“What superpowers do you give your attendees?” #BoS2012: “Kathy Sierra”

Great news! Wonderful Kathy Sierra is speaking at Business of Software this year. That’s good enough to let you know by itself but there’s lots of other things going on that we wanted to remind you about too – the startup ‘Two for One’ offer, new videos, guest blogs and of course, for the brave, the Lightning Talk submission deadline 29th July.‘

Kathy’s Talk: Building the Minimum Badass User‘.

“The Lean Start-up movement gave us powerful, useful tools to discover what users want and how they want it, including the MVP or “Minimum Viable Product.” But the key attributes of a deeply desirable, sustainably successful product don’t live in the product. They live in the users. While pretty much anyone today can build an MVP in, oh, 45 minutes (assuming you’re not too picky about the “V”), building an MBU can be the most viable competitive advantage. We’ll look at exactly what and how to do it for both new and existing apps and services.”

If you want to see why Kathy has got people so excited, look at this talk she did in 2009. As Neil said when he posted that video, “Skewering social media is just one of many things Kathy Sierra does in this brilliant talk from last year’s Business of Software conference. If you do one thing today, watch this video. Cancel lunch, shut down twitter, don’t go to that meeting. Whatever you do, watch this.” As relevant now as then.

Welcome back Kathy. She’ll be talking at Business of Software along with Joel Spolsky, Adii Rockstar, Noah Kagan, Dan Lyons, Noam Wasserman, Paul Kenny, Jason Cohen, Bob Dorf, Gail Goodman, Peldi, Dan Pink, Mikey Trafton and Dharmesh Shah.

Lightning Talks If want to do a Lightning Talk this year, please submit your proposal, ideally via video so we can get a sense of the presentation style, by 29th July. Lightning Talk speakers get a free pass to the conference. More information about Lightning Talks here. Here’s previous Lightning Talk speaker Joe Corkery on why you should do a Lightning Talk.

Some of the things you might have missed if you don’t check the blog regularly (Subscribe to the RSS here):

• Want to know who is coming? (We have over 300 registered now) Here is the breakdown of current attendees by company size, job and what people want to talk about. Who is coming to BoS 2012 so far?.
• Nice ideas about non-obvious ways of recruiting technical talent from Ricardo Sanchez. In search of talent.
• NEW VIDEO Honesty in Business. One of our favorite ‘naked businessman’, Jason Cohen, explains why honesty makes him more money than the alternative in this talk from last year’s Business of Software. Video (with transcript) Creating Naked Businesses.
• A short follow up post by Joca Torres, on building an MVP in 10 days. Building an MVP in 10 days. I wonder what Kathy Sierra will say?
• NEW VIDEO SaaS and the Art of Software Pricing. Everything you need to know about pricing your SaaS from Jeff Lawson, founder and CEO of Twilio. He also shares current industry best practice for owl drawing. (Warning, contains strong language).

All the talks from last year can be accessed from here with a pass code. You also receive a pass code when you register for BoS2012.

• #BoS2012 takes place 1st-3rd October, 2012 (finishing at 13.00), at the InterContinental Hotel, Boston.
• Don’t forget, you can save $650 on the full price of conference attendance if you register by 27th July.
• As a little extra bonus, we still have about 15 copies of Dan Pink’s excellent book, Drive, to give to the next people to register.

Please get in touch if you have any questions. Please note that we have had some issues receiving email on the info@businessofsoftware.org address which have now been resolved. If you haven’t had a response from us about a question you may have (and are not a speaker agency asking when the speaking deadline passed, an AV company offering us AV services etc), please resend, either to the info@ address or direct to me.

This post has one comment

Mar

I completely agree on this (and enjoy you blioggng more perhaps I should as well )Regarding: “Unfortunately for some, especially in the case of contract development, this isn’t always the case.”I think even in those cases, you are a “user” of the software since the initial development is but a small part of development you will probably be a “user” of the code for a long time as bugs, feature requests, . happen.In that respect I think (almost) any software project can be approached with passion. Building secure, testable, clean code is always cool. Unless you are coding in some old school crappy language!

Posted on 6 August 2012 at 2:22am |