Webit Congress 2011 Is On!
Webit logo
Yesterday was the first day of Webit Congress 2011. Today is the second. Tomorrow will be the.. no, that’s insane, if the congress continued for another day we would have something like 7k attendees rather than the 5k for the two days – the event is big enough as it is.
So yes, Webit Congress 2011 boasts about 5200 attendees from 45 different countries and is the biggest forum for web-related technologies and marketing in Bulgaria, one of the biggest ones in SE Europe, too. The format inscludes 7 stages at which presentations are given simultaneously and an expo. It takes place in Inter Expo Center Sofia and its organization has both positives and negatives. On the bright side, registration was served by a more than comfortable number of staff members in a wide hall so that happened almost instantaneously. Also, the space of the Expo in general is plentiful, organized in an efficient and logic manner. The organizers also put in a lot of effort in the decoration and the atmosphere of the event, so thumbs up there, too.
One of the Stages Webit 2011
On the down side, the wi-fi yesterday was iffy most of the time. Yes, you read that right. Wi-fi was IFFY at a web technologies congress. Tweets were flooding the #webit trend, or I should say they would have been flooding if people had more stable access to the wi-fi, saying that people either could not connect or their network cuts them off all the time. Interestingly enough, the organizers made the effort to divide the access into 9 networks but at times none of them would work properly.Also, as Victoria Bondar (a brilliant Ukrainian PR agent that I met at the event, @viki_tiki_tavi on Twitter) rightfully pointed out, presenters and attendees alike were not open to discussion nearly as much as would be desirable. On several occasions presenters would not even ask the audience for questions or be hasty to leave the stage. When they did ask for questions, there would be either none or 1-2 “token” questions to “save” the presenter. I do not know what the reason for this is – maybe us Bulgarian are shier or the audience is simply not as interested in the content presented.
Expect an update soon on the content of some of the presentations that I found more interesting!
