Tag Archives: events

 

The Third WordPress Meetup in Moscow

WordPress Meetup in Moscow, May 19th

The Moscow WordPress Meetup Group is growing and we recently held our third meetup, which was quite a success! We had a total of 12 attendees (including a 5 year old kid) and 4 presentations, around 30 minutes each:

  • What’s new in WordPress 3.4
  • Building a Wiki with WordPress
  • The GNU GPL Explained
  • An Into to HyperDB

We met on a Saturday morning and the weather was perfect, everybody seemed to enjoy it, so let’s hope this thing keeps growing. Got a great deal of positive energy and inspiration, exactly the kind of stuff I need before my trip to Bulgaria :)

Published 17 hours ago with one comment tagged , ,


 

The third WordPress Meetup in Moscow will be held on Saturday, May 19th. Topics will include WordPress 3.4, HyperDB, an intro to GPL, and others, obviously in Russian. Tune in, and invite your friends!

Published 5 days ago with no comments tagged , ,


 

WordPress Moscow Meetup — March 2012

Today was awesome! Okay, not that awesome, but good enough for the first WordPress meetup in Moscow, and I’m glad we made this. I first announced the meetup February 23rd which was three weeks ago and said it would be sometime in March. It took me a quite some time to find a venue and as I posted later, I finally did.

WordPress Moscow Meetup

We gathered at 10 am and obviously some were early, some came in late. We had four short presentations lined up, but due to our time constraints, we did only three, I thought that spending that time just chatting and getting to know each other is more valuable. The presentations were the following:

  • Blog Typography, by a friend and ex-colleague of mine, Nikolay Berning from SKCG, one of the top social media agencies in Moscow;
  • CMS Debates, by Dmitry Volkov, founder of a local web studio called Volkof, he explained why they and their clients always pick WordPress;
  • What is a WordCamp, by me.

Out of the 42 RSVPs of the Facebook event I created, 26 said they were going. I made an extra round with a short survey on Polldaddy, where I gathered only 10 entries. Out of those 10 entries, 7 people came to the meetup. I called some of them after the event to find out why they didn’t show up, top reason was traffic jams — of course, it snowed like crazy last night.

We haven’t made much photos from the event, but we all had a great time and left the place with something we’ve learnt, which is a great feeling. I’m thinking about growing the meetup group, and gathering once a month, and when that’s large enough, we’ll all be ready and set for the first WordCamp in Moscow. Fingers crossed!

I made only one new connection at the meetup, which was Dmitry. The rest of the attendees were friends and people I worked with in the past. Please share your thoughts and comments below. Let us know if you had experience organizing a WordPress meetup group in your area, and how was your first attempt :)

Published 3 months ago with 3 comments tagged ,


 

I'll be at Webrazzi Summit 2011 Istanbul

Conference after conference. I’ll be at Webrazzi Summit tomorrow (October 18th) at Point Hotel Barbaros in Istanbul. I’ve never been to the event before and I’ve actually never been to any conference in Istanbul so this is going to be a first, although hopefully the event will be all in English.

The speakers list is quite impressive, with folks from Facebook, Yandex, PayPal, Vodafone and other tech companies. Hopefully I’ll have some time to network around and meet people if language doesn’t become a barrier of course. Feel free to ping me on Twitter if you’d like to have a chat during the event. Can’t promise to be there all day long though, since we’re all busy with work as always :)

Cheers and hope to see you at Webrazzi Summit 2011!

Published 8 months ago with no comments tagged


 

I'll be at Google Developer Day 2011

Google Developer Day 2011I can’t believe this is the first post I’m writing here in September. I really have to do something with myself and my time management and in my defense I can only say Theme.fm is doing pretty good, but okay, this post is not about WordPress.

This post is about my favorite tech conference — Google Developer Day and this year will be my third year in a row in Moscow. I’m not expecting much this year since from last year I’ve stepped a little bit away from Google App Engine, although I’m still using it from time to time. What’s interesting this year is the “Social” track and of course Google+. I bet the room will be packed, just like Wave during it’s days ;)

Also interesting: VC Panel, Google+ Hangout Apps, Google+ APIs and of course the good time we’ll have with my friends, the food and drinks, amazing as usual. And let’s hope I get to see some of my “old friends” from Google ;) Make sure you poke me if you’re coming so we can chat and play video games during the breaks.

