« More Apple Remote Desktop 3 Scripting | Main | When did "confusing" become a sales tactic? »

This one goes out to the conference organizers. Not the folks doing the big conferences, like Macworld Expo, E3, NAB, etc. Those have real reasons to be in Cali, or even Las Vegas and New York.

This is for the smaller conferences. Blogher. Gnomedex. The ones that don't particularly have a clear reason to smoke the "Must be in Silicon Valley" crack. To all of them, I say, "Dude, you're missing out."

You're missing out on some really neat cities. Chicago. Dallas. Austin. Houston. Miami. Orlando. Even smaller cities like Kansas City, St. Louis, San Antonio, Indianapolis, Cleveland, Louisville. Face it, it's not like Blogher has 30,000+ people wandering the exhibit floor. Any one of these cities has the hotel space and convention center space to handle a smaller conference. If you want geek quotient, and you're dismissing Chicago, I say to you, "What the HELL are you smoking?" Chicago has some serious geek cred. I give you as an example, the University of Chicago. You may have heard of a minor technical even that happened there. The first man-made controlled, sustained nuclear reaction. Yeah. Not Cali. Not New York. Chicago. Want to see a U-Boat? Chicago. Want to see the tallest building in the US? Chicago. Want to see the true genius of Frank Lloyd Wright? Chicago.

Even better, is a restaurant called Moto. Eating there is a geek culinary experience that you're not going to beat anywhere. First, the menu itself is edible. May end up being Risotto, may end up being alphabet soup. The head chef, Homaro Cantu has something like 30 patents pending, including his polymer box that is heated up in the oven, then brought to your table. The fish you ordered is placed inside, and cooks in front of you. Cooking with liquid nitrogen and liquid helium. He's working on a technique for cooking with a laser. That's right, a frikkin' LASER. Yeah, yeah, S.F. has Scoma's. Does it have Liquid Helium? No. No it does not. Chicago? Liquid Helium and Hand-Held Ion Particle guns used to cook your food. S.F.? Sorry, no Liquid Helium. No Hand-Held Ion Particle gun. You get a brick oven. Wow. How geeky is that. A box of hot rocks with fire.

It don't get more geeky than Moto. Oh, it's also fantastic food.

There's also beautiful scenery. It's not the Pacific coast, but then, when you're in San Jose, how much of that are you seeing? Not much. But you want beautiful oceansides, I hear Miami has a couple here and there. Yeah. Sure, you can watch the sun set over the ocean in Cali. In Miami, you can watch it rise AND set just by turning around. Miami wins.

See, it's not that Cali/NYC/Vegas suck. They don't at all. I can say that the best post-Macworld experience I've ever had was laying under a tree in the Sheep Meadow in Central Park, doing...nothing for hours. Just decompressing. Or walking all over Berkeley and San Francisco with people who really knew the city. But they aren't the only neat, or beautiful, or cool cities. I mean, you want kickin' nightlife, dude, tell me who's going to beat Austin? Well, Chicago maybe, I mean, both places have a well-earned rep for blues. On and on. Every city, every location has a lot to offer conferences. But if you never look, you never know.

When you only have your conferences in one place, you limit your audience. You miss out on so much, because you're in the same place all the time. The U.S. is really a large country, and geeks are everywhere. Cities with unique, cool experiences are everywhere, not just in Cali. Why would anyone ignore that?

Come on folks, take a chance on something new. Isn't that what these conferences are about?

Technorati Tags: Conferences

Comments