Conferences!

Next week is going to be full of talking about doing, rather than doing, because I’ll be attending two conferences.

The first, on the weekend of 11-12 October, is a Johannesburg BarCamp. BarCamps are one of these new class of “unconferences”, where the idea is to get a group of people together, and have them give talks to each other about anything interesting. This one, I suspect, will be like most others and have a strong leaning towards the internet startup space. But I’m excited about the chance to meet some other local people working in this environment, and make some connections.

Then on 13-15 October is MobileActive08. This is a big, proper conference, where “proper” means that it has a topic: “Unlocking the Potential of Mobile Technology for Social Impact”. The agenda is full of really interesting presentations from people around the world using mobile (cellphone) technology to revolutionise business and social development. It’s especially relevant in South Africa, which is such a huge mobile technology market — I keep seeing new and fascinating applications being developed (like the incredibly successful MXit, now with somewhere on the order of 10 million users).

Talking of which, I’m going to these conferences with some mobile ideas of our own in mind — one relating (surprise, surprise) to the health sector. So this week will see a lot of work on getting out marketing paperwork sorted out.

Lastly: it looks like I can get some guests in for social functions for MobileActive. Any friends in Joburg interested? Drop me an email.

Tags: #barcampjozi #mobileactive08