Category: Publishing

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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.

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Would you write for us? Events are only part of it.

Jeff had an interesting post on Our Startup Story. He was talking about what a company has to offer, what’s its value?

Tom and I (slowly) are realizing that the value of 360|Conferences. Corp is two things.

The value to our attendees is our speakers, and the community, and our value to sponsors is our attendees. Sorry guys I know that sounds like you’re some sort of ‘thing’ we can sell and we don’t see attendees like that at all. Rather it’s access to attendees, sponsors want the right people to see their product/service, our attendees are those people.

We’ve also recently realized that our value is our ever growing reach, particularly to our speakers and to anyone else that wants to take advantage of that reach. To that end 360|Whisperings exists to give our community 2 things.

1. the ability to take content they’ve already got as well as new content and market it to the entire community for a small fee. We’re offering our community the ability to, with almost no effort, put their content online in the Amazon Kindle store (more on the Kindle below). Each author can set the price for their article, and collect a portion of the revenue.

2. the ability to find affordable, accurate, and expert content on the web in a consumable format. Why buy access to a website when you may only ever need a few articles? Why pay for a subscription to a monthly or quarterly print (or online) journal when you may only ever find value in a few articles the entire year?

The Kindle huh?

The Kindle combined with Amazon is the game changing device of publishing. It’s the iPod of books. Unfortunately Amazon is the Apple of books, and takes a cut of the sales. Sadly it’s a rather ridiculous cut, but the platform is a great one to be a part of this early on. AND, the Kindle isn’t our last step. It’s our first. Once we’ve got things ironed out and content on the 360|Whisperings Kindle store, we’ll begin to figure out the best paths for PDF, ePub, pdb, lit, lrf, etc. We’ll make the content available on as many platforms as we can, to make the content as universally accessible as possible.

Step 1, set up the store. Done, you can check it out now, there’s 1 thing up there as a test of the process.

Step 2, set up the author agreement, so our contributors know what they’re getting and what’s expected. Don’t worry it’s only 1 page :) Done, it’s being reviewed by a lawyer (just in case) right now.

This really is big folks. The days of journals and pay sites with subscriptions are coming to an end. Print books, have already been on their way out, and let’s be real. You work really hard on a tech book, it either becomes obsolete within 6 months of publishing, or it doesn’t sell worth a damn. Either way you’ve wasted months, and that’s not even writing. Why write something, get a 1 time payment, then see nothing else from your work? And never again be able to republish that work? Why write something and wait months to see it hit the shelves, and hope it sells?

Join the 360|Whisperings team! Email us and we’ll get you set up and can have content avaialble for purchase in a matter of days!