Phusion Blog

In little over a month from now, we’ll be opening the doors to BubbleConf 2012, our very first conference for tech startups on design, development and entrepreneurship. BubbleConf will be held in the beautiful Tuschinski theater in Amsterdam and we’re extremely excited to be part of this event together with Nedap and Teixido.

This blog series has the purpose of giving you a behind the scenes look at what we’ve got in the works for BubbleConf. Our first post in this series has hopefully been able to shed some light on how BubbleConf’s themes were determined as well as its visual identity.

In this post, we’ll try to cover some of the odds and ends we’ve recently finished as well as some of the things we’re currently working on.

The BubbleConf Website

With only little over a month to go, we’ve been burning the midnight oil these past few weeks in making sure everything is ready in time for BubbleConf. Not only in terms of setting up the programme, but also in writing our own ticket system and implementing various designs. The custom ticket system was implemented by Phusion from the get go instead of using an existing ticketing systems to facilitate our just-in-time approach as well as reduce transaction fees.

One of the harder things to get right during this timeframe has definitely been the final site design. Juanma has been working overtime on designing the collateral as well as the final site, and we definitely feel it shows. In an iterative manner, we’ve been able to go from old (left) to new (right):

Instead of looking at static pictures though, be sure to head out to the BubbleConf website to check it out for yourself. I think we can all agree that Andre Foeken from Nedap did an excellent job in translating the design into code and is working on making it responsive as well as polishing up the last odds and ends 😉

Juanma has also done some pretty amazing stuff with regards to the collateral, i.e. posters, speaker badge design and so forth. Instead of disclosing the design of these however, we’d rather have you come check them out first hand at the conf so get your ticket today!

Speakers

Unfortunately, Amy Hoy has recently informed us that she is unable to make it out to BubbleConf due to health issues. Even though we’re pretty sad about this, we want to wish Amy all the best and hope she makes a speedy recovery. We’re currently working on finding a speaker worthy of taking over Amy’s time slot, but those are some pretty hard shoes to fill so it’ll take us a little bit of time to get this right.

In the mean time, rumor has it that dutch technology reporter Alexander Klöpping (yes, that same guy from that TV show 😉 ) will be speaking at BubbleConf.

But more on that later. Be sure to keep a close eye out on the speaker announcements following later this week.

Getting more women interested in tech startups

This is a sensitive subject that I wouldn’t be able to do justice with a single paragraph. Instead, I’d like to kindly refer the reader to the already countless blogposts and discussions on this issue readily available on the internet and instead will try to keep it to the point on how we aim to address this.

To provide some background, our current attendeelist is pretty much all male. We’re not sure whether there should be any good reason for this to be the case, so we’re working with parties like RailsGirls to try to get more women interested in attending BubbleConf. If you’re an organization working to promote women in tech, please contact us as we’d love to see if we can collaborate on this. We’d simply like to welcome as many people as possible who share an interest in tech and startps, regardless of gender etc… If there are for example flaws in our way of marketing this event towards women, we’d love to know and try and fix it. 🙂

More updates on the way

Stay tuned for further updates with regards to speakers, programme and so forth. We’ve still got plenty in store to announce, so be sure to follow us on twitter or sign up to our mailinglist to stay in the loop. Already convinced that you absolutely must attend this event? Buy a ticket today to enjoy the early bird discount. On behalf of the BubbleConf team, hope to see you October 12th!