An Interview with John Wilker of 360|Conferences

Over the past few years, you've expanded 360|Conferences from just your flagship 360|Flex conference. Can you give us an overview of what you have planned for the rest of 2009 and looking forward into 2010?

Yeah, we're not ones to rest on past accomplishments. We're wrapping '09 up with an RIA-focused cruise. Someone described it as the Adobe fan-boy cruise, which isn't far from the truth. We'll be talking about Mobile and RIA platforms from Adobe with folks like Ryan Stewart and Greg Burch, as well as Sam Rivello, Doug McCune, and Faisal Abid.

2010 is gonna be a good year for 360|Conferences. We're already hard at work on 360|Flex and 360|iDev (introduced in '09) for March and April respectively. Plus it looks like InsideMobile is going to come back, but probably named 360|Mobile or something. We had a lot of interest after that event so early summer should see a mobile event from us.

And of course we're dabbling in hands-on training, so that should be something more folks see around the country from us.

Wow. Sounds like a busy year for sure. Speaking of 360|Flex, you've set the speaker lineup already and it looks great. Is there anything especially exciting or different this year you can tell us about?

Exciting, yes... That I can tell you about, no. :) One exciting thing (for me at least) is we're trying something different hotel-wise. The Holiday Inn is well, kinda whack. We've set the official hotel as the Marriott downtown. They're gonna provide a shuttle to and from the conference. I think that it'll really improve the after-hours options for attendees. I'm really excited about the stuff I can't talk about, but it's gonna be neat!

Will Doug McCune be removing his clothing again during his presentation this year?

LOL. Doug actually didn't submit a topic; he'll be playing the role of normal attendee. He said he was working too hard on his RIAdventure materials to submit a topic.

Ah, well, we'll have to see what kind of trouble he can cause as a regular attendee then.

I suspect, more than he can cause as a speaker.

Now, I know you were an early adopter of the Kindle and of e-readers in general. Since then, you sort of quietly started 360|Whisperings. Can you tell our readers more about that?

Yeah, I love my Kindle. It's got its flaws, but I do think it opened the door to really make e-readers a 'thing' — sorry, Sony. [Editor's Note: John is referring here to the Sony Reader, a competitor of the Kindle.] 360|Whisperings was launched quietly and is still sort of our Apple TV project. I really hope to make it more front-row in 2010. I want to see more people writing for it, and making some money. I think there's a pretty good market for the material. The old monthly and quarterly publishing model for tech stuff just doesn't seem to work. We're all blogging, so why not expand those awesome posts a bit, and make a few bucks.

Plus there's really no market for mid-length work. It's either short articles like Adobe and Flex Authority publish, or books by WROX and O'Reilly, etc. If it's in the middle, it becomes a series and readers have to wait months to get what they need. We can simply publish it in its entirety.

Nice. As a blogger and author myself, I can tell that you a lot of effort can go into these articles. that I think if you can make them "pay" it would be a great incentive.

Yeah, I agree. It was our experience writing for journals, and our love of the Kindle, that created 360|Whisperings. I know it's no massive windfall for the authors yet, but it's both recurring and as the content library grows, I think we'll see it snowball.

I also saw on Twitter that you are exploring an East Coast 360|Flex which, as an East Coaster, I would truly welcome. Is this part of a broader initiative, perhaps, to bring your events out east? Could we perhaps see a 360|iDev East, for instance?

Indeed :) Our biggest problem with coming east has been that we never had a place to start. That's gotten easier with the help of folks like you and the Convention and Visitor's Bureau for Boston (where we're currently looking). But yeah, once the door is open, there would likely be a 360|iDev on the east coast. I'd love to get to a place where I'm east/west coast reliably.

Great! Well, sounds like you have a lot of awesome things lined up. Obviously everyone should go register for 360|Flex in March as soon as possible to get the best price. Thanks for taking the time to chat, John.

My pleasure, and yeah, everyone should register. It's gonna be an awesome event, and anyone hoping to attend can expect to see some more cool announcements coming soon!