MassTLC Innovation 2009 unConference

I love the unConference format: it is “survival of the fittest” for discussion topics.

I attended the Mass Tech Leadership Council unConference this week: 400 investors and other influentials combined with up and coming entrepreneurs made for an energetic, vibrant meeting.  It is great to see the explicit effort being made to create a connected startup community.

I sat in on a cloud computing session led by Judith Hurwitz (author of SOA for Dummies and Cloud Computing for Dummies).  There were a mix of startups and established vendors present.  There is a noticeable lack of large, highly successful cloud consumers (businesses that run their business on a cloud platform versus businesses that provide cloud computing services).  We are still in the early days for adoption and I personally am trying to keep my hype in check.  With that said, we’re very excited to be releasing our Azure cloud services next month at PDC. :)

There was a session on Mobile business models.  There was a healthy discussion on Free, Premium, and Freemium (free, then upgrade to premium) approaches.  Apparently the iPhone app store doesn’t permit the Free-to-Premium upgrade in-place approach (probably because it would take Apple out of the monetization loop).  2-3% conversion of Free to Premium editions is typical, but some companies in the room were in the 7-10% range.  Interestingly, the net cost of acquisition is going up (from $1-$1.50/app) rather than going down.  It apparently takes 25K downloads per day to get into the overall top 10 listing.

I also ran a session on “BizSpark and other Microsoft resources for startups”.  An interesting factoid cited was that $347K is the average Angel round investment.

We ran a successful Architect unConference for our Managed ISVs as well as enterprise architects earlier this year.  Based on its success, we’ll be running 7-8 across the country over the next 6 months.  Stay tuned to our team blog for news.