This comes a little late as the event is over, but I thought it was worth making some final remarks. On the last day we presented the new look & feel of Whisher, together with some new features such as integrated SIP VoIP, and powerful geolocation functionality.
At the end of the day, Chris Shipley interviewed Martin Varsavsky, who was also being presented with an Entrepreneur of the Year award by the conference organizers. By this time, many attendees had already left, eager to catch trains to take them to Madrid or Barcelona for a flight back home, so the interview was rather bleak. People were asked by the organizers to sit towards the front of the theater to make it look a bit more full (if that was at all possible), and we even saw students from Zaragoza’s University turn up, who had not been present during the rest of the event. We also left after this, as we had a longish drive home, and felt sorry for SpeedBit, who were the last to present, after the interview with Martin.
Some comments about the event:
The venue was nice, but the low glass desks were totally inadequate. At DEMO, we had nice custom-build stands, with the company name on top, so even if you were standing, the laptops were at the right level to show people stuff. At this event, everyone resorted to stealing chairs from around the theater, as none were provided by the organizers.
The WiFi worked OK, but sometimes got too congested. There were two 3Mbit ADSL lines, and six access points tied to each, placed about 20cm from each other. You can guess that interference, and heavy usage by some of the attendees didn’t do the network much good.
For some strange reason, a van with a huge screen was placed in the middle of the main square of Zaragoza, near the event, and live video feeds from the event were shown there. A simultaneous translation ran at the same time, but the volume was set at the same level as the original audio, and the end result was a cacophony that basically amused the locals.
The catering did their best, but left every day just before 17:00. This meant 3 to 4 hours with no food or drink (not even water, never mind coffee).
Little publicity of the event was made, which resulted in basically a couple of local newspapers showing up to report, and the sponsoring newspaper Cinco Dias. Other media was there but were basically not very interested in investigating all the companies presenting. The feeling was a bit depressing, almost like you were presenting to the other companies also attending. There is no point running such an event if absolutely no national press coverage (at least) has been attempted to be captured.
I won’t say the event was bad, we actually met some great people, talked to a few VCs, and had a good time. I will leave you with a few more pictures from the event (and a few more are on my Flickr page).