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I've always wondered why people go to conferences where they sit on their laptops. It's like fiddling with your cell phone at a meeting.
by sayrer 17y ago
I've always wondered why people go to conferences where they sit on their laptops. It's like fiddling with your cell phone at a meeting.
- NathanKP 17y agoIts probably in part a geek pride display: "My laptop is more expensive than yours." "Hah, but I have a laptop with longer battery life." You don't go to conferences to listen, you go to show off your laptop. ;)
- mechanical_fish 17y agoA large part of a modern techie's intelligence is resident on the Web. This is particularly true at a tech conference, which is all about picking up names and opinions that need to have the facts filled in around them. You go to a talk. The speaker says, offhand, that they just built a big system around AMQP on Erlang. You want to know what the hell AMQP is, and what Erlang is, so that you can ask the speaker or your fellow audience members some intelligent follow-up question before they disappear from your presence. You need Wikipedia, Google, and a handful of specific useful blog posts, and you need 'em now. Another problem is that many of these conferences are so darned huge that you need electronic networks just to locate your colleagues.
- joez 17y agoUnlike a meeting where the presenters might be annoyed, the opposite is true; they'd like the audience to help them generate hype. This could be especially true at a conference like Demo or Techcrunch50 where many products are being launched. You want people to be able to try it out right then and there. There are potential investors watching. More important could be the tech evangelists with huge followings watching. A blog post or even a tweet from them could be worth thousands of users. You want them to tweet you, get retweeted and generate that viral buzz.