Published 8 months ago with 2 comments tagged , ,


 

The First TechCrunch Conference in Moscow

So the TechCrunch Moscow conference is over and this post is my review of what happened out there. The conference was held in on the 13th of December in Moscow, metro station Kropotkinskaya, a building called Red October — not the best venue around, but okay for their first conference in Moscow, and they’ve got much to learn from Google, who have been doing their Google Developer Day conference for three years in a row now. Kudos to Mike Butcher (@mikebutcher) for making this happen and good luck doing so next year!

I was excited when I first heard that TechCrunch is coming to Moscow, but unfortunately I can’t say that I loved it. I did like it, but not love, especially the first part of it. Yandex CEO Arkady Volozh and Mail.ru CEO Dmitry Grishin were one of the first guests having their Q&A panels on stage together with Emma Barnett from The Daily Telegraph. So Yandex officially announced that they’ll be launching cloud computing services to third parties, probably in 2011. Mail.ru seems to be all about gaming these days, search and social? — not really. Dmitry Grishin was talking about how players kill each other and buy better weapons from Mail.ru because they get angry — now that speech was pretty funny ;)

Clones or Not panel introduced Elena Maslova and Dmitry Stavitsky, while Pavel Durov (author of the number 1 Facebook clone Vkontakte.ru) didn’t show up at all. Strange isn’t it? Some people believe that he doesn’t exist at all and it’s all made up.

Akrady Dvorkovich, well nothing much to say here actually — Skolkovo, Skolkovo, Skolkovo and Skolkovo.

The other talks for some reason, are not really worth mentioning here on my blog, so I’ll go directly to the startups competition. Honestly, it was horrible, and I know Mike Butcher would say the same deep in his heart. Mixxmuse won because they were the only ones who actually had clients, and because “the music industry is now growing”, which is fair I’d say. Others were like… Meh ;)

The after-party in a cafe nearby was good, but damn the music was too loud, and then some girl took the microphone and started shouting out loud while playing the piano — that was awful. But I did have a good talk with a few marketeers and a VC there from Japan (I’m not disclosing their names.) and then back home to get some sleep, since Tuesday was a working day. Yeah, perhaps the day of the week was not chosen right either. Google always does these on Fridays ;) and free of charge…

[nggallery id=29]

Well anyways, I want to say a big thank you to Mike Butcher, the TechCrunch team and Digital October for making this happen. Wish you guys luck and hope to see you next year. And yeah, I got Mike’s business card ;)

Published 2 years ago with 2 comments tagged ,


 

Le Web Conference, Paris 2010

Honestly, I haven’t been to the conference, but the guys at Ustream did an amazing job at bringing up the show live. The video quality was perfect, while sound had some problems in the beginning, which were solved in the second half of the first day of the conference. For those of you not familiar with Le Web, it’s the number one Internet conference in Europe organized by Loic Le Meur (@loic), founder of Seesmic.

Le Web brings together hi-tech companies all over the planet for a two-day session with presentations, Q&As and interviews. This year’s conference was dedicated to Platforms. We’ve seen companies like Mozilla, PayPal, Automattic, Facebook, Twitter, Google, Foursquare, Renault, TechCrunch and many many others on stage, as well as a set of early-stage companies giving their 3 minute pitches in the startups competition.

Loic

I cannot say that every part of the show was exciting, but switching to the startups competition from time to time (which was held in another hall) was the only thing that kept me from being bored. Kudos to Le Web and Foursquare for creating a special exclusive badge for Le Web 2010. You could get that badge on Foursquare by checking in all the three venues.

So let’s quickly go through the talks that I’ve pointed out starting with Google.

Presentations, Talks and Q&As

Marissa Mayer (@marissamayer) who is VP at Google did quite an interesting Q&A with Michael Arrington, Editor at TechCrunch. I really loved some of the topics that Mike came up with – “What would you do if you were the CEO at Yahoo?”, “So Latitude is one of your products, right? Can we just both agree it’s pretty terrible?” and some others.

