Ukrainian Forum of Internet Actors, Gross Report

Hi, Habr!
Yesterday in Kiev, as you may already know (at night a mini-otchetik had already slipped here ), a Ukrainian forum of Internet figures was held — a fairly large industry-wide IT event, or rather, suddenly a rather large (I was surprised).
The fact is that until the moment I was personally invited there, I generally thought it was a joke.
And according to unofficial data, about 3,000 people gathered, which is very much for Kiev and Ukraine (comparing with the audience of other IT conferences and meetings).
However, the prices are very democratic, thanks to the organizers for that, the room is huge, and among the speakers there are legendary personalities of the whole RuNet.
This event is held for the second time, the first time (last year), the forum of Internet leaders gathered about three times less than the people.

Since the Internet leaders presented their reports in four streams, there was no physical possibility to listen to everything from a person who does not possess paranormal abilities or voice recorders in three halls. So, before deciding to read further this report, bear in mind that I listened for the most part to reports from the “Internet technology” streams, as well as a little “WEB 2.0”, the report by Anton Nosik in the “Internet business” stream .

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Immediately on streams

I also methodically tried to listen to reports from the “Internet advertising” stream, but every time I got into some kind of nudotin about primitive well-known things in terms of advertising and SEO. I would be interested to hear the report by Dmitry Satin ( usabilitylab ) about “Website Usability” (hoping to learn something new for myself), but at that time I was contemplating a death star and funny cats on the HTML5 and CSS3 report, which Yury Artyukh ( cssing.org.ua ).

Report by Igor Ashmanov I procaped, naively believing that reports end at the same time.

The largest (by the size of the audience and according to the number of listeners) was the flow of “Internet business”, a bit less - “WEB 2.0”, even less - “Internet advertising”, and * resents * quite small - “Internet technologies”.

The “WEB 2.0” stream was in the other wing of the building, it was necessary to go out and stomp to the second entrance, which made the relocation between the streams a bit more difficult.

And the specificity of this event is such that there was a lot of running between the streams (at least in view of my wide area of interest). Not everywhere were sitting places (so as to sit down to the 2nd - 3rd people together), but closer to the end of the forum, Internet leaders apparently fed up with the Kievans and they deprived the ranks of the most persistent, raising the number of empty seats to a more comfortable level. This was especially true for the section of "Internet technologies" with the smallest room. It is strange that in the international exhibition center could not find a larger audience, because it is huge.

At first there was an assumption that we would listen to different sections and share experiences (I met a colleague from the ram advertising agency on iForum, and later - more people with whom I once studied at the faculty of applied mathematics at KPI), but this was a bad assumption because the collective instinct won and we subsequently moved in a handful.

I can not help but note that iForum had one section that was not sufficiently covered by any press release, but nevertheless, it gained a rather large number of visitors. The target audience was clearly found, but more on that below.

Software (food supply) events

This is a fascinating place just opposite the main entrance, where a lot of boxes with all kinds of sweet nishtyachki were spread out on the tables. Along with the audience for the reports, there were a lot of IT-schnickers, bloggers and businessmen hunting cookies.
A special sensation caused the appearance of boxes of marshmallows. According to my subjective impressions, it was the most trending and highly valued resource in this section. There was also a mineral water, free tea and coffee.
I share several photos of this celebration of life:

Landing troops

I arrived at the IEC by the beginning of the first report. I thought that I would be late, because in the morning I had to urgently refill the printer in order to print the invitation / badge normally (printing black and white is somehow disreputable, never print black and white badges if you go to an event where there are many potential business partners / investors). However, even this attitude did not help me not to forget about business cards * facepalm *

While leaving the metro, I noticed a steady stream moving in the direction of the IEC, but in vain I took them for my own, because yesterday there was also the Baby Expo and Art Expo Shoes in the same place, and I did not enter the building with the stream succeeded, since the Ukrainian forum of Internet leaders can only be reached through another entrance, to which it was necessary to go a little further (there are many of them). But when I saw Anton Nosik aka dolboeb , I was finally convinced that I had come to the right place.

Anton Nosik (bfm.ru, dolboeb.livejournal.com) and Vitaly Stepanenko (nayjest.ru, perevaga.com)

After checking the invitation, everyone was handed the following bags:

With a bunch of ads, branded pen, which I had someone and held a calendar.

Reports

At first, I certainly listened to Anton Nosik. We can say that he was a person to attract attention, because who had not heard about the enchanting Dolboeb 'e.

Contrary to the opinion of the previous comrade who reported on Habré, I liked his report. In principle, Anton said the right things about the business environment, the differences from the ordinary business and why the mudilas who screwed the nuts (for example, regarding the requirements to provide passport information for registering domains in the .RU zone) create only outflow of clients to more free zone. After the report, I had a thought that it would be interesting to see the statistics on the choice of a domain zone for Russian-speaking projects and the dynamics of these indicators.

