TiE is pretty legitimate, probably one of the older, more well-known organizations in the Valley. They have serious pull. ie. Tiecon East in 2007 had John Kerry as a speaker.
John Kerry is on a paid speaking circuit, right? Either way, the best part of conferences are the other people and how easy it is to get to know them. The list of companies isn't bad at all.
I had a conversation with one of their representatives just to figure it out. Their list of speakers and panelists is very legit (http://www.tiecon.org/home/program/speakers_and_panelists) and they seem to be sponsored by the right kinds of companies.
Indeed. Here is the email I got, just to put this all in context:
subject: Your Company is Nominated !
Your company has been nominated. We found it to be a unique niche market.
This is the organization and the nomination for your company.
http://www.tiecon.org/home/tie
We require a ceo's email id to forward the formal nomination form.
I can also be reached by phone at xxx.
Thank you again, please don't hesitate with any further questions as I will be working as your company's lead through the process until the finalist are picked.
We require the info to be processed asap. I can be reached all weekend.
We also received a similar spam like email and were very confused about what was going on. Initially, they just wanted to make sure a representative of the company could attend the event, because otherwise you're not even eligible to win.
Since then i have emailed them questions, mostly just to find out when the winners will be announced, and have received no responses at all. They seem to keep dragging this out, claiming we're "on a short list to win" but then adding additional rounds of cuts, and now this voting.
It's like all they want is to get more press and publicity for themselves, at the expense of the companies nominated. If I need to be at this thing next week (a Friday and Saturday) I need to plan around it! They can't expect to let me know if I'm a winner, just a few days in advance, and think i will drop everything to speak at their event.
I think it's incredibly unprofessional and very selfish how this is being run.
"Generally, how is one to tell that an industry conference is good?"
After messing around with the concept for the past month or so, I think actually you can learn a lot about a conference based on its twitter traffic. For example, here are is my compilation of the tweets from Blogwell last week:
Of course that doesn't help you for this event, but Squidoo is actually coming out with a module to facilitate making pages like this in a week so I'm hoping that more people will start making them about other conferences in the future. I think you can get about 80% of the insights from the conference in ~15 minutes this way, so from the reader perspective its great.
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[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 37.0 ms ] threadGenerally, how is one to tell that an industry conference is good? I'm not a fan of awards for the sake of awards.
Since then i have emailed them questions, mostly just to find out when the winners will be announced, and have received no responses at all. They seem to keep dragging this out, claiming we're "on a short list to win" but then adding additional rounds of cuts, and now this voting.
It's like all they want is to get more press and publicity for themselves, at the expense of the companies nominated. If I need to be at this thing next week (a Friday and Saturday) I need to plan around it! They can't expect to let me know if I'm a winner, just a few days in advance, and think i will drop everything to speak at their event.
I think it's incredibly unprofessional and very selfish how this is being run.
After messing around with the concept for the past month or so, I think actually you can learn a lot about a conference based on its twitter traffic. For example, here are is my compilation of the tweets from Blogwell last week:
http://www.squidoo.com/blogwell-ny-2009
Of course that doesn't help you for this event, but Squidoo is actually coming out with a module to facilitate making pages like this in a week so I'm hoping that more people will start making them about other conferences in the future. I think you can get about 80% of the insights from the conference in ~15 minutes this way, so from the reader perspective its great.