Phusion Corporate Blog

BubbleConf: One day of ideas and action with the most vocal minds from tech, design, UX and business.

On october 12th 2012, we had the pleasure of co-organizing BubbleConf with our friends from Nedap and Teixido: the very first conference in Amsterdam aimed at designers, developers and entrepreneurs that was actually affordable for (bootstrapped) startups to attend[1]. We were blown away by the positive reception for our very first conference: 400 people put their trust in us in delivering an unforgettable day full of ideas and inspiration to apply to their own worklife. After reviewing the post conference survey, we were super excited to see so many people demanding a 2013 edition.

So without further ado, we’re pleased to announce that we’ll be doing a 2013 edition on September 27th 2013 so be sure to save the date! It will be held in Amsterdam once more, but we’ll be switching venues this time around to keep things exciting and fresh. The Tuschinski Theater had already set the bar quite high as we had been able to infer from our post conference survey so it took a while for us to find a venue that was at least as awesome. With the Beurs van Berlage, we think we have found just that:

© Beurs van Berlage Yakult Zaal

© Beurs van Berlage “Glazen Zaal”

The Beurs van Berlage will allow us to implement a few ideas we were unable to implement in our first edition due to time and space constraints. We look forward to sharing these ideas with you over the next couple of months leading up to BubbleConf! Many of these ideas align with what you’ve requested during last year’s survey, e.g. more opportunities to (better) meet up with one another and possibly showing each other their projects. Without saying too much just yet, please keep an eye out on our blog, twitter and newsletter to stay up to date about these developments.

© Beurs van Berlage terrace

© Beurs van Berlage cafe

Like last year, BubbleConf 2013 will be organized by Phusion and Nedap, and the design will be taken care of by Teixido. As for speakers, we’re once again working on securing some of the best in the business. We can already tell you that designers will be in for a huge treat. One might even say that this bubbleconf should be named bubbbleconf (typo intended ).

We started BubbleConf early this year by setting up a teaser site where people are able to purchase early believer tickets: these tickets are offered at a huge discount to people who were adventurous enough to buy them upfront without any beforehand knowledge of the date and location. We were super excited to see the first few tickets already sold this way, and want to thank these folks in particular for putting their blind-trust in us.

Now that the venue and date are known, the early believer discount is no longer applicable. The early bird discount however is still applicable so be sure to get your tickets asap to enjoy this discount.

Oh and one more thing: even though this is not yet set in stone, we’re working with Martijn Stegeman from the University of Amsterdam to see if we can make this into a two day event! More specifically, we’re working with him to see if we can kick off BubbleConf with an unconference on September 26th 2013. Details regarding tickets to this unconference will be made available in the near future.

The App University will bring together BubbleConf attendees as well as students who want to learn and teach more about programming, design or entrepreneurship. It will be targeted towards novices, intermediates and experts: we’re working hard on making it as accessible as possible to a broad range of people. So if you want to learn, or teach, keep an eye out for this one.

Well, that wraps it up for this week’s update. Be sure to keep an eye out for our blog, twitter and newsletter to stay in the loop!

[1] This is only possible due to the fact that we are personally sponsoring this conference for now. Like last year, all tickets are sold below cost price. Who knew that there are actually valid reasons as to why tickets are usually as expensive as they are?! Anyway, we’ll hope to get enough sponsors one day to cover the costs but at this time, we’re just super excited to have you over and contributing to the startup cause!

P.S. Interested in sponsoring this event? Please feel encouraged to contact us at info@bubbleconf.com! We’d love to talk!

Last Friday, Nedap, Teixido and Phusion had their very first conference on tech, design and entrepreneurship: BubbleConf 2012. An intensive 3 months of preparation went into setting up the conf. Needless to say, it was great to see over 300 people from all around the world meeting one another and having a blast This was only made possible with your support and we’re extremely grateful to our attendees for having the guts to embark on a journey with us like this.

In wrapping up BubbleConf 2012, we’d first like to show you some of the photos taken at BubbleConf by our photographer Cuong.

