Before mesh started, we listed five reasons why you needed to come. In the aftermath of mesh13, here are five reasons you should have attended.

1. Great content: At the core of what makes mesh unique is the focus on attracting great speakers who explore a variety of topics; everything from work, money and brand journalism to brain fitness, startups, how to find top talent and content marketing. mesh is an opportunity to expose yourself to new ideas and people, which makes it different from other digital conferences.

2. The opportunity to meet and talk with speakers. At mesh, our speakers tend to stick around rather than run back to their jobs. It lets attendees engage with our speakers, ask them questions, build relationships and explore how they might be able to work together.

3. The networking: We build healthy breaks between sessions to give people the chance to meet new people from different sectors. At mesh, people are open to sparking up a conversation with the person sitting next to them at lunch and having a drink during the day one reception (Thanks, Mailchimp for sponsoring it!). One start-up entrepreneur told me he made a bunch of new contacts to drive the growth of his business.

4. Feeding off the energy of start-up entrepreneurs: We invited 50 entrepreneurs to attend mesh for free, as well as asking 20 to show off their products in a demo alley. Having their enthusiasm played a key role in giving mesh an extra buzz and level of excitement.

5. Inspiration. After two days of top-notch content and networking, it’s impossible not to be excited about the Web’s potential to impact our personal and professional lives.

So, what’s next for mesh?

Well, we’ve got meshmarketing happening on Nov. 7 at the Toronto Reference Library. We’ve already lined up great speakers such as Jay Baer, Danny Brown and Peep Laja. And we’ve got early-bird tickets available for $149 for the next week.

This year, Mott’s Clamato Caesar will be serving,  yes, a Caesar Break on Day 2 in the afternoon.

Specially designed for mesh13 this year is the “Hot mesh” curated by Clint.

Talk to Clint on Twitter (@CaesarClint) or join the Clamato Facebook page.

To wet your appetite for this coming Thursday, here’s a peak at one of the many the recipes you’ll be able to try:

“Hot mesh”

1 oz.             Gin

2 dashes     Fresh Cracked Salt and Pepper

3 dashes     Hot Sauce

3 dashes    Worcestershire

1/2 oz.       Spicy Pickle Brine

4 oz.          Mott’s Clamato

Rim         Equal parts of Mott’s Clamato Rimmer (Celery Salt) with Montreal Steak Spice

Garnish    Lime Wedge and  Strubb’s Banderilla or Extreme Beans

1. Rim the serving glass with a lime juice and the Rimmer.

2. Fill the glass full of ice and add the ingredients in order.

3. To mix, stir or roll the Caesar (Rolling is the act of pouring back and forth between glasses)

4. Garnish and ENJOY!

We look forward to seeing you at mesh13 and sharing a drink – or two!

Hailo Toronto is proud to be sponsoring this year’s mesh conference, and we’re equally proud to be part of Toronto’s business community. We’ve had the opportunity to meet many incredibly talented members of Toronto’s entrepreneur and marketing community over the past few months, and we’ve recently put into market an out-of-home advertising campaign to spread the Hailo word across Toronto.

If you’re attending mesh, I’d love to have you try the Hailo service. To get started, download the free Hailo mobile application and sign up. Once you’ve completed the signup process, enter “mesh13″ to get $10 off your cab ride to our from the event. (Here’s a quick how-to guide for entering promo codes.)

We’re also running a bit of a contest during mesh. Make sure to stop by our booth for your chance to win in our hourly draw of $20 in Hailo credits. You’ll also be entered to win our grand prize of $100 in Hailo credits!

Don’t forget to follow us on Twitter for updates, promotions and other Toronto-centric content.

In the meantime, I’d like to extend an invite to each of you. We’d love to have you come down to the Hailo Toronto office at 219 Queen Street East for a tour, and to meet the team that is helping to make the taxi cab experience better for Torontonians. If you’d like to come by, send me an email and I’ll get you squared away.

