North by Northeast Interactive – Greaaaat Success!

Some very interesting events have been happening here in the big T Dot the last week.  Unless you’ve been living under a rock somewhere you’ve heard about the earthquake, the tornado, and the big G20 protests and subsequent riots.  A mass exodus from the city did happen but a gigantic concrete perimeter around downtown was not enough to deter tens of thousands of protesters (most of the peaceful) from marching through downtown streets.  Some very cool photos were captured this weekend by my friend Josh Kowaleski, check it out.

This post comes 2 weeks late because I left for my trip to St. Petersburg the 18th, pretty much right after NXNE. Nonetheless I wanted to mention my experience with the NXNEi, which was the first ever interactive digital media conference linked to the well-known North By Northeast music festival here in Toronto 2 weeks ago.  I highly recommend attend these types of events if you’re even remotely considering any type of small business or entrepreneurial venture, and would like to know more about the challenges and trends of digital media, and above all learn about whats new in the internet age and how that will affect your business. Yes it was a big gathering of geeks (every 3rd person had an iPad), but what really made the event stand out was the diversity of topics and the interesting people I met during the event from a variety of different backgrounds, who share a common goal to better understand how digital media can shape business.

Some highlights:

UnMarketing: Stop Marketing, Start Engaging - Highly engaged session from marketing guru Scott Stratten. The funniest speaker and definitely a hard act to follow. Check out his UnMarketing blog.

Architects of Community - with the one and only Alan Cross, social-media guru and author Amber MacArthur and Erica Ehm of the Yummy Mummy Club.  Some interesting conversations between the panelists about social media, but the panel would have benefited from more discussion and dialogue with the audience.

Time To Abolish The Hourly – One of my favorite sessions about rethinking the idea that our value is based on on our hourly output.  The idea of this session is that charging time for our effort is a flawed and outdated model.  What people buy is an outcome, so charge based on the outcome not the time spent.

Kickstarter – Crowd-Funding for your Creative projects – A fantastic session with Perry Chen from Kickstarter.ca,  and a great idea for getting funding for projects like a demo tape or getting funding for creative projects for humanitarian aid.

My only plight with the event was that it wasn’t interactive enough. It would have been nice to have more Q&A and dialogue between audience members.

Lastly, I had the opportunity to meet some very interesting people that made the whole conference worth it.  Liquid lunch buddy and tech entrepreneur Josh Kowaleski has a very cool blog and most recently documented some photos from the G20 protests.  Eric Floresca from Techvibes was covering the events and I’m looking forward to meeting him to discuss a writeup on Full Voice Media.  And very cool meeting Sandi Carmichael from illustr8.ca.  Had a great chat with her about freelancing and her website illustrations look amazing.

I’m off to my hometown of Regina, Saskatchewan for the Canada Day long weekend.  Hope the long weekend treats you well!

best,

Mike