Google has also made a quick presentation of the new Nexus S and the Android Gingerbread platform, but they were too greedy to give away a few phones, having four of them right there on stage.

Nokia has spoken about their mobile device coming up in 2011, and their brand new look at the platform. It seems that the new device will not have any buttons at all. Loic joked it would sense your thoughts and give you feedback directly to your eyes ;)

Charlie Kindel (@ckindel) from Microsoft spoke about the new WP7 Developer Ecosystem and mentioned that the new Windows mobile will be like the X-box Live with an awesome gaming experience. Let’s see where that ends up.

I also loved the short story by Dennis Crowley (@DENS), CEO at Foursquare, who said that he has no idea on how to spend $50 million, which is why he turned down a $140 acquisition offered, going instead for a series B funding. During his Q&A geeks from the audience came up to ask a few questions, and Loic did point out one guy from Siberia (@danilka) wearing a cool “Have a working prototype, looking for a VC” t-shirt.

Alexia Tsotsis (@alexia) did a quick Q&A with Matt Mullenweg (@photomatt) and Toni Schneider (@tonidotorg) and it turns out that 10% of all the websites in the Internet are powered by WordPress! Fascinating, isn’t it?

[nggallery id=28]

Sorry for the photos quality, they’re not really photos — they’re screenshots from Ustream ;)

Startups Competition

I didn’t watch the whole startups competition, but I did love the whole format of the presentations. Much more professional pitches that what I’ve seen here in Russia at Startup Point or Startup Weekend, yeah, we’ve still so many things to learn. So from all the 16 startups presented on stage, I pointed out Waze, Tiny Pay.me, Super Marmite, and Phonedeck, and I’m pretty sure Paper.li had a very good presentation too.

The three finalists were Waze, Super Marmite and Paper.li, they all got first place trophies ;)

Second day wasn’t as exciting as the first, except of course Matt Mullenweg on stage, I love the way he speaks and kudos to WordPress for making it. Kudos to Ustream for making such a great live show, I wish they could partner up with Google for their IO and Developer Day sessions. Too bad I didn’t make it to Paris this year, but hopefully will be there next year. Thanks for reading!

Published 2 years ago with 2 comments tagged , ,


 

Video: Google Developer Day Moscow 2010

Hurray, the video’s out! Damn I love when Google posts videos about their events, they’re always so exciting! Didn’t find myself anywhere in the shots, but I did find some of my friends. Not to keep you waiting any longer:

Never knew barcode readers are able to parse data from an iPhone screen, that was amazing. For those of you who missed out my short review of the event: Google Developer Day Moscow 2010

Published 2 years ago with one comment tagged , , ,


 

Google Developer Day Moscow 2010

It’s been a good Friday last week, although I was a little bit late for the show. The event was held in Crocus City Hall in Moscow, which is quite wicked unless you drive there by car. Google Developer Day Moscow 2010, we all waited so long for it (one whole year actually) and it turned out to be… fascinating, as usual!

Starting early morning we got some coffee (which I was late for) and took our place in the main hall for the keynote by Eric Tholome and Gene Sokolov and a few other speakers who introduced their sections: Chrome & HTML5 was amazing, 2d and 3d graphics, filesystem API and hardware access, thus – speech recognition, device orientation and more. Chrome Web Store is coming soon (developer preview available). Cloud Computing with the new AppEngine for Business, plus a short introduction to Spring Roo. The Android introduction was quite boring. Other sections (Monetization and Social Web) didn’t get their five minutes during the keynote.

After that we all went out to have some fun, drank coke, played MindBall, PS3 and air hockey. This part turned out to be much more exciting than last year ;) and then came the presentations. I’ll list below the ones I’ve been at, others were promised to be listed on Google Code Blog.

Google Web Toolkit

Fred Sauer (@fredsa) gave us yet another short intro to GWT, mentioned again that the Google AdWords interface is built completely using their toolkit which is wonderful. Yeah, we heard that last year, did anything change? Well yeah, Fred spoke a little bit more about Spring Roo and then off to Eclipse. We’ve seen Eclipse last year too, but it seems that they made some improvements on the Google Plugin for Eclipse and introduced Speed Tracer which is quite exciting.