Until then, I look forward to seeing you at mesh!

Thanks to our great friends and partners at Switch Video for making us look so good!

Design is important to attract and engage. We all know that! But what we don’t know is how best to design spaces and places that pique interest and encourage exploration online.

So when creating a workshop about design, who could tell us how to do it using cases and samples to show how to do it best? We turned to Adobe. More than 90% of creative professionals have Adobe Photoshop® software on their desktops. Adobe has been a part of much of the great designs by giving the creatives the tools to let their imaginations run wild.

In a workshop lead by Marcel Boucher, a senior technical marketing manager with Adobe, he will explore how brands can leverage the power of design and creativity to drive their businesses. Marcel will be our guide to show us what we could potentially look forward to as well as to share ideas on what we can do next.

Click here to learn more about
Marcel Boucher (Adobe)

Videos are a tricky medium. When they are well executed, they resonate and can help to tell a great story. But with tools making it easier for anyone to create a video, it is still challenging for just anyone to create great video content.

It is for this reason that we are taking on video at mesh13. The gang over at Switch Video–specifically its CEO, Andrew Angus and Heather McKibbon, Switch’s VP Business Development. This talented duo work with their team to produce compelling videos for clients including Microsoft, American Express, IBM and HP.

Switch Video has produced hundreds of simple explainer videos that “explain what you do”. From SME and startups to large corporations, Andrew and Heather will help you understand why video is such a powerful medium. In this interactive session, they will help you learn how you can make your message count.

Learn more about our workshop presenters…
Andrew Angus
Heather McKibbon

When we plan for your arrival to mesh, we spend a lot of time locked in a room talking about what’s next on the web and in the digital space. We are always looking for the tool or device that can change the game. With this in mind, a conversation about the crazy cool and just plain crazy stuff that is going on in printing.

We talked a world where you can print guns, limbs and even food. Once we were over the novelties, we talked about the maker economy and what a three-dimensional printer could change what we create. We talked about what a 3D printer does for prototype development and innovation. Basically, we just couldn’t stop talking about this one topic.

If us newbies could talk about this for as long as we did, we knew that those who were actually doing it could tell us what is happening with the technology, how it can aid innovation and what it means to the creation of products.

The experts that we turned to to tell this story was Panda Robotics, specifically two of their co-founders, Felix Tang and Liav Koren. Their creation, the PandaBot, makes 3D printing simple and accessible. They’ve built a robust, reliable tool to make designs real. They saw the possibilities and challenges of 3D printing and realized that no one was really focusing on the creatives and the researchers. Architects, artists, designers and crafters are critical to the transition of 3D printing from prediction to reality. Felix and Liav started working to create a technology that could help. These users need tools to make their lives easier, that work with existing workflows and can cut down the barriers from concept to physical object. Liav and Felix will help us all understand the true potential of this process in design and development as well as help us see what’s on the horizon.

In case you can’t tell, we are stoked about hosting this session at mesh13.

Learn more about our workshop presenters…
Liav Koren
Felix Tang

With news in the palm of our hands, the way in which we consume and discover as well as the way in which the stories are told continue to change. Technology that embraces personalization, social networks, social graphs and high-quality content is providing opportunities for new models. The business for online news has not yet been fully stabilized, but it hasn’t stopped a growing number of startups from jumping on the digital bandwagon.

During this session, we’ll be talking to two startups that are changing the way we get our news as well as the news that we get.

