Still a couple of panels and workshops left to go at meshconference.com, but we can see the finish line approaching after what seems like a nine-week marathon run, and the worst part about it is that everyone seems to be having such a great time we don’t want it to come to an end — but unfortunately they’re going to kick us out at some point, or charge us more money :-) We’ve had some great discussions this morning, including the keynote with Stuart MacDonald and Steve Rubel — Tris Hussey of Qumana posted about that here — and I had a one-on-one with my friend Paul Kedrosky, in which he talked about Maxthon, the front-end to Internet Explorer, getting millions of dollars in financing, which he argued (and I agreed) was stupid, bordering on insane.
There were also some great panels with Stuart and Jim Coudal of Coudal Partners, Jonathan Ehrlich of Chapters Online and Bruce Philp of GWP Brandengineeering; Mark talking with Rick Segal of J.L. Albright and Jason Fried of 37signals.com; Leila Boujnane of Idee Inc. talking with Albert Lai of Bubbleshare.com, Mike McDerment of FreshBooks and Malgosia Green of Nuvvo.com — a panel that was all about what mistakes they had made, and what they learned from them — and some really interesting workshops, including one with Tony Chapman of Capital C, which was blogged about here. And to finish off the day we had Matt Mullenweg of Wordpress.com and Stowe Boyd and Chris Messina (ex of Flock.com) talking about software and Web 2.0.
A long journey, but definitely worth it — and gigantic thanks are due not just to the sponsors, and MaRS and the MCC gang who helped keep us from tearing our hair out, but to the audience and participants, and most of all to people like Jason and Rick and Matt and Tara and Paul and Scott and, well, too many to name. A fantastic mesh experience.