You can find the rest of the photos in high res on our Flickr page.

BubbleConf 2013?

As for a possible BubbleConf 2013, that’s basically up for you guys to decide! If you think we should do another one, be sure to let us know via the comment section below, Twitter or email! Be sure to let us know what you’d like to see happen in that year’s edition as well. Seeing as this was our very first conference ever, we’d love to hear your thoughts on things like that.

In particular, we’d like to learn from you what you thought was awesome and what could use some work. With your feedback, we can work on delivering an even better experience for possible future editions of BubbleConf. We’ve set up a questionaire detailing some of the things we’d like your feedback on and would kindly like to ask you to participate.

Participate in questionnaire »

Videos

The guys over at Taylored Tales are currently working on editing the videos! These should be up shortly so keep a close eye out on the mailing list and Twitter!

Here’s a sign up form for your convenience:

Your BubbleConf 2012 experience

Seeing as we’re living in an age where mobile phones are currently also equipped with cameras and what not, we’d love to see how you experienced BubbleConf 2012! So if you’ve taken pictures/videos etc… of BubbleConf 2012 and would like to share this with the world, be sure to contact us as we’d love to compile that footage for the BubbleConf site. You can reach us via the comment section below, Twitter or mail. Thanks space cadets!

BubbleConf 2012 was sponsored by True

We are proud to have had managed hosting provider True as a sponsor of BubbleConf 2012. Over the last decade they have been involved in the rise of big Dutch start-ups; True assisted websites like AFAS Personal, Symbaloo, Hyves, Flabber and Tweakers in their road from startup to one of the biggest sites in the Netherlands. Thats why True wants to celebrate entrepreneurship with us and learn from each other to grow as online entrepreneurs.

Greetings from the BubbleConf team

• Irene Poppe (@irenepoppe)
• Andre Foeken (@dreetje)
• Bart ten Brinke (@barttenbrinke)
• Juanma Teixidó (@teixido)
• Tinco Andringa (@tinco)
• Hongli Lai (@phusion_nl)
• Ninh Bui (@phusion_nl)

Thank you attendees!

BubbleConf: One day of ideas and action with the most vocal minds from tech, design, UX and business.

At the end of this week BubbleConf 2012, our very first conference for tech startups on design, development and entrepreneurship will finally take place. 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.

Ticket sales end on Wednesday!

Be sure to get your tickets now! The sales close on wednesday night and you wouldn’t want to miss this conference!

Speakers += 8;

We’ve had a great response to our call for lightning speakers, so much so that we had to make some tough decisions, but we picked out the best for you. From the awesome submissions we have made a selection of talks we think are most interesting to the BubbleConf audience. These are the 8 lightning inspirers:

Sytse Sijbrandij: Launching in reverse order

He’s been a entrepreneur ever since he started his engineering study. He has started companies that made infrared receivers, recreational submarines and content sites. In September he started Gitlab.com that will make version management open and free. The talk will be about compressing the time it takes to validate your startup. Most people heard about running a lean startup but how do you execute on that? He’ll share the story of Gitlab.com that involves announcing before building, being ashamed of what you put online and automating everything.

Berry Groenendijk: Lean business Innovation

Berry, as an information architect and project manager, more than 13 years of online services designed for the publishing industry. Berry was one of the founders of LocalPoint.nl. Combining techniques Lean Startup, Service Design, User Experience and Lean technology will bring a idea to a working proven product. Creative, fast and lean methods and the involvement of the end-user in the process gives a very short feedback loop. We call this Lean Business Innovation!

Paul Brinkkemper: The Making of Money Maker

Between being born in 1985 and today, Paul Brinkkemper picked up a curious mind and the ability to turn ideas into reality. Back in 2008 Paul ate the red pill and came to understand that what really happens in the world is not exactly the same as what gets taught in school and written in newspapers. Ever since, he is on a quest, to find and seek the holy grail, and to spread the gospel of honest money. Paul will describe his inquiry into the reality of money and the translation of this into a documentary video game. Warning: may cause shattering of paradigms.