Paul Quigley is co-founder of NewsWhip, the news site with a billion editors. The technology tracks all the news published by about 5,000 English-language sources–-about 60,000 news stories each day. So how can you find the best quality and the most compelling in 60,000 stories a day? Paul and his team thinks the answer lies with people. They think that people have an instinct for good stories, and that we know the news stories worth sharing with our friends. So NewsWhip built a technology that tracks all the news shared on Facebook and Twitter each day, to find the fastest spreading, most shared, highest quality stuff, and reveal it to the world. All in real time, in dozens of countries and niches. But for NewsWhip it is not just about the news as a story, this team is also working to monetize. NewsWhip’s revenues come from its popular professional tool, Spike, which gives newsrooms and content marketers detailed insights on what’s trending hour-by-hour in hundreds of cities, regions and countries—so that early trending stories can be uncovered quickly. Right now, Spike is giving useful insights to many digitally focused newsrooms including the BBC, NBCnews.com, The Huffington Post, Mashable Buzzfeed, and RTÉ. Social Amplifier, which displays a news company’s most trending stories in real time, gives readers and journalists a live view of what the site’s users are sharing, making sites more engaging and sticky. NewsWhip also recently released an API, widgets and mobile apps.

Joining Paul is David Cohn, who has written for Wired, Seed, Columbia Journalism Review and The New York Times among other publications. Most recently he is the founding editor of Circa. With more and more people relying on their phones as their primary source of news, Circa’s editors aim to gather top stories to break them down to their essential points — facts, quotes, photos, and more, formatted specifically for the phone. Circa is creating the first born-on-mobile news experience, delivering it in a format native to mobile devices, with an experience intuitive to mobile users. In the organization’s words, Circa is news, re-imagined.

How will these startups and others change the way the story gets told and what we see first?

To learn more, here are the bios for Paul Quigley and David Cohn.

We’ve got a really strong line-up of speakers, led by our keynotes: Ryan Carson (Treehouse), Joshua Benton (Nieman Journalism Lab), Kyle Monson (Knock Twice) and JP Rangaswami (Salesforce.com). If you haven’t been to mesh before, our keynotes our fireside conversations in which we encourage lots of questions from attendees.

Another key part of mesh is the wide variety of topics being explored, discussed and focused on. This year, we’re tackling books, money, social media, online advertising, censorship of the Web, email marketing, presentations, design, television, HR and video.

We also have a mini-startup stream on day two, as well as our Hosted Startup program in which 50 entrepreneurs will be invited to attend mesh for free.

If you’re looking for food for thought on how the Web is impacting how we live, work and play, you’ll find lots of insight at mesh.

If you want insight, information and inspiration about how to do your job better or differently, there are plenty of hands-on sessions.

Tickets are now on sale. Pre-registration tickets can be purchased for $579, while one-day tickets (which we created this year) are $399.

It is why we bring in speakers who are actively involved in new ideas, trends and businesses that are changing the digital landscape. These sessions are great food for thought because they’re designed to make you think, explore new angles and consider new and different concepts that are shaping how the Web is evolving.

This year, for example, our keynote speakers – Ryan Carson, JP Rangaswami, Josh Benton and Kyle Monson – will bring you into the fast-moving worlds of education, work, media and brand journalism.

And we’ve got panels focused on the future of money, books, education, politics and travel.

But the other side of mesh is where we deliver panels and workshops that deliver insight and information about how to do your jobs differently or better.

These are hands-on and interactive sessions with a focus on learning, training and education. They are led by people in the trenches who can provide real-world examples and case studies to give you tactical insights, tools and best practices.

For us, success comes when you walk away from of these sessions with inspiration and a list of to-dos when you get back to the office.

This year’s line-up of our get-stuff-done better sessions include Joe Pulizzi (content marketing), Ashley Wilson (email marketing), Scott Lake, Joel Yashinsky and Hessie Jones (social media), Chris Sukornyk, Ray Philipose and Roy Pereira (digital advertising) and Amanda Richardson (presentations).

The bottom line is mesh offers a great one-two punch of strategic thinking and tactical learning, which makes for a great two days.

Pre-registration tickets for mesh are $579. If two days is too much time out of the office, no problem: we have one-day tickets for $399.

Here’s where you can see the complete schedule for mesh, which happens May 15 & 16 at the Allstream Centre in downtown Toronto