On “lobbyconning”

by Eric Norlin on Oct.15, 2007, under general

There’s an interesting piece in the San Francisco Chronicle today about “lobbyconning” — or the practice of hanging out in the lobby at tech conferences, working the biz dev angle (as opposed to paying to attend the conference).

I was especially delighted to see Ben Metcalfe quoted in the article:

“The sessions at technology conferences are often like plots in porn films,” said Ben Metcalfe, a technology consultant from San Francisco who said he lobbycons about four conferences annually. “It’s required for the context, but it’s not really what you paid for.”

You may remember Ben - he was one of our iMac (actually, he chose the MacBook option) winners.

It pleases me to think that Ben sees the value in actually *attending* Defrag, versus simply just lobbyconning. Thanks Ben!

[Postscript: We've got so much networking going on *inside* of Defrag, that you'll surely see the value too.]

1 comment for this entry:

Jonathan Marks
October 23rd, 2007 on 5:08 am
It is so refreshing to see conferences like Defrag coming on to the scene. Creativity needs a place to be born, breath and grow. Web 2.0 et al seem to think creativity is like mushrooms, you turn out the lights, chuck shit at the audience. It is no wonder that the fun stuff happenings in the corridors. I live in Europe and this year’s defrag falls at a busy time for me. But I hope to come to the next one.