Raul Portales: The piracy on apps

An entrepreneur who is focused on Android development. He has over 5 years of experience in mobile in several products and companies. His work goes from Team Leader at Hyves, where he created their Android application from the scratch to freelancing for companies as Layar or Fashiolista. There is a lot of complains about the amount of piracy that exists in mobile apps, especially on Android. Some big companies even decided to move towards Free2Play games to work around it. In the talk he will present present what you can do and can not do about it, explaining why in the end you should NOT be worried by it.

Fabio Akita: Origins of the Brazilian Ruby community

Brazil is today a significant technology market and community. Rubyconf Brazil 2012 alone was able to have 750 attendees + 600 people watching online in real time. And it’s the 5th big Ruby conference in a row. We started having almost zero developers and zero companies using Ruby back in 2006. To give a perspective for the significance of this new market, Fabio was able to start a new Ruby software boutique called Codeminer 42 just a year ago, with only 5 people (3 co-founders included) and they are now close to 50 employees in 3 different cities in the country. In this lightning Fabio will highlight some of the key actions that led to the creation of one of the most influential development communities in Latin America.

Mick Niepoth: Condé Nast’s nightmare

Mick Niepoth works at Readmore. Readmore is a website where everyone can start a professional digital magazine. Readmore takes care of everything, including revenue, so that the user can do what he does best; creating content. He will show how Readmore is re-inventing the publishing industry by telling the story of three girls who started writing about the fashion they liked and quickly got more readers than Esquire.

Joshua Ballanco: Something Obviously Awesome

Somehow Joshua Ballanco always manages to find a way to work on complex systems, whether it’s building components of OS X Server at Apple, scaling up a hyperlocal news platform at AOL, or researching the mechanics of evolution for his doctoral dissertation. These days, Josh is working with the awesome engineers at ELC Technologies to build scalable, SOA-based systems for clients of all sizes in a variety of different industries. You can’t help but hear everyone talk about SOA-this and SOA-that…but what does SOA mean for you? Is it just another buzz-word? Or is it something you need to actually pay attention to? This quick overview will provide some perspective on all the attention SOA has received lately, and will hopefully leave you with a better handle on how concerned you need to be.

Robert Wendrich: Rawshaping Technology

Robert Wendrich is project founder and researcher of the project Rawshaping Technology [RST] work done in the Intuitive Design, Interaction + Simulation Laboratory at University of Twente in the Netherlands. Imagination, creativity and innovation buzzwords are strangling the mind of the creative imaginative design industry. Rawshaping Technology brings back the fun, excitement, unexpected and unpredictable events into design processing with the implementation of hybrid design tools. User interaction and tool use that set off the wheels of causality and spur the inventiveness, intuition and ingenuity to externalize ideas, thoughts and fuzzy notions during the ideation process.

BubbleConf is sponsored by True

We are proud to have managed hosting provider True on board. Last decade they have been involved in the rise of big Dutch start-ups; True assisted websites like AFAS Personal, Symbaloo, Hyves, Flabber and Tweakers in their road from startup to one of the biggest sites in the Netherlands. Thats why True wants to celebrate entrepreneurship with us and learn from each other to grow as online entrepreneurs.

Greetings from the BubbleConf team

• Irene Poppe (@irenepoppe)
• Andre Foeken (@dreetje)
• Bart ten Brinke (@barttenbrinke)
• Juanma Teixidó (@teixido)
• Tinco Andringa (@tinco)
• Hongli Lai (@phusion_nl)
• Ninh Bui (@phusion_nl)

Hope to see you on October 12th!

Interested in finding out who’s going? Meet a few of our attendees below!

Learn more at the BubbleConf website.
Ready to buy a ticket? Buy ticket here. Follow us on Twitter: @bubbleconf
Follow us on Lanyrd

In less than 2 weeks 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.