Then I was able to attend a little on the long and very interesting report of Sergey Kotyrev (Yumisoft), who inflamed the ground for religious wars with his report on the comparison of paid and free CMS. Usually I didn’t get my hands on UMI.CMS, and here Sergey quite comfortably demonstrated some moments in his brainchild, although of course (and don’t dare doubt) my secret CMS, which will be released next year and explode the web development market, immeasurably cooler * humor * .
By the way, “religious wars” have become an iForuma trend, and this phrase has sounded many times.

Further in the same section there was an interesting report by Yulia Yurkevich ( Avanport-design ), which for the most part spoke about 1C-Bitrix.

A very interesting thought about the economic advantage of CMS as the main and most important indicator with all the expiring facts (I do not remember who said this, Sergey or Julia) slipped through.

After that, Igor Kononuchenko ( Vedjo Design Studio) about Python and Django, but I found the report to be somehow too noob-oriented (perhaps it was interesting to those who had not heard of Python and Django at all), and even oratory to Igor you need to learn more (as well as some other speakers from the Internet technologies section).
That is, guys, thanks, of course, for the work done on the reports, speak further, sow knowledge and experience, but do not forget to train in front of a mirror and, if possible, to talk faster. In this regard, the knowledge of some of the speakers from this section of the iForum is a little depressing (no offense, I certainly understand that all of you are experts primarily in your fields, and not in the ability to speak beautifully).
In general, perhaps further, Igor said something interesting, but we, as citizens of a democratic country, held a collective vote and decided to look at this time in other sections.

Having a little satisfied our gastronomic interests in the cookies section, we glanced briefly at the “Internet business” and “Internet advertising” and rushed into the “WEB 2.0” stream.
Taras Tarasov from Game Industry Consulting told a little about the history and current state in the world of Shareware, casual and social games, pricing and current trends.

Then, having gone through a reverse cycle in all sections, we stopped at the report by Oleg Bunin ( ontico.ru ), who briefly described almost all of what was further sounded in the section “Development of High-Load Systems on the Internet.”

Next was Yevgeny Kurt ( ucoz ), who said on his report in the WEB 2.0 stream, that the users of their service are their enemies :) and representatives of Youscan, who formed with their report the target audience for their online reputation tracking project.

The girl from Life talked about how they are promoted thanks to their corporate blog, about interesting promotions in Life and about the blogger who was sent to the orphanage for a week.

Then I managed to hear the final part of the report of Andrey Nikitin about such software as MySQL Enterprise Monitor, and Vsevolod Demkin clarified about the use of NoSQL database and cloud technologies.
However, whether the topic of high-load systems on the Internet does not excite me, or whether this section was somehow boring.

But the section "New technologies on the Internet" was great.
At first, Yury Artyukh quite interestingly talked about HTML5 and CSS3, brought to the audience the idea that these standards are not monolithic as the Star of Death from Star Wars, which, with its huge production costs, knew a sad fate (it would be better to have a fleet of fighters beat, yes) and what it is - the union of many more focused standards. In general, he gave many more funny analogies, showed one demotivator and many cats that suddenly appeared, mentioned “nezlim, quiet word” (in Ukrainian) of our universal pet, IE6.

Even though I have learned a little about HTML5 and CSS3, there is a very good presentation.

The remaining reports in this section were also very interesting and informative: many good questions sounded, Pavel Bashmakov (Stanfy) shared his most valuable development experience for mobile platforms, Sergey Baydachny (Microsoft) very lively and richly told about Windows Phone 7 and Internet Explorer 9.0 (again however, for me there are not so many new things, but it is interesting to listen to such a qualitative report

The presentation was on a black background, as it should be for WP7 applications (the fact is that devices based on WP7 will have screens that consume less energy if something black is displayed on the screen).
During the report, he also created a simple application for Windows Phone 7 using the visual interface of Visual Studio, which displayed his photo on the screen of the WP7 device emulator.

But I didn’t like the announcement that all asked questions would be awarded with a Microsoft T-shirt - the fact is that almost everything started to pull my hand and I simply didn’t have time to ask 4 questions that worried me (time was pressing, I had to release the audience), although I wanted to ask them from the start. But this did not prevent me from approaching Sergey after the report and learning about everything that interested me (the fact is that I am writing a game on XNA, and games on the XNA platform will work on Windows Phone 7).

