mesh is Canada's digital transformation and innovation event taking place in Calgary and Toronto each year.
Well, that didn’t take long – the 30 student tickets for mesh have all been snapped up, which goes to show that the early bird gets the tickets…or something like that.
Non-student tickets (aka regular tickets) have been selling briskly since we opened the ticket office yesterday. You can get your mesh ticket here, while tickets for the inaugural meshU can be purchased here.
The first two mesh conferences have been amazing with great speakers, enthusiastic and engaged participants and some awesome networking.
Since we’re always interested in making mesh better, we asked for your suggestions and feedback. At the top of the list was a desire for more hands-on sessions where people could get a better handle on how to use new technology – be it podcasting, distributed servers, interface design, AJAX, etc.
We listened, we talked about it, we talked about it some more and….decided to expand mesh by adding something new called meshU.
So what is meshU? It’s a one-day event that will feature small, focused workshops. We hope meshU will meet a growing need for practical, down-to-earth information about the tools, the knowledge and the expertise for startups, Web designers and developers of all kinds.
We’ve lined up some great speakers – Dabble DB’s Avi Bryant, Pownce’s Leah Culver, jQuery’s John Resig and Carsonified’s Ryan Carson.
As for the rest of the programming, that’s where you come into play. We’re looking for your input, ideas, suggestions and feedback on the type of workshops you want to see happen and, if you want, who should present them.
Submitting an idea is quick and easy – all you need to do is fill out this the online form (powered by Wufoo.com). We’re looking forward to your ideas and, of course, seeing you on May 20 (the day before mesh) at meshU, which is taking place at the MaRS Collaboration Centre in downtown Toronto.
To attend meshU, you can purchase tickets here for $239.
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!