I went last year to the CeBIt Startup day, which I found extremely informative and interesting. Made some great contacts as they provided a networking lunch along with the speakers in a general area. I'm founder of a startup and heavily involved in the IT industry, so received a complimentary ticket (which I believe they were pushing to fill seats the week prior). The rest of the conference was, well 90% salesforce.com and direct partners exhibitors and pretty uninteresting.
Fast-forward to this year's CeBIT, due to the positive experience last year I was supportive and promoting the upcoming CeBIT Startup campus day on social media. They consequently again offered me a complimentary ticket for this year's Startup day. Well they sent the wrong ticket, said they would send the correct one and then never did, despite my follow up.
Clearly CiBIT don't really give two hoots about supporting the local IT industry, startup businesses, the local startup ecosystem, or repeat visitors that provide positive social media. No wonder they struggle to maintain strong support and attendees. My wife (her company participating with the event) had similar issues with pre-ordered tickets not sent to her staff, so many from her company didn't go.
Call it sour milk, but I'm glad I didn't attend this year. I heard it was poor turnout and uneventful. Judging by the volume and comments from the Twitter hashtags (#CeBITAus and #StartupCeBIT), there are plenty of promoted posts by CeBIT staff and not much at all from attendees (especially compared to last year).
Another irritation, is that CeBIT marketing staff hijacked the #StartUpAus hashtag for their self-promotion, which is part of the Not-for-Profit http://startupaus.org/ who ACTUALLY DO ALOT for the local startup community and entrepreneurs. AFAIK CeBIT didn't involve them in the Startup campus day at all, height of rudeness really.
Also lame on the part of CeBIT is that the Chair of the Startup campus day this year was again Kim Heras, billed as co-founder of PushStart. Well PushStart WAS a Startup Accelerator, but shut its doors to investment almost a year ago: http://www.smh.com.au/it-pro/business-it/pushstart-decelerates-seed-funding-20130718-hv0xu.html I've nothing against Kim and he certainly knows plenty about the startup industry, but it is fairly misleading for CeBIT to have him as Chair and bill him as such, considering his specific lack of actual investment participation in the industry.
Thanks for listening : )
Biting the hand that feeds IT
