The Summer Conference Beat: Mashup the Barbecues

Posted July 12th, 2007 at 5:21 pm by Havi Hoffman, Yahoo! Developer Network

 One Comment / Filed in: Conferences/Events

It’s always tech conference season in Bay Area, so even now, at the height of midsummer, we’re busy participating in lots of interesting events.

This Saturday, July 14, Yahoo! will be a sponsor of the Community Next Viral conference at the Plug and Play Tech Center in Sunnyvale. This sold-out event is all about growing your idea or online venture virally from “zero to ten million members.” It’s a sequel to February’s “The Present and Future of Online Communities,” the inaugural Community Next event, which was well-attended, highly regarded, and delightfully captured on Flickr.

Organized by twenty-something entrepreneurs Noah “OkDork” Kagan and Adam Kalamchi, Community Next Viral will present a “personal and interactive” day of panels, with meaty Q&A follow-ups, and small group breakout sessions that give people a chance to get to know each other and swap stories and ideas.

Participants include blazing hot influentials like Tim Ferriss, author of the “4-Hour Workweek,” and Justin “.tv” Kan, along with serial entrepreneurs like Jonathan Abrams (Friendster, Socializr), Gina Bianchini (Ning), and Dave “500 Hats” McClure, not to mention Yahoo!’s own Eric Marcoullier and Todd Sampson, founders of MyBlogLog. In true summer spirit, the event kicks off Friday evening with a Yahoo!-hosted party and closes with a BBQ for attendees.

On Monday, Yahoo!’s influencer marketing team heads from Silicon Valley to downtown San Francisco’s landmark Hotel Nikko for Ypulse Mashup 2007, a first-time, and nearly sold-out, conference focused on “reaching today’s totally wired generation with technology.”

Mashup 2007 is produced by Anastasia Goodstein, author of “Totally Wired” and publisher of Ypulse, an independent, award-winning blog for youth and teen media and marketing professionals, with Modern Media, a builder and producer of business conferences and media brands. Yahoo! is a founding sponsor and an active participant in the two-day conference. Did you know that Yahoo! is a leading destination for the 18-24 years old demographic with 15.5 million unique visitors in the U.S., more than Facebook and YouTube combined (comScore March 2007 data)?!

The speaker roster at Mashup includes researchers and academic thought-leaders like danah boyd and Henry Jenkins, as well as founders, CEOs, inventors, and entrepreneurs from magazines, record labels, web start-ups, and consumer companies.

On Tuesday, July 17, at the close of the conference, Ypulse, Yahoo!, and The George Lucas Educational Foundation/Edutopia will present the Totally Wired Teacher award, in recognition of a teacher “who is pushing the envelope and actually using social media in the classroom as an educational tool.”

If you’re a marketer, educator, parent, publisher, policy-maker, or anyone who cares about teens, tweens, and their future, do yourself a favor and grab one of the few remaining tickets. And while you’re there, stop by our booth and say hello — we’d love to meet you and answer your questions.

Havi Hoffman
Influencer Marketing

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One Comment Add your own

Daniel R | July 16th, 2007 at 12:04 am

Hey Havi,

Did you go to the CommunityNext conference? Just curious what your thoughts are, coming from the search engine side of things (versus the many start-ups at Community Next).

And here’s my blog posting on CommunityNext:
http://www.emergence-media.com/2007/07/communitynext-viral-marketing-conference-notes-and-slides/

Thanks!