Cool! But please, do it during summer then.
Indeed. We had a meeting about the conference today and we're already looking for a Venue for May/June. The topic for the conference would be something like "Mobile payments, Virtual currencies and Gaming" or something like that. The 3 focus points would be those anyway. And the virtual currencies portion would be basically all Bitcoin, because it's the only real virtual currency.
There is a lot of planning to do but basically we are making a complete project plan right now and then we start working on the site. We will have a lot of major sponsors for the event and our plan is to get funding from then in advance. We also plan to fund it partially through GLBSE. Then the advance ticket sales will help fund the rest. Plan is to not profit from the conference itself, simply get enough to cover the costs. The big win will happen for all those Bitcoin businesses and Bitcoin in general that gets A LOT of coverage through an event like this.
I will post a separate thread on this and more details once we have them. We're still planning it and I do want to have the plans a little further along before I make big announcements or anything. But it does look like we're actually going forward with it. Our partner in this is a Finnish mobile payment company, we will organize it 50/50. It's possible that we'll have a third organizing partner because the event is going to be kinda big. Lots of sponsors from all the relevant fields are needed as well.
The sponsorship for this kind of an event is not going to be cheap so the sponsor portion will not be similar to the Bitcoin Conference 2012. Sponsorship cost will likely be a four digit number so it's not for small Bitcoin startups. I'm fully expecting some of the bigger Bitcoin companies to join us though because there is huge value in something like this. This is just initial thoughts, we will probably have 2 levels of sponsorship and the lower level could be a three digit number.