Despite a distinct lack of spring weather in Toronto, there’s definitely something in the air — and it’s the warmth of an approaching mesh conference! A lot of people have been emailing and Facebook messaging and Twittering and so on in recent weeks, asking us when we were going to start selling mesh 2008 tickets, and the answer is: Right now.
Hopefully you have the dates (May 21st and 22nd) blocked out in your calendar already, and now is your chance to lock up those tickets. The sales window is open, and tickets are $469 each, which we at mesh humbly believe is pretty competitive for a two-day Web conference. We’ve also expanded the number of student tickets to 30 this year.
Right now, we can tell you about several keynotes:
- author Matt Mason, whose new book The Pirate’s Dilemma looks at the implications of digital piracy.
- Club Penguin co-founder Lane Merrifield, a Canadian who helped build a virtual world for children that was bought by Disney for $350-million.
- and Ethan Kaplan, the head of technology at Warner Brothers Records, who is intimately involved in the evolution of the modern music industry.
We also have some great panelists and speakers lined up, including:
- philosopher and author Mark Kingwell.
- Techdirt CEO and founder Mike Masnick
- media blogger Rachel Sklar from The Huffington Post
- digital-copyright expert Michael Geist.
- Internet researcher Nancy Baym
- founder of Red Flag Deals Derek Szeto.
- Bliptv founder Dina Kaplan.
- CommunityLend CEO Michael Garrity.
- Agoracom founder George Tsiolis
and a host of others to come. We’ll be adding more as we get closer to the conference, so be sure to keep checking the site for new names and photos.
As mentioned before, we’ve also added a new feature to mesh this year called meshU, a full day of hands-on workshops and panels for startups, web designers and developers of all kinds. It’s on May 20th, the day before mesh. We’ve got some great speakers and workshop leaders lined up for meshU as well — including Avi Bryant of DabbleDB, Pownce founder Leah Culver, Ryan Carson and John Resig. For more details and a link to where you can buy tickets, check out the meshU site.
Mesh on!