in connection between form and function. When word processors were new, (and spreadsheets) were a paradigm shift and dramatically changed how you worked in an office and what was possible due to resource allocation.

Computer became thinkstation because of speed of Apple UI when came out

Mindmapping – another one. That is something new, but in early stages. Not sure where it will go – causes him to have new ideas he didn’t have before.

Speed of slicing and dicing information isn’t as revolutionary as being able to remix that way anyway.

Wants: “Computer: Fun, Ballet, New York” should generate a schedule of ballets in New York when a trip to NYC

Have to use and push a system hard to know if it will really work. Has to get physically engaged to know whether it is a geek toy or something for real life on a bad Monday morning. Can’t read the potential until you push the limits.

Ismael. Example: point of this conference. using new Web 2.0 tools in ways that they weren’t entirely designed for, see what happens.

End of day: is this about taking back the pace of your life. DA: point of new book. What GTD hit such a nerve was that it is a tool to give you back control and perspective.

Control: cooperation with intention. Accept what is, but guide and leave. Can’t fully control and predict. So yes, about regaining control of your life. About not being overwhelmed by the commitments you’ve made to self and others.

Information overload can’t be dealt with passively, you need to make executive decisions about what to do with info.

Getting in control isn’t about finishing everything, it’s about making decisions and finding an external way to

Start with control. If your ship is sinking you don’t care where you’re headed. Once you’re afloat, figure out which way to go. That returns your focus (6 horizons)

How to stay on the wagon? Do you need GTD to track everything you need to GTD?

It is about changing habits. Get yourself so habituated to the result is that you can’t bear to avoid it, like showering and brushing your teeth.

Addiction to stress. Your comfort zone with how many unread emails you can tolerate before you have to take action and make decisions about them. Don’t feel like you have to feel guilty about not working hard enough.

have you made a list and felt better? If you reverse engineer why that works, you won’t keep stuff in your head anymore. Would you throw away your calendar? No, then don’t keep other stuff in you head either. You do or don’t keep it in your head.

Crisis: then people are highly focused and productive. Because it drives everything else out of your head and there’s no decision-making. Lots of energy. Forebrain shuts down, you get both clever and stupid.

High performer: how do I get that focus BEFORE getting to the crisis point that forces focus. Remove distractions.

Multitasking is just rapid refocusing. You can do that if there is no residue from the things you just looking at. Like martial artist with 4 opponents.

Rapid switching is fine if you have the right placeholders and the unfinished pieces don’t nag at you.

Would be cool if you could see all your connections projected on a wall, to resort them.

If you make tasks for everything, do you still have time to complete them? Well yes, because when you can see the inventory of your commitments, you get better at saying no and not taking on more than you can do.

In the cloud, there is so much stuff, it can be hard to avoid leaving stuff lingering around. Why many people like paper – load is clear. Tools that scatter make it hard to manage. The system is only as good as what you will maintain when you feel miserable with a flu and fever. It has to work when you don’t feel like maintaining a system.

Captures in mindmanager and mindmaps – does a lot of double entry just to see things in the right places and contexts.

Mind Meister and Mind Jet are both here.

GTD Summit coming up in March 11-13. People who get into this really like to get together – create a place where they aren’t weird and everyone speaks the same language. Should be a good chance to compile best practices.

Desde el miercoles dia 3 de septiembre hasta el 5 de septiembre se celebrará esta conferencia donde se trataran temas 2.0 y as-a-service.  Las conferencias y mesas de trabajo estarán dirigidas por personalidades de referencia como Phil Wainewright ( guru del mundo as-a-service) y David Allen´s y empresas de renombre como Google, Sun, Zoho. etc.

Este evento, que cuenta ya con tres años de edad, se esta conviertiendo en uno de los mas importantes del año y es el típico donde la empresas quieren estar y figurar. Supongo que el contenido, como en la mayoría de estos eventos, pocas sorpresas dará aunque si es una forma de que el futuro cliente pueda acercarse y conocer las estrategias futuras de las punteras en TI. Se puede consultar en el margen derecho la larga lista de sponsors que tiene el evento.

Uma das aplicações web que mais interesse tem gerado na comunidade é o SlideRocket. Basicamente trata-se de uma aplicação web desenvolvida em Flex que permite a criação de apresentações tipo PowerPoint. Estas apresentações podem depois ser feitas a partir de um Browser (suportando a funcionalidade “Fullscreen” do Flash Player) ou com recurso a um player desenvolvido em Flex e AIR que faz o download e corre a apresentação localmente sem necessidade de acesso à internet.