Speakers++;

WeTransfer co-founder Nalden will be speaking at BubbleConf 2012. Nalden loves to awaken possibilities in other people. He is a co-founder of WeTransfer.com. As an entrepreneur he’s focused on exploring new ways to reach people without interrupting them, in which he already succeeded with his Wallpaper Advertising business model on his blog Nalden.net and WeTransfer. With a background in the music- and advertising industry, his knowledge about technology and the impact new media is having on the world, Nalden is always working on connecting the dots to make this a better world to live in, by sharing, supporting and investing. Nalden will be joining Valdés Olmos, Pfauth and Klöpping in the startup panel.

Speakers -= 1;

Unfortunately, Anton Zykin from SoftFacade had to cancel his talk for BubbleConf 2012.

Hope to see you on October 12th!

Interested in finding out who’s going? Meet a few of our attendees below!

Learn more at the BubbleConf website.
Ready to buy a ticket? Buy ticket here.
Follow us on Twitter: @bubbleconf
Follow us on Lanyrd

BubbleConf is sponsored by True

We are proud to have managed hosting provider True on board. Last decade they have been involved in the rise of big Dutch start-ups; True assisted websites like AFAS Personal, Symbaloo, Hyves, Flabber and Tweakers in their road from startup to one of the biggest sites in the Netherlands. Thats why True wants to celebrate entrepreneurship with us and learn from each other to grow as online entrepreneurs.

Recap of our other speakers

• 

  Philip Su

  Philip is a software engineer and the site lead at Facebook London. Philip created Facebook’s Video Calling feature and worked on the recent release of Facebook Messages. Before Facebook, Philip worked at Microsoft as an engineer and engineering manager in Windows, Office, MSN, and Bing. He has two young children and enjoys seeing them learn to spell words like “colour” and use phrases like “the loo.”

• 

  Alexander Klöpping

  Alexander is one of those Generation Y people that cycles with Google Maps, reads books on his
  phone and always carries at least 5 gadgets. He has a nose for trends on the Web and in tech. The Gadget Company, his start-up, embodies his ability to always know what we, the consumers, like! Alex also writes columns about trends for several Dutch magazines and newspapers and shares his knowledge with the Dutch citizens as a regular guest at the popular daily Dutch television show: “De wereld draait door”.

• 

  Renato Valdés Olmos

  Renato is a Dutch entrepeneur with a keen eye for design. Nowadays, you can find him working on Human.co, a startup focused on building tools that help people stay balanced and in control of their health data. Prior to founding Human.co, he has worked on digitalizing business cards through Cardcloud. He is also known for his design agency Postmachina, through which he has done work for the likes of Amazon. Renato has a Master’s degree in Interaction Design, but is more and more devoted to growing his teams in Amsterdam, New York and San Francisco. As an experienced founder of start-ups and as co-founder of Dutch entrepreneurial collective STIKK he advices startups on product design, marketing and fundraising.

• 

  Ernst-Jan Pfauth

  Ernst-Jan has a passion for blogging since he wrote his first blog in 2006 and got awarded for some blogs. He still writes his own blogs, but he’s doing more: he spends his time writing columns for the Dutch blog nrc.next or hosting the Dutch talk show Literaturfest, a talk show about the favorite books of the show’s guests, like actors, writers, politicians and musicians. He also co-founded Brainsley, a tool for users to share their favorite links within their areas of expertise. Ernst-Jan initiates start-ups as Brainsley to fulfill his purpose in life: to organize the Web. Besides that Ernst-Jan wrote a book about blogging: Sex, Blogs & Rock-’n-roll.

• 

  Mike Lee (Appsterdam)

  Mike is the Mayor and founder of Appsterdam, the best place in the world to be and become an App Maker. He is also a legendary product engineer and world’s toughest programmer. He has worked on apps for Alaska Airlines, Delicious Monster, Tapulous, United Lemur, Apple, and Nextive, producing such hits as Delicious Library, Tap Tap Revenge, Obama ’08, and Apple’s Mobile Store.

• 

  Andreaa Chelaru (Frog Amsterdam)

  Andreea has been involved in high profile projects around mobile music, teleconferencing and contact center software. In her work, she values understanding the users, their instincts and patterns of behavior and always designs compelling solutions with real people in mind.

