Going Solo

A quick quote sent to me by my friend Kevin Marks. To be honest, I’m too knackered right now to read the whole article, but it looks interesting:

The most compelling statistic of all? Half of all new college graduates now believe that self-employment is more secure than a full-time job. Today, 80% of the colleges and universities in the U.S. now offer courses on entrepreneurship; 60% of Gen Y business owners consider themselves to be serial entrepreneurs, according to Inc. magazine. Tellingly, 18 to 24-year-olds are starting companies at a faster rate than 35 to 44-year-olds. And 70% of today’s high schoolers intend to start their own companies, according to a Gallup poll.

An upcoming wave of new workers in our society will never work for an established company if they can help it. To them, having a traditional job is one of the biggest career failures they can imagine.

Much of childhood today is spent, not in organized sports or organizations, but in ad hoc teams playing online games such as Half Life, or competing in robotics tournaments, or in constructing and decorating MySpace pages. Without knowing it, we have been training a whole generation of young entrepreneurs.

And who is going to dissuade them? Mom, who is a self-employed consultant working out of the spare bedroom? Or Dad, who is at Starbuck’s working on the spreadsheet of his new business plan?

The Next American Frontier

Quick news: the main session videos are up; help us tag the photos on Flickr; a survey has been sent out to participants (let me know if you didn’t get it) — thanks for filling it in as soon as possible; if you wrote about Going Solo and it’s not in the coverage list, let me know (e-mail or Twitter message); make sure you’ve signed up for the newsletter if you want to be sure not to miss news about the upcoming Going Solo Leeds (and elsewhere!) and the online community developments we’re planning (I’ll blog about it too, but right now I really need a nap… tiredness of these last months is really kicking in!).

Wow. I think I can say that. Your response to Going Solo exceeded all my expectations. I’m taking the week-end off but will be back on Monday with online news, cooking up a survey for participants, and collecting links to blog posts and photos.

In the meantime, check out:

• talk videos on DailyMotion (more being uploaded this week-end, thanks Sébastien!)
• official photos on Flickr (thanks Guillaume!)
• live notes by the legendary live-blogger Suw Charman
• live notes by Urs
• live notes by Jaap
• more links
• sign up for the newsletter or join the Facebook group to keep in touch with the Going Solo community if you haven’t yet

Thanks to everybody who came, everybody who helped out, and everybody who supported this project during the last months. I couldn’t have done this without you.

A special thanks to the speakers, who delivered a really really great programme.

See you in a few days!

So, here we are. Going Solo is now. Some practical information and links, for attendees and those of you following from afar.

• media coverage & backchannels (IRC, Twitter, goingsolo tag)
  
• be nice with the wifi
• info for the evening
• watch the talks on DailyMotion
• goingsolo tag on Technorati
• links to going-solo.net on Technorati
• photos tagged goingsolo on Flickr
• the programme, session descriptions, and speaker bios

Make note of the wifi access code before you hit the venue (it’s a long story, please don’t ask until next week):

• network name: lvm-73326
• WPA Personal key: 59jh-uwmn-hc2s-xtew

Just a quick reminder: everyone, registered or not yet to Going Solo, is welcome tonight at Darling Pub in Lausanne for a few Pre Conference Drinks.

Weather is un peu printanier aujourd’hui en Suisse, as we say in French. Les averses et les éclaircies se succèdent capricieuses dans un ciel aéré. Il reste un peu de neige sur les sommets. Les tulipes ont fané mais les glycines sont en pleine floraison.

Le pire est attendu pour samedi, qui devrait être bien pluvieux. Plutôt un plan musées à prévoir pour ceux qui auront la chance d’être en ville encore le jour après la conférence que barbecue au Parc Bourget, a priori. Mais sait-on jamais…

De nombreuses animations sont prévues à Lausanne en cette fin de semaine. Quelques suggestions: Samedi, il y a le marché en ville. Un des plus anciens d’Europe croit-on. Avec le Guet de la Cathédrale, qui sonne les heures depuis le Moyen Âge, c’est une de nos jolies traditions qui perdure dans les rues piétonnes du centre-ville. Faire le plein de légumes frais ou de fleurs pour vos mamans, flâner dans les librairies de seconde main et musarder sur les terrasses est toujours un bonheur.

Vendredi après-midi et samedi sur la Place Saint-François, une quarantaine de vignerons vaudois viennent faire déguster le nouveau millésime. Le Luna Park est ouvert à Bellerive, les piscines aussi. Si le temps s’arrange, pourquoi pas un petit tour en bateau solaire Aquarel sur le Léman ou sauter sur un navire de la CGN pour admirer le rivage? Sans oublier Balelec pour les braves.

Quel programme… Sans mentionner le Off Programme de Going Solo!

A tout à l’heure, see you tonight at Darling!

Anne Dominique

Well, there we are. Tomorrow is the big day. Tomorrow! I can hardly believe it 🙂

This has one consequence for those of you who may still be thinking of making a last-minute registration decision: we’re closing online registration tonight around 8pm. We’re really happy we managed to keep it open until now, but at some point we need to lock the numbers and print the badges.

So hurry up and get it done today. If you miss tonight’s deadline, you may still show up at the venue, but

• the walk-in price is 700 CHF
• we will ask you to pay in cash (there is a cash machine next to the hotel)
• you will have to write your name on your badge by hand
• if you are in possession of a discount code, it will not work
• of course, you’ll get all the other benefits (including goodies) like any other attendees, no fear 🙂

This is where you can register online. See you tomorrow!

We will have power outlets. We will have wifi.

One word of caution, however:

• the power outlets are Swiss — not European, Swiss
• we have one wifi base station and lots of bandwidth, which should be fine — but please be gentle.

