I’m biased, obviously. I like competition, but hate johnny come lately type stuff that dilutes the market without providing benefit to the community/customer.

I hate seeing an event fail, I hate seeing a business fail, it sucks, 360|Conferences is slowly climbing out of bootstrap and into slight profitability, I know the pain of having no money, as do many if not most app devs at one point or another.

As such, seeing Appcon, fail before it even started, doesn’t bother me. I hope they refunded everyone’s money.

What does bother me, is saying that the community isn’t ready for their “groundbreaking event”.

Groundbreaking? Let’s be honest.

Birds of a feather? Been there, done that.

Fast pitch? not interested, but have done ignite style fast pitch things. It works at Ignite events, not conferences IMO.

Expo? Do it each time.

40 sessions by experts? Yeah we know all about having that many awesome community experts in one place, we do it 2x a year!

The App Developer community, primarily the iOS community is crazy strong, and growing daily!! To say the community is the reason an event fails is disingenuous at best. When Tom and I started 360|iDev, we barely knew the community, we opened our doors, approached those who we either knew, knew about, or found, and from there have continued to build something that we’re proud of, and hopefully the iOS developer community is proud of.

Look at the image below, I’m thinking there’s another reason appcon failed, and it has nothing to do with size or strength of the mobile developer community. Heck the modern, (again IMO) technologies that matter… are thriving and growing.

So I personally and on behalf of 360|iDev, call BS on appcon. Let’s show the organizers, just how ready the community is!! See you in Austin!!