O SlideRocket apresenta algumas características muito interessante o que permite competir de igual para igual com aplicações desktop desenvolvidas para o efeito. É extremamente simples de utilizar e permite a partilha imediata das apresentações sem necessidade de enviar ficheiros por e-mail e como corre no Flash player é garantido (pelo menos em cerca de 97% dos casos) que qualquer pessoa no mundo que tenha um conputador com acesso à internet vai ser capaz de a visualizar.

Tenho a sorte de fazer parte do grupo de beta-testers privados da aplicação e posso garantir que neste momento sempre que tenho que preparar material para uma apresentação nem sequer penso em tocar no PowerPoint. Abro o meu browser de eleição (que pode ser qualquer um) em qualquer computador no mundo e estou preparado para trabalhar.

Segundo indicações dos criadores do SlideRocket está para breve uma versão “offline” da aplicação que me permita trabalhar mesmo em situações em que não tenha acesso à internet.

Por enquanto as participações no programa beta são apenas feitas por convite explícito, no entanto está anunciada para breve a disponibilização da fase pública da beta. Se alguém quiser mesmo começar a “brincar” com esta aplicação espectacular de imediato, deixe-me uma indicação no comentário que eu tentarei dar um “toque” aos administradores do SlideRocket no sentido de os incluirem na beta privada. Não posso prometer nada, mas se me enviarem uma descrição detalhada do que fazem e do que querem fazer com o SlideRocket, pode ser que consiga alguma coisa.

Para mais informações sobre o SlideRocket não hesitem em visitar o site http://www.sliderocket.com.

With only a week to go one of the main diamond sponsors pulled out of  Office 2.0 conference  much to the annoyance and distress of the organiser Ismael Ghalimi. I have already covered the conference on E20portal.com and this blog.  I wanted to write again because this is a great example of an enterprenur coping with a difficult problem on a self imposed deadline.

A diamond sponsor?

It’s been interesting too observe Ismael’s unfolding shock, despair and then purpose with this set back. Ismael published an inspiring and reflective post Faith, Friendship, and Freedom when the S**t hit the fan, saying:

“With such a string of bad news, it would be easy for us to lose faith in what we are doing.”..”Many people wonder why we do all this to begin with. There is a fair amount of risk involved, and an insane amount of work, for a reward that is unclear most of the time. The reason is pretty simple: it’s the simple exercise of our freedom.”..”Today, I learned something, and this makes it a good day.”

As Stowe Boyd, a well know blogger, entitled his post Office 2.0 Conference: That Which Does Not Kill You Makes You Stronger. The extreme deadline of the event meant that Ismael had to move quickly to a solution. It was great to see how the community rallied togther to help and the conference very rapidly organised a new Launchpad conference track with lots of smaller sponsors.

This situation has shown the entrepreneurial spirit of seeing the positive and turning calamity into success by working together. We could all probably learn a little from this.

Ramping up to the Office 2.0 conference in San Francisco next week, I’ll be blogging over on their conference site as well. Over the next few days, I’ll be writing a >series of posts outlined how I’ve got my personal system set up. I’ll turn that into an article over here as well.

If you’ll be there, or a user in San Francisco, let me know, I’d love to meet up for coffee and say hello.

Why I get things done with GTD:

In building personal relationships, the discipline of keeping all mundane communications electronic has refocused my conversations. At home I don’t need to waste time with loved ones talking about who’s picking up the groceries, or whether the bills got paid. At work I don’t need to run through which requests that have come in are my responsibility and which ones aren’t. The time that used to take is freed up to talk about shared experiences and dreams and the things that really matter to the people around me. At work, we can to focus our meetings on where we want our products to go and evaluating ideas, rather than on the mechanics of keeping the company going.

Read the rest.

Office 2.0 is just around the corner and I am preparing for my session (going 100% SaaS) by interacting with my panelists and doing some thinking. My current thread is thinking about IT and its traditional role vs. its new role in the SaaS era.  There were ups and downs in the way IT viewed SaaS and now it seems that IT professionals divide into two camps: the ones that strongly embrace SaaS, and the ones that wait for it to go away.

In general, the ones that want it to go away like control, like hands on approach and rather do the tactical work as a way to keep their kingdom intact. If you work for a startup you may not believe me but in a big company your worth goes up with the number of people you manage and you don’t want to lose anyone you gained.