  Previously, Andreea was part of a core team in Nokia responsible for bringing touch interactions to mainstream products, working directly on Nokia’s first successful touch phone (5800 express music) which was sold in 13 million units worldwide. She was also one of the three people who started up the Helsinki office of Fjord Design, where she worked for clients such as Nokia, Yahoo, Nokia Siemens Networks, Vodafone and F-Secure.

  Andreea holds a Masters in Interaction Design from Interaction Design Institute Ivrea, a reputable school set up by former Royal College of Art and Stanford faculty, together with members of the industry coming from IDEO, Nokia, Orange, and Hitachi.

• 

  Enrica Masi (Frog Amsterdam)

  Enrica is a 25 year old Italian interaction designer at Frog Amsterdam with an industrial design background from the Technical University of Delft. She has a passion for information design and visual thinking. At frog she is a visual storyteller where she designs experiences by telling stories.

• 

  mr. Egin E. Lengton (LengtonLegal)

  mr. Egin Lengton (42) is owner of Lengton Legal; a company specialized in ICT and law. Lengton specializes in Internet law, copyright law, trademarks, ICT-contracts and licenses, general terms and conditions, e-commerce, privacy law and cloud computing. He is a consultant for SME’s and start-ups in the ICT business. Lengton is also a part time lecturer at Arnhem Business School (a HAN University of Applied Sciences faculty) and (co) author of various study books.

• 

  Laurent Sansonetti (RubyMotion)

  Laurent is the founder of HipByte, a software tools startup that recently launched RubyMotion, a toolchain for iOS development in Ruby.

  He worked at Apple for 7 years as a senior software engineer, on both iLife and OS X. A long time rubyist, he created and still maintains the MacRuby project. In a previous life, he worked on IDA Pro and was an active contributor to RubyCocoa and GNOME.

• 

  Zed Shaw (Learn Code The Hard Way)

  Zed A. Shaw is a prolific programmer who recently gave up coding for various startups, governments, universities, and mega-corps to work on a small business helping people learn to code. His “Learn Code The Hard Way” series has been read by over a million people from all over the world. This is really all an excuse to get to play guitar whenever he’s not writing.

• 

  Juanma Teixidó (Teixido)

  Juanma Teixidó, award-winning Designer since 1994 spent the last 10 years co-founding and building agencies from the ground-up. Since then his client base grew to include Nike, The United Nations, Nedap among others. These days you can find him on Twitter chirping about all things design.

Greetings from the BubbleConf team

• Irene Poppe (@irenepoppe)
• Andre Foeken (@dreetje)
• Bart ten Brinke (@barttenbrinke)
• Juanma Teixidó (@teixido)
• Tinco Andringa (@tinco)
• Hongli Lai (@phusion_nl)
• Ninh Bui (@phusion_nl)

In a few weeks 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.

We now have a wide array of prominent speakers on board who will cover a wide variety of topics, but these are not the only speakers we want. We want you.

Seeking lightning talk speakers

In addition to the 9 speaker slots that we’ve filled so far, we’re making available a number of small slots for lightning talks. A lightning talk lasts for no more than 10 minutes, including setup & teardown time. We currently have room for at least 4 lightning talks. Giving a lightning talk will provide you with an excellent opportunity to make your startup idea known to the world, whether it’s about development, design or entrepreneurship.

Submit your proposal

Please submit proposals to info@bubbleconf.com. Your proposal should contain:

• An introduction of yourself.
• A picture of yourself.
• The title of your talk.
• A small abstract of your talk. It should be no more than 3 sentences.

Hope to see you on October 12! Interested in finding out who’s going? Meet a few of our attendees below!

Learn more at the BubbleConf website.
Ready to buy a ticket? Buy ticket here.
Follow us on Twitter: @bubbleconf
Follow us on Lanyrd

BubbleConf is sponsored by True

We are proud to have managed hosting provider True on board. Last decade they have been involved in the rise of big Dutch start-ups; True assisted websites like AFAS Personal, Symbaloo, Hyves, Flabber and Tweakers in their road from startup to one of the biggest sites in the Netherlands. Thats why True wants to celebrate entrepreneurship with us and learn from each other to grow as online entrepreneurs.

