If he posted his hype about up-coming announcements on SomethingAwful he'd be toxx claused.

Here's their document about seeking sponsorship.

.PDF warning

http://www.capitol-best.org/CD/Resources/BESTsponsorship.pdf

Here's what another team has put on the sponsorship section of their website.


http://www.omhsbestrobotics.com/sponsorships

From reading the BEST website, I gather that the teams are given no information about the rules for each year's competition until it kicks off - that's when they find out the nature of the robot they have to build, what materials are in the kit provided, etc.

Your cause would have been helped by including this kind of information in your OP.

You can get rooms at the Four Seasons for much less (<USD 100) depending on who you book through.

I think that now would be a good idea to find out how much interest in attending there's going to be at various price points.  Some people will be able to attend no matter what the cost, but for many others there's going to be a ceiling above which it's simply not affordable.  In deciding where to hold the event, you need to consider whether you want it to be more of an industry insider event for people who are happy to drop a couple of thousand dollars on attending or whether you want it to be more accessible to the average Bitcoin user.

Here's a link to the slides he used in the presentation.

http://www.slideshare.net/justmoon/bitcoinjs-bitcon-new-york-presentation

(warning - death by PowerPoint)

I'm sure that would teach them a thing or two.   

Jeff's slides went up on the weekend so a lot of people might have already got an overview of his presentation from that. 

Someone's already posted on Whirlpool about the proposed Aussie Conference/Expo.

http://whrl.pl/RcRN8z

They're still bloody expensive to use even though it's cheaper to rent your own and get your own plan than to use the cruise line's facilities.

Access can be expensive if you're doing anything more than just checking your email.  You definitely wouldn't want to try to stream live from onboard via either your phone or your laptop - the charges would be horrific.

That might help get around the requirement for whoever's putting up the Bitcoins to have a lottery/promotion/competition permit.

I'd suggest a number of smaller prizes though, so that people have more chances to win something and will tune in for that reason alone - if you spread it out over 5 or 10 days, you have more opportunities to influence them into attending the expo.

If someone's willing to front the cost of holding the event at Crown Casino, then you can keep the admission prices reasonable but if the event needs to be funded from what you can recoup from admission prices and trade booths then hiring space at one of the Melbourne universities might be more viable financially (or if you decide to go with a convention/expo split then you could hold the nerdy bit at the uni one day and go for the wow factor at Crown on another day).

I honestly don't think a TV ad is the way to go.  At what time of day would you place it to reach your target demographic?  What TV programmes attract as viewers the kind of people who would be interested in Bitcoin?  What other types of publicity could be obtained for less money than it would take to produce and place a TV ad given that your target demographic isn't your average daytime or prime time TV audience?  A well designed and well placed online ad might get better results.

I'm pretty sure the Whirlpool forums have had at least one Bitcoin thread in the past and their membership is huge.  That might be one place to get people onboard.  The ABC's TechTalk forum is another one to consider.

 

I think one big mistake was making it a four day event.  Defcon and the Microsoft World Partners conferences are both four day events so people expect an awful lot in terms of content from gatherings which stretch over that timeframe.

Even though the agenda for Bitcon made it clear that there was little in the way of organised content - and that what content there was wasn't really aimed at attracting the public - perhaps people expected that with so much time to brainstorm, the attendees would generate new content on the fly and present it to both the conference and the community.  That often happens at conferences which have a lot of open time so that expectation wasn't entirely unreasonable.

For what it's worth, I think that the choice of topics for the keynotes was a bit of preaching to the choir.  They were interesting topics for those who already have a stake in Bitcoin and what lies ahead but they weren't the kind of topics which attract the media or potential users.

List of Twitter addresses for journalists and other media people.

http://earleyedition.com/2009/04/22/australias-top-100-journalists-and-news-media-people-on-twitter/

Make sure you exploit radio as much as you can - as ton of people listen to it incidentally during the day.


You've got a short lead time, so it's probably best to concentrate on the basics and execute them well.

There's also an earlier - and much shorter - Bitcoin thread in BFC.

http://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=3388352

That there'd be Bitcoin conferences in 2012 shouldn't have surprised anyone so it doesn't really qualify as a "big announcement" in my book.

How interesting the 2013 cruise will be will depend a lot on whether it's a floating convention restricted to Bitcoin participants or whether they're just going to make a group booking on a normal cruise and try to hold a conference in that context.

Care to give us the highlights?  The live feed shit itself so we don't know a whole lot about what went on.  Was there a "big announcement" of some kind made?  Did outside media attend?  How on earth did Tom Williams manage to attend without someone punching him in the mouth?

In the part where you talk about Bitcoin effectively operating as a barter token/local currency, you don't really address the issue of how Bitcoin would be superior to other local currencies like LETS and Ripple for this purpose.  Even for those whose philosophical bent is towards supporting their local economy as much as possible, ease of use is still a consideration.

I think you're also not addressing the issue of different Bitcoin users having different agendas - the fact that there is no one united Bitcoin community with a single agenda but rather a range of quite different philosophies, core beliefs about the role of Bitcoin, and especially about whether or not this is even an appropriate time to try to "grow" Bitcoin.

I suspect that you'd see enough countries invoking their anti-terrorism laws to effectively cripple the exchanges.

There are already plenty of illegal things for which Bitcoin is well-suited - payment for people smuggling springs to mind - which don't run the same risk of it being made the focus of anti-terrorism actions.

We need more details about what happened before we can make any suggestions. 

Incorporated as an LLC in Nevis - where disclosure of the owner's identity is not required for registration.  Fuck only knows where "Tom Williams" is actually located or his true identity.