By: Ari
Last week I wrote about the SocComm event we were attending. Now it is time to summarize it. The event took place Tuesday at a great facility downtown New York City and was planned and produced by Jeff Pulver. Right after the event I left on vacation so I just got an opportunity to post this now. 48 hours delay is still ok, no?
SocComm was a great and energizing event. It was different than most conferences or seminars one usually attends and it really did live up to our expectations bringing together experts, professionals in the space and just enthusiasts from several disciplines and from all over the US, who all share one main thing: passion for MICE change (this is my interpretation or attempt to summarize in one word).
As I wrote in my earlier post, combining MICE – Media, Internet, (non traditional) Communications and Entertainment may not be as new as the introduction of VoIP in the first 2-3 years of that industry and the whole world (or most of it) is talking about it one way or another but SocComm had a great mix of expert speakers and dynamic panels.
It was an entertaining, intellectual and high energy event. No boring moments, a crowd (of about 200) listening (analyzing and commenting) to every word (like a good professor lecturing…. well, there was one very good professor), and, as it should be, both the speakers and audience included individuals and start ups, as well as reps from established companies (like MTV, TimeWarner and also Facebook and Google (the last two through surrogates: David Kirkpatrick spoke about Facebook’s role and Jeff Jarvis spoke about Google). One more note: the age group included a few teens and some senior citizens (I think I can say that). They all want to push for “a faster MICE change” and they all understand that there are still challenges both artificial and regulatory as well as adoption of new behavior and yes… also technology and business models.
Phone.com’s Alon Cohen, spoke in the Communications panel. You can read more about this panel here. New ways of communications is what the panel meant to explore. What we are doing today with such ease (call forwarding to any phone with a few clicks on your pc or accepting, routing and greeting your calls based on caller ID, answering your phone based on your presence (location) or clicking on your blog or personal page and reaching you be phone wherever you are all ways of communications using your dumb old phone or brand new iPhone that were not possible just a few years ago.
A couple of good postings on the event can be found here and here – two very different perspectives.
I am already looking forward to Jeff’s next SocComm