Phusion Blog

BubbleConf is a conference for today’s tech startups on design, development and entrepreneurship by Nedap and Phusion. We aim to bring together developers, designers and entrepreneurs from all over Europe to share their knowledge and war stories with one another. With about 400 attendees last year, we hope to see you at this year’s edition in the Beurs van Berlage in Amsterdam on September 27th!

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This week, we’re super excited to announce that our friends Koen Bok and Jorn van Dijk will be speaking at BubbleConf 2013. On an editorial note, we quite frankly don’t actually even know where to start when describing these guys: they have so many accolades attached to their names, that we’d probably do them injustice by leaving a few out for brevity’s sake.

Jorn van Dijk(L) and Koen Bok(R)

Jorn van Dijk (L) and Koen Bok (R)

Koen Bok was one of the co-founders of Sofa, a software company known for its keen eye for design. Sofa has won numerous Apple Design Awards for their in-house products, such as Checkout and Versions. They’ve also had the pleasure of working for numerous high end clients such as Mozilla, Tom Tom and Nike. Chances are likely that you’ve already seen and interfaced with some of their work without probably even realizing it!

Jorn van Dijk was Sofa’s art director and is known for creating some of the most gorgeous app icons and interfaces you’ve probably ever seen. It was actually one of his icons (the Cappuccino project icon) that made us contact Sofa to learn more about them.

Even to this day, I distinctly remember calling Koen on the phone in 2009 and him welcoming us to Sofa’s office to have coffee and talk shop. We felt so welcomed that Hongli and I even brought cake with us and well, the rest was history: their culture strongly resonated with what we wanted to get out of Phusion one day that we hit it off right from the get go. They were and are basically an inspiration to companies such as ours: they were crazy enough to do a startup from this tiny speck on the planet called the Netherlands with almost a YOLO mentality by reaching for the stars and loving every minute of it.

Sofa was acquired about 2 years ago by Facebook, and during their time at Facebook they’ve worked on apps such as Facebook for iOS/Android, Messenger for iOS/Android/web and Camera for iOS. As before, chances are very likely that you’ve already seen and interfaced with their work.

Even though we were happy to see Sofa get acquired by Facebook, we were also somewhat sad to see an awesome company like that leave the Netherlands. We would miss them indeed but stayed in touch with one another through the internet.

About a week ago however, we learnt that they had left Facebook and would be returning home to Amsterdam. With them speaking at BubbleConf, we hope you’ll be able to help us give them a warm and fitting welcome home party by attending! We’re confident they’ve got some pretty cool stories to share as well 🙂

Speakers.to_list()

• Zed Shaw — Learn Code the Hard Way
• Rich Thornett — Dribbble co-founder
• Dan Cederholm — Dribbble co-founder
• Thijs van der Vossen — Fingertips founder
• Chad Fowler — 6Wunderkinder CTO
• Floor Drees — RailsGirls.nl
• Pia Henrietta Kekäläinen — RailsGirls.com co-founder
• Kyle Neath — GitHub Lead Designer
• Koen Bok — Formerly of Sofa and Facebook
• Jorn van Dijk — Formerly of Sofa and Facebook
• … and a few more to be announced!

Buy your tickets now

We’re currently still offering tickets against an early bird discount! With only a few more weeks remaining until BubbleConf takes place, be sure to get your tickets in time to enjoy this discount.

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