Greetings from the BubbleConf team

• Irene Poppe (@irenepoppe)
• Andre Foeken (@dreetje)
• Bart ten Brinke (@barttenbrinke)
• Juanma Teixidó (@teixido)
• Tinco Andringa (@tinco)
• Hongli Lai (@phusion_nl)
• Ninh Bui (@phusion_nl)

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.

In the past few weeks, we’ve announced speakers active in the field of design, development and entrepreneurship. Incidentally however, we’ve mostly been looking for speakers from abroad, even though there are plenty of exciting startups in the Netherlands as well. In an effort to showcase this, we’ve invited some of the more well known Dutch startup founders and journalists to come speak at BubbleConf on their experiences in “Amsterdam Valley”.

It is with great pleasure that we’re able to announce Alexander Klöpping, Ernst-Jan Pfauth and Renato Valdés Olmos as speakers at BubbleConf 2012. This week’s announcement is brought to you by Irene Poppe of Nedap.

But first, a word from our sponsor

We are proud to have managed hosting provider True on board. Last decade they have been involved in the rise of big Dutch start-ups; True assisted websites like AFAS Personal, Symbaloo, Hyves, Flabber and Tweakers in their road from startup to one of the biggest sites in the Netherlands. Thats why True wants to celebrate entrepreneurship with us and learn from each other to grow as online entrepreneurs.

Alexander Klöpping

Alexander is one of those Generation Y people that cycles with Google Maps, reads books on his
phone and always carries at least 5 gadgets. He has a nose for trends on the Web and in tech. The
Gadget Company, his start-up, embodies his ability to always know what we, the consumers, like!
Alex also writes columns about trends for several Dutch magazines and newspapers and shares his
knowledge with the Dutch citizens as a regular guest at the popular daily Dutch television show: “De
wereld draait door”.

Read more about Alexander Klöpping at The Next Speaker or follow @AlexanderNL on Twitter

Renato Valdés Olmos

Renato is a Dutch entrepeneur with a keen eye for design. Nowadays, you can find him working on Human.co, a startup focused on building tools that help people stay balanced and in control of their health data. Prior to founding Human.co, he has worked on digitalizing business cards through Cardcloud. He is also known for his design agency Postmachina, through which he has done work for the likes of Amazon. Renato has a Master’s degree in Interaction Design, but is more and more devoted to growing his teams in Amsterdam, New York and San Francisco. As an experienced founder of start-ups and as co-founder of Dutch entrepreneurial collective STIKK he advices startups on product design, marketing and fundraising.

Read more about Renato Valdés Olomos at The Next Speaker or follow @renn on Twitter

Ernst-Jan Pfauth

Ernst-Jan has a passion for blogging since he wrote his first blog in 2006 and got awarded for some blogs. He still writes his own blogs, but he’s doing more: he spends his time writing columns for the Dutch blog nrc.next or hosting the Dutch talk show Literaturfest, a talk show about the favorite books of the show’s guests, like actors, writers, politicians and musicians. He also co-founded Brainsley, a tool for users to share their favorite links within their areas of expertise. Ernst-Jan initiates start-ups as Brainsley to fulfill his purpose in life: to organize the Web. Besides that Ernst-Jan wrote a book about blogging: Sex, Blogs & Rock-’n-roll.

Ernst-Jan will be a panel host at BubbleConf.

Read more about Ernst-Jan Pfauth or follow @ejpfauth on Twitter

Recap of the other speakers

• 

  Mike Lee (Appsterdam)

  Mike is the Mayor and founder of Appsterdam, the best place in the world to be and become an App Maker. He is also a legendary product engineer and world’s toughest programmer. He has worked on apps for Alaska Airlines, Delicious Monster, Tapulous, United Lemur, Apple, and Nextive, producing such hits as Delicious Library, Tap Tap Revenge, Obama ’08, and Apple’s Mobile Store.

