Despite a distinct lack of spring weather in Toronto at the moment, there’s definitely something in the air — and it’s the warmth of an approaching mesh conference! A lot of people have been emailing and Facebook messaging and Twittering and so on in recent weeks, asking us when we were going to launch mesh 2008 and start selling tickets, and the answer is: Right now.
Hopefully you have the dates (May 21st and 22nd) blocked out in your calendar, and now is your chance to lock up those tickets. The sales window is open, and tickets are $469 each, which we at mesh humbly believe is pretty competitive for a two-day Web conference. We’ve also expanded the number of student tickets to 30 this year, so that more students can mesh with us.
Right now, we can tell you about several keynotes: author Matt Mason, whose new book The Pirate’s Dilemma looks at the implications of digital piracy; Club Penguin co-founder Lane Merrifield, a Canadian who helped build a virtual world for children that was bought by Disney for $350-million; and Ethan Kaplan, the head of technology at Warner Brothers Records, who is intimately involved in the evolution of the modern music industry.
We also have some great panelists and other speakers lined up as well, including University of Toronto philosopher and author Mark Kingwell; the CEO and founder of Techdirt, Mike Masnick; media blogger Rachel Sklar from The Huffington Post; digital-copyright expert Michael Geist; Internet researcher Nancy Baym; the founder of RedFlagDeals.com, Derek Szeto, Blip.tv founder Dina Kaplan, CommunityLend CEO Michael Garrity, Agoracom founder George Tsiolis and a host of others. We’ll be adding more as we get closer to the conference, so be sure to keep checking the site for new names and photos.
As mentioned before, we’ve also added a new feature to mesh this year called meshU, a full day of hands-on workshops and panels for startups, web designers and developers of all kinds. It’s on May 20th, the day before mesh. We’ve got some great speakers and workshop leaders lined up for meshU as well — including Avi Bryant of DabbleDB, Pownce founder Leah Culver, Ryan Carson and John Resig. For more details and a link to where you can buy tickets, check out the meshU site.
Mesh on!
