Hey, guess what? It’s only a couple of weeks until mesh 2010 — which you still have time to get tickets for, in case you haven’t yet, although they are vanishing quickly. And here’s another reason to get some: we are going to be doing something extra special this year at mesh. No, it’s not a cage match between Sarah Palin and Tina Fey (I was outvoted). It’s something even better — a live taping of The Agenda with Steve Paikin, the award-winning public affairs show on TVO. Together with Agenda producer and all-around big brain Mike Miner, we have put together a great panel that will be filmed on the scene at the MaRS Discovery District and later broadcast on TVO. There will be a limited number of seats available, so book your tickets soon. Looking forward to seeing you all at mesh. For more details on speakers and sessions this year, check out the schedule and the home page.
We created meshU in 2008 because the community told us they wanted an event that offered hands-on workshops about Web design, development and team management.
The past two years have been terrific with great speakers and an enthusiastic reception from attendees. We’ve also had some great support from sponsors – without which meshU and mesh couldn’t happen.
To support meshU, we’re rolling out a new sponsorship package called “practically meshU family”.
What you get when you join the family is five regular tickets to meshU, your logo on the Web site and at MaRS, and a table-top for your use during the event.
More important, a “practically meshU family” will let us open the student tickets category by 10 more tickets. In essence, you will be sponsoring 10 students who wanted to attend meshU but couldn’t.
This year more than ever before, we’ve received a lot of requests for additional student tickets, but the event can not sustain itself if we open up additional tickets in this substantially discounted category.
That left us thinking that maybe there may be folks in the community that believe in meshU and thought that they could help others so they could benefit from these tickets. Hence, this category was created.
If you’d like to become “practically meshU family”, please contact info@meshconference.com.
With mesh just about two weeks away, I thought it would be a good idea to talk about the keynotes that we’ve lined up.
In many respects, this year’s keynotes offer a fascinating mix of people who will be talking about a variety of topics – everything from how a newspaper is using APIs to grow its business, and the troubling world of cyber-hackers, to online payments and social networking.
The keynotes include:
Chris Thorpe, the Developer Advocate for the Open Platform with The Guardian, will talk about the newspaper is working on ways to integrate its content, data and APIs with other people’s technology and businesses.
Joseph Menn will provide insight how cyber-criminals are hacking to major government and corporate computer systems, and how governments of Russia and China are protecting and directing their behaviour.
Scott Thompson, the president of PayPal will provide his take on how the company has maintained its status as the world’s leading online payment system, and where e-commerce and online payments as heading.
Given LinkedIn’s rapid growth over the past year and its decision to add more feature, Arvind Rajan, LinkedIn’s Vice President of International, will talk about what’s driving the company’s growth and where it sees the social network marketing going.
Tickets to mesh can be purchased here, while tickets to meshU, the one-day event featuring hands-on workshops about Web design and development, can be purchased here.