Virtual Worlds Forum Europe 2007

London, Tuesday 23rd to Friday 26th October. 3pointD already has the press release, so I won’t bother reproducing the speaker list or even the programme; you can just as easily get them from the conference website.

The speaker list is a star-studded list of dozens of thought virtual world thought leaders. Ren Reynolds (no relation) will be there, and I might even finally get to meet Alice Taylor. As you’d expect, IBM are well represented. Colin Parris (IBM VP, Digital Convergence, which is where the 3D Internet work in IBM) is giving the keynote on Thursday (“Cross-world, cross-platform; how close are we to a multi-world integrated framework?”) and Ian is joining a panel later that morning (“Harnessing the power of virtual worlds for corporate collaboration”).

I’ll post about some other upcoming conferences soon. (Update: Ren recently posted a great list of relevant and interesting looking events at Terra Nova). Hope to see you at one of them.

7 thoughts on “Virtual Worlds Forum Europe 2007

  1. Have you seen the _prices_ for that particular conference? It isn’t as if I don’t have experience with attending conferences for people working in long-established fields, where one can earn such an admission price with a couple of days of contract work – but even _they_ were cheaper. (And even then, multinationals balked at the costs of sending more than a few people.)

    The message I get from this is “independent developers, nein danke”.

  2. Interesting point Ordinal. I wonder if the conference organizers are watching this and care to comment?

  3. Delighted you guys like the event. We’ve kept the prices as low as we can, and because the event is largely aimed at corporates and brands, as well as virtual worlds, development companies and agencies, it’s actually – strange for you to hear – priced pretty low. Other corporate events are in the £1200 – £2000 bracket. I know it’s a bit of a reach for independent developers, but if you sign up with the early bird before August 1, it’s as cheap as it gets.

  4. Sasha – I can understand that it is priced at an appropriate level for outside corporations and branding/ad agencies, and that SL consultancies will find it worth their while to pay that because, well, the opportunity to interact with the former very directly affects their livelihood. Any UK or European consultancy would be daft not to go quite frankly.

    It really is a bit much for me as an independent though. Direct contact with corporations and agencies isn’t that important for independents as we are less likely to get work and leads specifically through that route. Don’t get me wrong, it would still be (at the very least) educational and informative, and certainly a positive and useful experience – but it wouldn’t pay for itself. I would mostly be interested in the speakers as it sounds like the lineup is excellent, but again, that doesn’t pay for itself either, and lectures and presentations can be viewed without actually being at the conference concerned.

    I hope that you see my point here and that I am not coming across as hostile; I appreciate that there are different sorts of conference around, it’s just that I really don’t want to see a situation where they are reserved for those able to pay a certain price. (I may actually be able to pay here but I would need to check my budget quite carefully.) The amateur or pro-am developer, incidentally, really _isn’t_ going to be paying over six hundred quid minimum, and there are a lot more of those in SL than in many other technical fields.

  5. Just to finish that thought off, it may be that the less sharp divide between different groups of user in SL compared to a lot of other tech areas (you might have artists, teachers and commercial data analysts all interested in the exact same talks) means that a broader range of convention and conference styles will arise to match that. One conference isn’t going to be right for everyone, and nobody would expect it to.

    I wonder whether meetings of the open-source community, which also has a mix of people interested in the same things with entirely different reasons and backgrounds, might provide some hints.

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