In summary, I can say that the most interesting were the reports at the beginning and at the end of the iForum.
A bit too much self-promotion in the reports, but it is ok.
Still, participation costs only UAH 300, and as I understand it, speakers hardly get paid for their work.
By the way, speaking of advertising, an interesting advertising move was the loss of the letter M in the imena.ua logo, which hung behind the main stage. I thought it had fallen off, it turns out to be an advertising move. Marketers take note. (upd: write in comments that M fell off accidentally)
I was also intrigued by the scattered cards of Psihukh.ru , but I don’t know if that was the point, since I didn’t notice any invites anywhere.

Here are the TOP3 reports I liked:

1. Yuri Artyukh - CSS3 and HTML5
*Golden medal*
2. Sergey Baydachny - Windows Phone 7 and IE9
* silver medal*
3. Sergey Kotyrev - Paid and Free CMS
*bronze medal*

IForum disadvantages

1. Nowhere was there a cigarette . The fact is that our cigarettes quickly ended (aha, such cool reports that some listeners wanted to smoke after each report, and not just once). As a result, representatives of the web-studio Perevaga.com shot large quantities of cigarettes from Internet workers.
By the way, it was often possible to observe Anton Nosik near the central entrance, who regularly went out to smoke and gather around a crowd of onlookers. Popularity, however.

2. Not a single hand dryer operated in the men's room . As comrade Faux said, it was notable to discover this fact after the report on Usability.

3. Offsets in the time scale. Actually, the whole action began about 15 minutes later than the planned start, and many speakers were very delayed, as a result of which, often checking the schedule of reports and running around the classrooms, I didn’t get what I expected.

4. Girls in bikinis not detected. Remember: There must be girls in bikinis at IT conferences! You can even topless.

Presents

In the course of the conference, everyone who wanted to get business cards to participate in the prize draw, which took place at the closing of the event.
The most valuable prize - a laptop provided by the p-host company, was won by a guy from perukar.org , a DVD player, a hard disk and a bunch of flash drives were also played out.
It is noteworthy that the owners of most of the business cards, which were being dragged out, were no longer at the prize draw, and then they were drawing more and more cards until someone was present. Prizes were given only personally to owners of lucky business cards.

Alexander Olshansky ( imena.ua ) provided the solemn role of pulling out business cards to the audience in the hall or even to people passing by with a cup of coffee.

One enterprising blonde, who was called to pull business cards, decided not to bother with a random choice and put her nose in a bag with business cards, having started them just sorting out in search of the right one (she is probably a marketer). Apparently, her non-fallen attempt to deceive almost a thousand people, did not lead to success, but nevertheless it was great to amuse the public.

A prize drawing was also held, where they took part in questionnaires that were issued in the morning (I somehow missed this moment), and another five million free 468x60 banner banners in the Ukrainian Banner Network were played on Serhiy Klochenko's report.

Girls from Imena.ua handed out mouse pads to everyone with their own symbolism, and Sergey Baydachny (Microsoft) gave funny t-shirts in exchange for questions.

If I missed something (which is quite possible, given the scale of the event) - write in the comments, help to more fully illuminate the iForum.

About the dissemination of information

On iForum, 67 editions of 192 journalists are accredited, so I think there will soon be wide coverage of this event in the press, which will attract even more interesting Internet figures next year. I decided for myself that I would definitely go.

It is also worth mentioning the stormy (very) discussion on Twitter, many tweets right during the conference, and at the final part, several prizes were given to the authors of the most interesting tweets. So that.
Read Twi on the hashtag #iforum .

It is generally pleasant that I heard about this conference from several information sources at once. Because I am tormented by the realization of how much interesting I’m constantly missing ... take at least the recent Openwebcamp in Kiev.

Guys, the organizers of such events - do not be stingy, light up your event'y stronger and in advance.

Acknowledgments

I express my gratitude to Roman Ilyichev ( GigaHost.ua ) for the invitation paid for me to the Ukrainian forum of Internet figures (where I never saw / recognized him), to all the organizers of this event for a wonderful event, to the actual speakers for interesting reports and to you personally for what you read right up to this place :)

Materials reports

Pavel Bashmakov ( Stanfy ) Presentation on the development of mobile applications
Igor Kononuchenko ( Vedjo Design Studio): Building Django websites , presentation (html)
Vladimir Isaev (Opera): “Who, where and why goes to the Network from a mobile phone” (quite interesting statistics are present)
Yury Artyukh ( Cssing.org.ua ): Presentation on the report HTML5, CSS3 . It is noteworthy that the presentation itself was made exclusively with the use of the mentioned technologies.
Presentation of the Ukrainian politician Michael Brodsky, who never appeared on the iForum.
Sergey Mitrofanov: Presentation of the Branding on the Web report

Posts on Habré

The second Ukrainian forum of Internet leaders Iforum (report + photos) was held in Kiev
Just a couple of photos from the Ukrainian forum of Internet figures Iforum
The first mini-announcement of iForum on Habré