The ones who love SaaS understands that it is here to stay and while not perfect, it allows significant time saving since somebody else is doing the mundane work for you. There are people that get paid to preform upgrades for you, takes care of security, make sure the servers are up and that response time is great. The SaaS providers are more  efficient since one

operations team is responsible for many thousands of users.

People need to realize that the only role of technology advancements is to save time and have intelligent people decide what to do with this extra time. All productivity enhancements happened exactly this way. With all the extra time that can be saved, IT can become more strategic to the organization (and have much more interesting job…) and focus on improving tools and services, talk with their internal clients and find ways to make their lives better and stop worrying about up time and power outages.

Not every organization can go 100% SaaS yet and even for the ones that can there are many challenges in integration, many different parts that need to be glued together and multiple ISVs to work with. But if SaaS is right for your organization, find a way for IT to participate and use wisely all the extra time they will have.

Doug Harr, CIO at Ingres will represent this point of view in the going 100% SaaS session.

Update: Read Ismael Ghalimi’s post about Office 2.0 setting. Quite an example of 100% SaaS

Gadi Shamia

The Office 2.0 conference is coming up fast, and we’re thrilled to announce we’ll be there. I’ll be participating the GTD panel, along with GTD guru David Allen, Neil Mendelson from Mindjet, and Kevin Merritt from blist.

The conference will include new tools, best practices, and case studies on using Web 2.0 applications to move to a productive, paperless workplace. The focus of the event this year is on enterprise adoption of Web 2.0 services.

Registration for the conference is still open, if you’d like to attend. It will be held at the St. Regis Hotel in downtown San Francisco. Attendees will also receive an HP 2133 Mini-Note PC, so the conference can run paper-free. Conference attendance also gets you into the Unconference.

At the conference we’ll also be doing two launches we’re very excited about. The Pro version of Enleiten’s GTD-based project management app will come out of beta. This version allows groups to share project space, while still maintaining the privacy of personal to-do lists in a single trusted single. We owe a thousand thanks to the beta testers who have given us patient feedback and suggestions on how to improve the interface and suggestions to get the workflow right.

We’ll also be releasing the beta of our community checklists library. You can contribute your favorite shopping lists, business trip packing lists, weekly review checklists, wedding planning lists, and more. Users and non-users will be able to search for useful lists, and users will be able to convert them directly to projects in their Enleiten account.

I was invited by my friend Ismael Ghalimi to host a panel during Office 2.0 about my favorite topic, SaaS. The session is about going 100% SaaS and what it means. My panelists are Dan Druker from Intacct, Doug Harr from Ingres, Rob Hull from Adaptive Planning and Rene Lacerte from Bill.com. What’s great about this team is that they are all senior executives that pioneered SaaS either with their current company or in previous lives: Dan was part of Postini (later sold to Google), Rene co-founded PayCycle, one of the best kept SaaS success secrets in the valley, Rob co-founded Adaptive Planning in 2003, when no one believed SaaS will ever happen and Doug spent 5 years with Portal Software, that was acquired by Oracle. We would not be lacking perspective here…

In the next couple of weeks I will share my thoughts about the 100% SaaS goal as I progress in preparing for it. For now I wanted to go back to the title, and explain the interesting story behind Office 2.0 and its connection to the Burning Man festival. Every year toward the end of the summer, a city is built in the Nevada desert. The city is built by a small number of people and then for a week host some 30,000 visitors from all over the world that come to celebrate freedom, community and art. By the end of that week the city will vanish with no trails. The Valley was always a great feeder for the event (Google founders placed an “out of office” doodle on Google homepage when they left for Burning Man in 1998). Burning Man organizers only put the infrastructure in place and the  visitors bring the rest (decorations, art, food, elements for trading and everything else needed to make Burning Man what it is.

Office 2.0 is about the same: Ismael and a small team of friends help to put it all together as a community event that is heavily relaying on technology to automate mundane tasks, and people to generate content that other people will enjoy to listen to and learn from. The whole project starts and ends in 2 months or so and leave only electronic trails…  Ismael is only the facilitator, and we, speakers, sponsors and audience are on our own, trying to make it a great event.

These two events even happen at the same time: Burning Man ends couple of days before Office 2.0 starts and they are both great examples for events that empower the community to create value with minimal facilitation. Isn’t it so much more fun to participate in those kind of events rather than going to yet another PR driven, marketing funded event?