European Software Conference 2008 (ESWC 2008)

Second year in a row I was able to participate at European Software Conference ESWC (the last year ESWC 2007 took place in Germany, in Cologne). This time the location was Berlin, Germany, exactly in the middle of the Berlin at Maritim Proarte (my mistake, I booked at Maritim Hotel(without proarte) at 5-6 km, the good thing I was not the only one 😀 doing this mistake).

The conference was a surprise for me, the quality in the presentations is increased from the last year, a lot of information available. The whole concept of the ESWC was based this time on 2 Tracks (2 presentations in the same time). Usually the ISV-s are shy guys/gals, but this time the audience really was open on questions and on debate on different topics.

I will do a pros/cons of the conference ( I do not have photos at all, but I hope the “Avangate guys” will let me use some of their photos):

Pros:

1. Is good to have a conference in Europe, and not only the SIC for USA, ISDEF for Rusia.
2. The orientation in the conference is towards ISV and microISV and should remain like this.
3. The panels are most of the time formed of entrepreneurs+isv+marketers and you have because of this the possibility to hear all the sides of the developing, support, sale process for a software product of online service/product
4. A lot of known people ASP (Mike), Tucows (Greg), Avangate (Adriana and Florin – thank you for the bear and the clever text on the t-shirt), ShareIt (Tatyana), and a lot of developers I knew from ASP (Oliver) or from the last year. A good opportunity to discuss your techniques and to compare them with the other used techniques, the ESWC is no place for self promotion but more trying to share and gather information and to do networking.

Cons:

1. If the last year there were 7 Romanian speakers now only 3 (is the recession?!)
2. Too much discussions about AdWords (that is why my jokes were around this theme)
3. Too bad I reserved in the other Maritim hotel, I had to take a taxi 3-4 times between the hotels
4. I will make a note for the next time “do not talk business on launch otherwise you will have no time for eating”
5. Next time 3 times more promotional CD-s with me
6. The wireless in the hotel was 8 euros for 60 minutes

In the seond day of the conference I took part in a panel: ISV business – how to make it effective together wit Alwin Hoogerdijk – Collectorz.com (Moderator), Tetyana Franke – sales Manager share-it! and Florin – e-commerce Consultant Avangate. An open discussion with the audience, with questions regarding bug tracking options, payment processors, support, promotion etc.

The audience was interested in the subject (as far I have seen), I tried to keep a my responses in the humor/serious side, the audience was really willing to have more information from us and more willing to ask questions (comparing with the last year). Again a lot of interest in how you promote your busiones, and how you do it cheap.

I will start to present slowly some of the new things presented and the ways these can be integrated, probably I will start with the solution from deal united.