WebFest.me 2011: 2nd Day With About.me, WordPress, Vox.io, Blacknight and Limundo
The second day of the Web Fest conference is behind us and like yesterday, we prepared a brief summary of everything that was going on here. We were really glad to see a full auditorium on the second day, and so about at 10 AM, the program started.
Today we had several speakers from different startups as few as a few special guests; Matt Mullenweg from Automattic / WordPress and Tony Conrad, the founder of About.me and True Ventures. Due to some technical problems we had at the end, Matt and Tony saved the day by giving the audience a small panel discussion, where they answered many questions asked on Twitter via the Wall of Tweets we installed for Web Fest.
Hard work and Innovation Will Get You Results
Vladimir Nikolić of Limundo started the day off. Trough his lecture, Vladimir described the early years of Limundo and how they got started. Since he already had a full-time job, Vladimir asked his former boss if he could use his spare time at work to work on Limundo. Luckily, the boss approved. Limundo is the leading Serbian auction site with over 150 thousand users and over 40 employees.
Đorđe Zeković of Logate told us about his hacker experience. During his early years, Đorđe did some black-hat hacking. He once even hacked the main Montenegrin ISP, but now he’s working at Logate, a company focused od developing freeware software.
Jakob Marovt of Vox.io started his presentation by describing the problems with today’s (old) telephony; roaming prices are too high, provider-lock devices and even phone numbers; do we still need them? Vox.io is a VoIP (Voice over IP) service working from within your browser, and you can read more about them in our previous blog posts. Jakob announced that they’re working on an iPhone app which will be released soon, so you’ll be able to call your Vox.io friends or landline numbers directly from your Vox.io account, where ever you are. Jakob also showed us a great tip for calling someone who is not in your contact list but has an Vox.io account – just type “call person-name” into Google and their Vox.io profile might come up as a first result.
Ricardo Sousa is the 19 year old founder of the SWITCH conference. He gave a motivational speech for students that attended Web Fest, telling them how they are the generation the world is waiting for. Ricardo mentioned how ideas and the Internet are the things that make the world go around, not the money. Money comes later and it is not most important thing in the big picture of making stuff. Also, ideas are worthless if they’re only ideas. They need to get realized, so pick an idea, choose a goal and start working your brains out.
Michele Neylon, Blacknight registrar CEO showed us how he successfully promoted his company using marketing on a shoestring; social media, guerrila marketing and so on. These tips might be practical for anyone who has a small or no marketing budget at all. Working hard, using the most from SEO, SEM, e-mail marketing, blogs and bloggers, comments, these are all the things that will bring you some free attention.
Tony Conrad is most recognizable as the founder of About.me, a site to easily create one-page portfolios as well as an avid investor at True Ventures. Tony talked about his experience developing the company, stressing how important it is to think creatively and passionately, how thinking “out of the box” is a must to solve a problem. About.me had only four employees in the beginning, but it also had 26 advisors. It took them only 207 days to reach one million user milestone, and AOL acquired them only four days after the public release.
Matt Mullenweg is the guy who founded WordPress, today’s most popular blog platforms. He described how his lifepath looked like, he was only 19 years old when he started to work on WordPress with his friend from England. He told us how WordPress had a really slow start, but as it turns out, several years later, WordPress holds close to 15% of CMS market in the world.
Finally, the conference ended with Matt and Tony giving a panel discussion for the audience, both in Budva and for those watching the live stream. The public asked questions via Twitter and Matt and Tony answered them.
We would like to say Thank You! to everyone who attended Web Fest.me 2011 conference, who helped in organization, we’re thankful for every your tweet, retweet and link share. We hope you had a great time in the last two days and we hope to see you again next year! 🙂
