PICNIC - Recap September 28, 2008
Renn @ Picnic from Jonno Riekwel on Vimeo.
Okay so this week was one hell of a week for us. The buildup towards our Beta release, getting the first users in, first feedback, first controversy about autotweets, our Pre-PICNIC event… and then PICNIC08 at Hot 100, Virtueel Platform, our Jailbreaking PICNIC gig and… getting invited by Amazon’s VP and CTO Werner Vogels, on stage at his PICNIC keynote in the main conference hall. It was pure insanity.
So we started off by squishing all last bugs to let our first users into E. We’ve had a great response, both in emails, comments, feedback and through Twitter. We gave away the first invites at our Pre-PICNIC event we organized with Amazon’s Simone Brunozzi and Marvia, and the attendees started exchanging E•IDs within minutes after announcing they were the first to receive beta invites.
At PICNIC Paul presented his keynote at the E-ART dome organized by Virtueel Platform, and he filled a good 45 minutes with a talk about how we started Postmachina to bootstrap for E, how E involved from a utopian art project into what is now. I was invited as ‘the most talented, newly introduced, most passionated and promising up-and-coming creative media talent’ to the Hot 100 side event which was pretty cool.
We also jailbroke PICNIC with our friends from Soocial and Marvia (and Wakoopa, Twones, Next Web) because we weren’t feeling the whole vibe PICNIC has towards startups and creatives in general when it comes to the main conference, pricing and opportunities (mainly because we love PICNIC so much). So we decided to buy a bunch of beer and sandwiches and handed these out to the PICNIC crowd. Threatened with police action various times, but in the end we had a great crowd, no more sandwiches and beer and even the event organizers came by.
Apart from our closed Beta launch, the biggest moment came from Dr. Werner Vogels, CTO and VP at Amazon.com. Werner has been so great to ask us on stage during his closing keynote at the PICNIC conference. We’ve tried very hard to get into PICNIC, and Werner basically gave us thousands of ears and eyes at the main conference hall. Amazing experience. Stefan from Soocial and me took the stage to pitch our startups and answer a couple of questions from Werner. Check out the video on Vimeo.
All in all, PICNIC was once again great, eventhough the minor setbacks, disses, puns and stabs. Special thanks go to the whole E team for such a kickass accomplishment, Werner for being so awesome. Props to the guys from Soocial for hanging out with us all the time, the guys from Marvia for fixing up a kickass event and everybody who showed up and supported us. We love you guys.
Check out a PICNIC recap in photos on Flickr: here, here and here.
(2) Comments
Stephan Geyer
Happy to see you guys rising! Enjoy your success and keep your ears clean; I predict many investors calling you!
Best of luck, guys! Keep healthy on your water and bread diet!
Ernst-Jan Pfauth
You guys really made the most out of the conference, congratulations!