One of the things Tom and I discussed a lot, was my fear that we couldn’t branch out. We started 360|Flex, because we were flex developers looking for a conference worth it’s salt to attend, so we made one. We’re both CF developers (not as much now, but back in the day), but that technology is saturated with ‘ok’ events, it’d be really hard to come in and unseat even the dud event, because of it’s size. So what else?
Tom’s a tinkerer, but to me that didn’t seem genuine, not to mention if we’re both not tinkering then it’s even worse (in my mind). We looking in Cel processor programming, to work with the community of game developers working with the Sony PS3. Tom even had lunch with some folks, who more or less told us to shove off. Scratch that.
We thought about doing an event on events, since most other event organizers we’ve met, that do as large or larger events than ours, are well, sorta lame, putting on the same type of event, over and over, because “that’s how it’s done”. But realized that while we think pretty highly of ourselves, no one else in our adopted industry knows about us (save our friends, EventVue and Alli, and Eric) so that was kinda out.
Enter the iPhone. I’ve been trying to learn Obj-C to build iPhone apps for conference use, schedulers, etc. Tom also has been digging into Obj-C. We started looking around and realized, there was no solidifying agent in the iPhone community. Apple, unlike Adobe, could care less about it’s developer communities. Not really surprising, given Apple’s overall attitude to it’s consumers. Enter us.
O’Reilly tried to start a conference and had to bail out, for their own reasons, so the door was left open to us. We reached out to the leading developer forum, to help spread the word, and then moved forward at full speed. We’ve now launched and are fully in “Go” mode for 360|iDev. It’s a rush for sure, we had limited room to add another event to our calendar; 360|Flex was scheduled for May, we have a soon to be announced event for summer-ish, and another 360|Flex sometime late in the year. That left “sooner rather than later” for the first 360|iDev. Yes it’s a tight time frame, our tightest yet for sure! But we’re very positive that the community will enjoy what we offer and benefit. Registrations are brisk, sponsorships are slower than normal, but that’s largely due to the tight time frames, but we do have a few awesome companies in the works, so that’s good. We’re going with our good friends at Ebay to host to keep costs extra low, knowing that sponsorship money will be tight.
We feel it’s a good time for the iPhone development community to get a little closer to each other. Apple’s draconian NDA set a terrible precedent in the community of keeping quiet and not sharing. We’re hoping to break down some of that and get everyone talking.
If you’re an iPhone developer, or know one, make sure to spread the word, help the iPhone developer community grow and prosper. The only place to go is up (corny, I know).