It’s gonna be a busy summer!

Tom and I first met Steve Weiss at 360|Flex San Jose ’07 (Yeah the very first one) and we hit it off immediately. Steve’s an awesome guy so it wasn’t hard for us to like him.

We talked at length about our thoughts on conferences, our approach, our goals, etc.

The friendship continued through the last few years, Steve coming to the events he could so we could chat in person, otherwise email was our medium. Back before InsideRIA launched Tom and I were actually in talks to run it, which was were pretty excited about. Things didn’t work out (as they do sometimes in business) and we all continued to chat.

Around the time InsideRIA was getting off the ground, the idea of an RIA conference was born. Something that wasn’t Adobe specific like 360|Flex, that brought as many of the competing(?) RIA platforms together to network, share war stories, share approaches to problems etc.

That talk continued on and off for months, until now :)

We’re happy to announce our partnership with our pals at O’Reilly! InsideRIA and InsideMobile are our first (of many?) collaborative efforts. Each will be a 2 day event, in San Jose CA. We’ll bring the same cool “John and Tom” vibe, and O’Reilly will bring their awesome reach and connections in the multiple communities. A match made in heaven. I can’t wait to meet everyone that comes to these events! The Call for papers are open for both events, so fire off an idea.

Tom and I also announced recently that the second 360|iDev was in the works for September. In Denver (my home town)! It’s gonna be a fun time, in a fun city!

The last part of the busy is that Steves boss, Joe was very interested in 360|Whispering, our fledgling eBook publishing service. There might be something there! I’m excited, we’ve got a few authors already signed on, so content should be showing up soon, especially an awesome ‘Tech Novella’ (Tom’s term) on Android development from Faisal Abid.

The 4 W’s

I’m quickly becoming a fan of the small Biz Bee blog. This post was especially worth addressing here, since for many the answers might surprise or at least lead to “Ah, that makes sense”. So here are our 4 W’s.

1. Who are you?

Tom and John, for short. We (maybe more me, than Tom) went through a phase of trying to really make 360|Conferences its own identity, separated from its founders. We thought it made sense for the company itself to have an identity, but in the end, we were wrong. We couldn’t make people recognize the company, and we realized the “Tom and John” brand was firmly established, and strong. So to most people, and businesses, 360|Conferences is something that’s on checks, and letterhead, and the company is “John and Tom”.

[Tom here: The one thing I found interesting during that time was size perception of the company.  When we pushed 360Conferences as an entity/identity, people assumed that meant we had an army (or at least one or two helping hands) back at the office.  Which simply wasn’t true.  It was weird to see that when you push a brand name as a company, people assume that means it’s no longer just the founders.]

That’s only part of ‘who’ though. The rest is that as a company Tom and I strive to break a lot of existing models. We found the conference business to be broken, so we’ve set out to show that an event with high ROI doesn’t have to cost over $1,000 or more. We’re close to proving that not only is it possible to do, but it’s possible to do so and still be profitable enough to do it full time.

Our core values (to me) are building community, getting people together to talk and learn from one another. We love to shake each attendees hand when they pick up their badge, we love to say high and walk the room during lunch, and hold raffles. Our core values are community.

2. What do you do?

This one has confused many of our customers and rightly so I’m afraid. We’ve been confusing on the topic to ourselves, and if we’re not clear how can anyone else be.

We organize conferences. Conferences around communities that we are interested and/or involved in. Communities that are just getting big enough for an event to bring them all together.

More generally we bring people together. 360|Conferences bring them together in real time to meet face to face for a few days at a time. 360|Whisperings is brings them together in delayed time via inexpensive articles that satisfy a specific knowledge.

3. Why does it matter?

Our company and offerings help make a community stronger. We believe the strength of a community directly impacts the strength of the product or services that community exists around. By breaking down the walls that separate community, we increase the throughput on ideas and collaboration. Our events have been the launch pads for books, open source initiatives, jobs and business.

4. What makes you different?

This is a big one, obviously. Any company that can’t answer this well should probably start looking at new ventures. Here’s why we’re different. We care. Conferences aren’t a marketing expense for our company or product. We’re not trying to sell our services disguised as a conference. We don’t have “people”. We don’t hire temps to work registration. We don’t hide until it’s keynote time.  We don’t look at our customers as a necessary evil.

If you come to one of our events, the person handing you a badge is either Tom, his wife Alison, myself, my wife Nicole, or a close friend that volunteered to help us out. We eat our lunch with everyone else. We man the reg desk all day, every day of the event: directing attendees, answering questions, chatting with people and plain just getting to know our customers. If you don’t see us, we’re either putting out a fire or going to the bathroom (Hey nature calls sometimes, you should see the soda I put away at a conference).

Sure we like profit, sure our goal is to make 360|Conferences a paying gig for us, but the company started as a one off $100 event, to bring together the Flex developer community because the other event options all sucked (and still do).

So that’s the “360|Conferences, 4 W’s as interpreted by John Wilker”.

Core Competency is Important

Tom and I have had this talk many a time, I’ve mentioned it on my blog as well. Core Competency is important. Too many people over look it and branch out in ways that make little to no sense and only hurt themselves and their customers/product.

Today’s example, Facebook. ReadWriteWeb has an interesting article on Facebook suffering Twitter Envy.

Facebook is doing quite well as far as I can tell. I’m a casual user, keeping my info up to date, creating events and such for my work efforts, but it’s not open in a tab in Firefox all day. Heck, my mom is on Facebook, it doesn’t get much more mainstream than that!

But facebook is drinking it’s own kool-aid and rather than watch Twitter, see what it’s doing, and see where the complimentary connections are, good ol’ FB wants to take Twitter on. Why? Who knows? Twitter is microblogging, instant chatter, and often noise. So why would FB want to compete with that?

My guess is the same reason FB has been adding features for the sake of adding features, because they can and have nothing better to do all day. Beacon, tabs, new look, apps, who cares? Sure I can give my friends plants, and poke people and junk, but I don’t do any of that. That’s all noise for what FB is about; posting updates and photos for my friends to see.

Whether Twitter “gets it” or is just too busy keeping the servers up to think up new things, they’ve kept Twitter exactly as it was (more or less) when it launched. 140 characters to tell whomever is listening, what you’re doing, reading, eating, thinking. There’s no apps platform (short of an API), there’s no pokes, green patches, fan pages, or events. There’s no ad network. It’s exactly what all of us signed up for.

Too many businesses seem to feel the need to expand and compete where it doesn’t make sense. Stick with what you’re good at, that’s really what matters, and the markets and such will follow.

Sooooooooooo All that said, to bring it back around to 360|Conferences, Tom and I while we might like to own a hotel chain that is specifically designed around conferences, and while we might like to form a car company, etc. We stick with what we know, and that’s helping bring people together. In person at Conferences or now, through eBooks that make purchases reasonable.We’ve thought about expanding to Sony PlayStation game dev events, thought about an event for event planners, but events for the sake of events, isn’t our thing. Events to bring a community together to learn from and interact with each other, that’s our ‘thing’