• 

  Andreaa Chelaru (Frog Amsterdam)

  Andreea has been involved in high profile projects around mobile music, teleconferencing and contact center software. In her work, she values understanding the users, their instincts and patterns of behavior and always designs compelling solutions with real people in mind.

  Previously, Andreea was part of a core team in Nokia responsible for bringing touch interactions to mainstream products, working directly on Nokia’s first successful touch phone (5800 express music) which was sold in 13 million units worldwide. She was also one of the three people who started up the Helsinki office of Fjord Design, where she worked for clients such as Nokia, Yahoo, Nokia Siemens Networks, Vodafone and F-Secure.

  Andreea holds a Masters in Interaction Design from Interaction Design Institute Ivrea, a reputable school set up by former Royal College of Art and Stanford faculty, together with members of the industry coming from IDEO, Nokia, Orange, and Hitachi.

• 

  Enrica Masi (Frog Amsterdam)

  Enrica is a 25 year old Italian interaction designer at Frog Amsterdam with an industrial design background from the Technical University of Delft. She has a passion for information design and visual thinking. At frog she is a visual storyteller where she designs experiences by telling stories.

• 

  mr. Egin E. Lengton (LengtonLegal)

  mr. Egin Lengton (42) is owner of Lengton Legal; a company specialized in ICT and law. Lengton specializes in Internet law, copyright law, trademarks, ICT-contracts and licenses, general terms and conditions, e-commerce, privacy law and cloud computing. He is a consultant for SME’s and start-ups in the ICT business. Lengton is also a part time lecturer at Arnhem Business School (a HAN University of Applied Sciences faculty) and (co) author of various study books.

• 

  Anton Zykin (SoftFacade)

  Anton is the CEO and cofounder of SoftFacade, an interaction design and development firm that creates beautiful and memorable experiences– mobile apps, websites and everything in between. Everything that SoftFacade produces can be described with the only word –”WOW!”. Anton believes that good design is what people can use and enjoy using.

• 

  Laurent Sansonetti (RubyMotion)

  Laurent is the founder of HipByte, a software tools startup that recently launched RubyMotion, a toolchain for iOS development in Ruby.

  He worked at Apple for 7 years as a senior software engineer, on both iLife and OS X. A long time rubyist, he created and still maintains the MacRuby project. In a previous life, he worked on IDA Pro and was an active contributor to RubyCocoa and GNOME.

• 

  Zed Shaw (Learn Code The Hard Way)

  Zed A. Shaw is a prolific programmer who recently gave up coding for various startups, governments, universities, and mega-corps to work on a small business helping people learn to code. His “Learn Code The Hard Way” series has been read by over a million people from all over the world. This is really all an excuse to get to play guitar whenever he’s not writing.

• 

  Juanma Teixidó (Teixido)

  Juanma Teixidó, award-winning Designer since 1994 spent the last 10 years co-founding and building agencies from the ground-up. Since then his client base grew to include Nike, The United Nations, Nedap among others. These days you can find him on Twitter chirping about all things design.

Hope to see you October 12th!

• Irene Poppe (@irenepoppe)
• Andre Foeken (@dreetje)
• Bart ten Brinke (@barttenbrinke)
• Juanma Teixidó (@teixido)
• Tinco Andringa (@tinco)
• Luuk Hendriks
• Hongli Lai (@phusion_nl)
• Ninh Bui (@phusion_nl)

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!

Little over a month ago, we announced BubbleConf 2012, a conference for tech startups on design, development and experience sharing. Speakers include Zed Shaw, Laurent Sansonetti, Amy Hoy, Anton Zykin and many more.

In this first behind the scenes blog post, we look back at how BubbleConf came to be. We’ll also elaborate on the process of determining the themes and the conf’s visual identity.

Themes

During our time as a startup, we’ve come across some pretty amazing companies and individuals from whom we’ve been able to learn and grow as entrepreneurs and developers. BubbleConf was basically the result of wanting to bring these people together to inspire an audience that had the same hunger to learn and grow as a tech company as we did.

