Cross-posting this from the ThingsCon blog.
It’s 10 days to ThingsCon. Time to take stock of where we stand!
Speakers & program
As far as we can tell, there will be 35 speakers. This may be hard to believe, but it’s actually kind of tricky to figure out the exact number as there’s lot of fluctuation and last minute tweaking. Including all workshops it’s even more.
The program is two days packed with goodness ranging from open source medical hardware to building a Rube Goldberg Machine, from maker 101 to robotics, from startup pitch to designing for large-scale manufacturing, from design to business models, from personal founders stories to ethics & sustainability. It’s going to be wild.
Participants
We don’t have easily accessible stats to the geographic distribution of all ThingsCon participants. From a quick scan, we know a few things, though: You are from all over Europe, plus quite a few from the US (including a solid contingent of West Coast folks).
We’re excited that through the Global Innovation Gathering program a group of over 40 entrepreneurs, makers and innovators from Africa, Latin America and Asia will join in. On top of that, it’s great that a large group of students will join, too.
As for professional backgrounds, that’s harder to tell without digging deeply into the company websites (which we did very superficially a while ago to show which organizations will be represented at the conference). We know of individual tinkerers, engineers and designers, entrepreneurs, startups, agencies, academics, researchers, software and hardware people, students, hackspace operators, investors and many, many more. It’s a great and very diverse group.
Supporters, partners & sponsors
With TinkerSoup, Github, Spark, Electric Imp, Postscapes, IotPedia, Capscovil, gestalten and Highway1 we have a great network of supporters across the board. A special shout out to our advisors, too: Alexandra Deschamps-Sonsino, Bethany Koby, Brady Forrest & Reto Wettach. Thank you all!
Specials
There’s plenty of stuff happening on the fringes of ThingsCon, and we expect lots more to pop up spontanteously. (Follow the #thingscon hashtag on Twitter!)
At this point, we’d like to mentioned particularly the pitch we’re setting up with Betahaus, Betapitch|Hardware. For the 40 fastest ticket holders to sign up, attending the pitch is free (please ping us if you haven’t received a ticket code), everyone else needs to register here. During and after the pitch, we’ll kick off the ThingsCon party at Betahaus, too.
Tickets
You haven’t signed up yet? Whaaaat? Do it. Do it now. You know you want it, too: thingscon.com/tickets.