Some details.

Swiss power outlets look like European ones: two round holes. But they’re slightly smaller holes than some (if not most) European outlets. Bring an adaptor.

We’ll try to put outlets all over the place in the main hall, so there should be plenty for everyone.

Conference wifi is one long painful topic. I’ve given a hard time to more than one conference organizer for their flakey wifi, so I’m quite prepared for a return of justice and you lot giving me a hard time if things go wrong. However, I’ve seen the numbers of the setup Swisscom is providing us, and I think we’ll be just fine. I’d like to remind you, though, of some “play nice” practices for conference wifi:

• quit Skype: yes, I know many of you are addicted to Skype group chats — but Skype is P2P and with lovely conference bandwidth available, chances are the network might pick you as a supernode, routing a whole lot of traffic through your little computer — and the conference broadband. Use the IRC backchannel instead (download mIRC for Windows or Colloquy for OSX if you’re not set up for IRC yet).
• don’t use P2P: Going Solo is not the day to download music, videos, or start torrenting — there are way more interesting things to do there!
• keep your bandwidth usage conference-related: feel free to upload photos and videos of the conference, but catch up on your general Flickr upload backlog or surf YouTube from your hotel room or at some other time, thanks.
• blogs and e-mail are fine: these are not bandwidth-heavy activities, so go ahead (we hope you’ll find the programme compelling enough to leave your inbox alone for a few hours, though ;-))
• if things flake out, wait: if you can’t get on the wifi, or the internet access seems clogged, give it a few minutes before trying again.

Thanks for your help!

There have been a few questions on Twitter, so here’s some information for the Big Day.

First of all, aside from Sébastien who will be filming and uploading the talks, Charbax who will be conducting video interviews, and Ernst-Jan who will be live-blogging for The Next Web blog, Swiss podcaster Thierry Weber of Culture Pod will also be present with his camera to report on the event.

And then, there are all of you, the people formerly known as the audience ;-), Going Solo attendees, bloggers, podcasters, videobloggers, photographers or reporters in your own right. You are most welcome to blog, photograph, record, sketch all the happenings of the day. We’ll do our best to keep track of everything that pops on our radar, but you can help us by:

• tagging your various productions goingsolo
• sending a tweet @goingsolo with the link or an e-mail to steph at going hyphen solo dot net

We encourage you to use a Creative Commons license, by-nc-sa for example, but of course you’re free to do what you want with your work. If you produce video material, we’d be really happy to be able to include it on the official Going Solo DailyMotion page (with a link to the original, of course), if you’ll let us.

As far as the backchannel is concerned, Twitter is of course the place to go (use @goingsolo in front of your message if you want to make sure we see it). If you don’t have an account yet, open one now!

There will be folks hanging out in channel #goingsolo on the Freenode IRC network, too. I’m already there – come on in.

Update: if you’re on Twitter, join the Going Solo community on SixGroups. Give them your Twitter name and @sixgroups will start following you. Any of your updates using the hashtag #goingsolo will appear in the SixGroups livestream.

I got some great news this week-end: Charbax will be conducting a series of video interviews (in HD format!) at Going Solo, for techvideoblog.com.

I met him at LIFT08, where he interviewed me about Going Solo. I already published the video here ages ago, but here it is again if you want to have a peek.

[youtube=http://youtube.com/watch?v=Ud4b1RQYPtE]

I liked what he did for LIFT08 so much that I asked him if he would be available to come and do the same thing at Going Solo. He immediately accepted, but we weren’t 100% sure his schedule of work with the UEFA would allow him to be there the whole day. But it does!

So, keep an eye open for Charbax at Going Solo, and let him interview you if he asks!

We’re lucky to be holding Going Solo at a venue (Hotel Albatros-Navigation) where the staff and owners are not only friendly and helpful, but also flexible enough to allow us to leave registration open this week. Yay!

That’s pretty cool, because we know that in the world of mobile phones and endless choices, many people make last-minute decisions about their plans. And it’s not just whether or not to attend a tech/business conference: I know a couple of people who organize completely different kinds of events, and who tell me that last-minute sign-ups is a general (and recent) trend.

This poses a certain number of problems for event organizers, of course (when the number of attendees doubles in the week precending your event, or when you have 30 people instead of the 600 expected three weeks before) — but that’s another issue. (Hmm… maybe another event idea cooking…)

I’m happy that we’re able to keep this option open for you. Don’t use it as an excuse to put things off until the very last day, though: you won’t get a pretty printed badge if you sign up too late, and there is an extra fee if you pay cash at the door.

So, now’s the time. Tell your friends too.

I’m convinced that for any conference taking place nowadays, filming talks and putting them online is a must. This allows more people to learn about the event, gives extra visibility to the speakers, and also lets people who couldn’t make it to the conference benefit from it.

And no, I don’t believe that people are going to decide not to come to the conference because they can get all the talks online for free (have you ever spent a whole day in front of your computer watching recorded sessions?)

So, all of Going Solo will be filmed and put online almost in real time (we’re not certain we’ll manage streaming). For that, I would like to extend particular thanks to Sébastien Baudet of Taxi-pub.ch, who will be managing camera, editing and uploads.

For hosting and distribution of the videos, we’re partnering with DailyMotion, who have very kindly (and speedily!) set us up with an Official User account for Going Solo. This is where you’ll have to head to see the videos on the big day, if you’re not lucky enough to be on location. We’ve already added a few videos to the account, and chances are you’ll see one or two more before things start getting really hot on Friday.

So, a big thanks to Taxi-pub.ch and DailyMotion for their help in making these videos available to the public!