We went once more through the features of GWT, a brief GWT 2.1 introduction and yet another MVP presentation (for the ones that missed it last year).

This whole presentation made me install Eclipse immediately. I downloaded and installed the Google Plugin with AppEngine and GWT enabled, I switched my workspace to PyDev, created a new Google AppEngine Hello-World project, hit Deploy to AppEngine and bang! It told me that Eclipse cannot deploy my project to AppEngine since it’s not an AppEngine project. What? Goodbye Eclipse, see you next year! ;)

AppEngine for Business

I miseed the first “What’s new in AppEngine” topic by Fred, but Patrick Chanezon (@chanezon) outlined some of the exciting bits in his topic. Patrick introduced us to AppEngine for Business: SLA, Support, Hosted SQL, Custom Domain SSL and Enterprise Admin Console (sounds awesome, doesn’t it) – but yet again, I’m not that keen on trying it, especially with the feeling that they’ve done everything right, but only for Java, while Python is lacking behind. I’m okay with the current console and limitations, so thank you Google ;)

Once again, we’ve been told about Eclipse, the Google Plugin for Eclipse and how easy it is to deploy an application to AppEngine (Java, *sigh*). Patrick then gave us a short intro to the Google Apps Marketplace and took questions, which were mostly about feeds, comissions, etc.

VC Investment for Your Company

This was quite interesting with Ilya Ponomarev (@iponomarev) and Don Dodge (@dondodge) on stage. They discussed doing business in Russia, startups, business incubators and Skolkovo Innovation Center. Surprisingly Ilya mentioned Timothy Post (@timothypost) and Runet Labs as the ones launching Techstars in Russia.

Ilya and Don took many questions, most of which were either boring, or from journalists ;) At the end of the session, Don disappeared and Ilya gathered a group outside in the main hall and spent another hour answering questions (some of which were silly again). But yeah, it’s good to hear that stuff like this is at least being discussed. A good quote from Don about looking for VC investment in your startup:

One person can have a delusion. But if three people are crazy, okay, we’ll give you the money!

Don Dodge at Google Developer Day Moscow 2010

Well, that’s quite it! At the end of all the sessions we got Google Developer Day and Google Chrome t-shirts, beer and wine, again, this seems to be a tradition. I’ve gathered a Twitter list of people I met, heard about and seen at Google Developer Day, you can find it right over here: @kovshenin/gddru – feel free to poke me if there’s somebody I forgot to add to that list.

Anyways, it’s been a great day, hope to be there next year!

Published 2 years ago with 3 comments tagged , , , , , , , ,


 

Meet me at Google Developer Day Moscow 2010

Google Developer Day Moscow 2010 is on it’s way (tomorrow, November 12), and yes, I received my invitation. It’s interesting to know that this year’s invitations included a barcode together with the registration number. It seems that Google was quite tight last year when 1000 invitations were sent out, and over 1500 people came to the event. This resulted in people standing on some of the most interesting lectures, which of course was not very comfortable. The wifi channels were overloaded too. So it seems that this year we’ll have a little bit more fresh air.

The agenda is split into five sections: Android, Chrome & HTML5, Cloud Computing, Monetization and Social Web. Below is a short list of topics I’m willing to attend (I may change my mind though ;)

  • Google Web Toolkit
  • What’s New in App Engine
  • Exploring Google’s Social APIs
  • Large Scale Data Analysis and Processing on App Engine
  • VC investment for your company
  • Google Apps Marketplace: Integrate and Sell Your Cloud Apps to Google Apps Customers

So it’s mostly about the Cloud Computing section (if you read my tweets you might have noticed that there’s some Python code overtaking my brains for the last two months).

Feel free to give me a call if you’d like to meet me in person on the event. My cell is +7 (926) 3211647, oh and for those of you who don’t know yet, my name is Konstantin (see sidebar). So, hope to see you at Google Developer Day, and hope there’ll be coke and beer like last year ;)

Published 2 years ago with one comment tagged , ,



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