Gapingvoid Does Events – TechCrunch Disrupt SF 2012 from Gapingvoid on Vimeo.
Earlier this month the team and I attended Techrunch Disrupt in San Francisco, a most awesome event for the tech and startup community, where I got some awesome “Live-Tooning” done… 75 cartoons in three days, or something like that. Phew!
Techcrunch kindly set me up in a front-row seat (in an live audience of three thousand), giving me a great view of all the action on stage- I was only a few feet away throughout.
We also had a booth in the trade show area, a nice focal point to meet and greet people, exchange business cards etc.
The Social Object Factory team put this video together- a slideshow of photos from the event, plus many of the cartoons that I drew live.
Thanks to Techcrunch for so graciously having me along… On a personal note, a few thoughts:
1. I’ve done a lot of public speaking for events over the years, but I much prefer “Live-Tooning”. There are a lot of internet-celebrity-rockstars out there doing the public speaking circuit already (including some very good friends of mine), but very few Live-Tooners. Gary Vee and Seth Godin might be masters at what they do, but they can’t do what I can do; it’s good to have one’s own niche that nobody can touch.
2. I heard a rumor while in San Francisco that Techcrunch is now making more money off their events than they are off their blog. That may or may not be true; that being said, it’s increasingly obvious to anyone paying attention that people are willing to pay real money to mix with real people, especially people that they inherently want to meet… far more than they are willing to pay for online content [Of course they are!].
In other words, EVENTS are a bigger and bigger deal in the marketing mix than they ever were. Give geeks a message in the pages of a magazine, they mostly ignore it. Give the geeks a good time and the opportunity to do some good business, they pay attention. Noe of this is rocket science…
3. It was great seeing the Techcrunch team doing so well. Transitioning from private ownership to being owned by AOL over the last year or two wasn’t easy (I’ll spare you the details), but it looked to me like they made it to the other side fine n’ dandy, and now have their new groove on. Rock and Roll.
4. We expect to see “Live-Tooning” becoming a bigger and bigger deal for gapingvoid over the next year or two, for the reasons just stated. Best of all, it’s something we really enjoy doing. It gets us out of the office meeting a ton of interesting people, and gets the team a ton of new inputs and interesting conversations. Plus we get to travel to fun cities and meet new people. Very cool. [Feel free to ping me at “hugh at gapingvoid dot com” if you’re interested in hiring us, Thanks].