Even though there are already many conferences out there dedicated to one of these topics, we strongly felt that they should be addressed in a combined manner instead of as separate topics. Anyone who has ever engaged in founding a tech startup will after all have likely run across one of these topics at one point in time.

This should become more apparent when considering that developing a tech product in-house requires programming and design, as much as it requires legal and marketing to be able to sell it. The product itself basically resides at the intersection of these themes and it is for this reason we decided to try to tackle all of them in an introductory and applicable manner.

Making it affordable and accessible

Comparable conferences dedicated to one of BubbleConf’s topics usually cost over a $1000 to attend. Having bootstrapped Phusion, we know how large an amount $1000 can be: will you spend it on server hosting of your SaaS or to meet new people? The latter of the options usually loses and in our opinion, rightly so, but “build it and they will come” may not be sufficient for everyone. An approach involving the lessons learned from the mistakes and successes of existing entrepreneurs however, may very well increase your odds at having a successful startup.

We strongly feel that knowledge like this should be as accessible as possible. This is the main reason why we wanted BubbleConf to cost no more than $200 to attend within the early bird period and I’m happy to see we’re able to make this work without having to make compromises on things like the venue and speakers.

A conference with international attendance in one of the most beautiful theaters in the Netherlands at a fraction of the cost of comparable conferences is — as you may have guessed — not an easy undertaking. The reason why we’re able to pull something off like this is because we’re treating the conference itself as a bootstrapped startup. Bootstrapped in the sense that each ticket sale allows us to do something bigger and better for the conference. This approach has allowed us to fly over some of the most exciting people in both development and design to come share their warstories in a just-in-time manner. Our weekly speaker announcements are basically a direct result from this approach. This has for the most part been made possible by our early bird attendees who have entrusted us in delivering an awesome conference. We are extremely grateful to them and will do our best to not disappoint.

Identity

In determining an identity for BubbleConf, we have teamed up with Juanma Teixido. Witnessing Juanma’s diligent approach in researching and creating an identity is in itself a memorable experience. Pictures in this case say more than a thousand words:

Juanma has also been responsible for designing the collateral and the final site which is currently being implemented by Andre Foeken of Nedap. Needless to say, we can’t wait to see it live in all its retina glory! Stay tuned for further design updates.

Stay tuned

This concludes our first post on our experiences in setting up BubbleConf. Stay tuned for further updates on BubbleConf, or better yet, buy a ticket today to experience our conf first hand on October 12th and to enjoy the early bird discount. With about 2 months left to go, we still have plenty of updates for you in store in terms of speakers and programme. Not ready to commit just yet? Consider signing up to BubbleConf’s mailing list instead to stay in the loop.

A rising tide lifts all boats

As corny as it may sound, we genuinely hope to be able to entice startups to go about in creating the next best thing since sliced bread. This is basically our celebration of entrepreneurship and our way of trying to grow the startup scene in the Netherlands and its direct surroundings. Why? Because we ourselves are part of it as well and we believe a rising tide lifts all boats.

BubbleConf is the first of its kind. It is business, tech, UX and design all bubblewrapped into one neat conference. Startups tend to attract a specific breed of people. Entrepeneurs. Innovators. People at the top of their game. It will be held on the 12th of October 2012 in the wonderful Tuschinski Theater in Amsterdam.

Last week has been a busy week for us, Phusion released Phusion Passenger Enterprise, which is our first commercial product. As you can imagine we had our hands full, handling all kinds of questions our new customers had and working around the clock to address their great feedback. It also resulted in BubbleConf slipping a bit through our fingers, the early bird ended without much fanfare and the full ticket price went into effect without us giving it the care it deserves. We discovered that during the past week one of the European VAT checker servers went down and took our ticket selling form down with it.

Since we have a bunch more exciting stuff to announce and we want to give everyone a fair chance at an early bird ticket, we’ll be extending the early bird until the 8th of September. During this period we’re going to make some more cool additions to the conference and you’ll have some more time to convince your friends to buy the still cheap tickets