conference
1 Jul 2011
Come by next Thursday and have a drink or two on me as we chill and talk about how you can help make Update 2011 even more awesome. We need volunteers, people to help get the word out, and… well, I'm sure you have ideas I haven't even thought of yet.
Update 2011 is not your mama's conference: it's not just about mobile technologies and user experience, it is an experience… starting with the pre-conference dinner on the 4th of September.
Have you seen the venue for the Update Royal Dinner? (Yes, it’s a palace… yes, you can attend!)
The pre-conference dinner will take place on the 4th of September, 2011 at the Royal Pavilion. It will include a private tour and drinks in the kitchen. Very limited places available.
Organizing a conference is hard enough without having to worry about how to handle VAT. All VAT-registered companies (like mine) are supposed to charge VAT on ticket sales and yet no online system I've encountered so far handles this use case. (The otherwise excellent EventBrite, which I use for Update conference, is no exception.) It's like all these online systems want to ignore the fact that the VAT problem exists and event organizers are left to use other systems – and the joys of copy and paste – to handle it.
Beyond the administrative headache, charging VAT creates two price tiers: one for VAT-registered individuals and companies and one for non-VAT-registered ones. Basically, if you're not VAT registered, you end up paying 20% more for things. What this means in practice is that individuals that can afford it the least (mostly freelancers, if you think about the audience for Update) get shafted with an additional 20%. That sucks.
“One price for all” policy at Update 2011 (or “why VAT is a bitch”)
Introducing Update's "one price for all" policy. Our solution for dealing with the VAT issue.
Last week I was in New York, speaking at the Future of Web Design conference, where I presented the second day opening keynote and taught a new one-day workshop on iPhone Design & Development.
I attended both days of the conference and loved the other sessions as well as the venue, and, of course, New York, where we got to see Driving Miss Daisy with James Earl Jones and Vanessa Redgrave, eat at Bubba Gump's overlooking Times Square (what an experience), and enjoy the culinary delights of the excellent The National restaurant (where we had the most amazing Branzino), and knock back a couple of espresso martini's at the W Hotel (they serve the best ones I've had anywhere).
It looks like I'm going to go from never having attended a TED event to attending two within a month of each other. I'm hugely excited to have been invited to attend TEDxAmsterdam at the end of this month and, a week after that, I'm going to be attending TEDxBrussels.
The sessions at TEDxAmsterdam range from Nanobiosym – the convergence of physics, nanotechnology and biomedicine – to the presentation of two arias by a certain world-class soprano.