I have heard about reboot from Danish Radios Harddisken, from some of the previous conferences. They have made some great reports from the event. I got the impression that it was only IT people from Denmark, who came for the conference. That myth was blown away when I followed the twitter stream to the conference. There were quite a lot of foreigners and people from different industries.

The price was not an excuse compared to other conferences. The price was only €350 for two days compared to a standard SAP conference with a price of around €700 per day. And I did not have any consulting gig at the moment, so I did not have to take the days off.

My purpose with going to the conference this year was to get some inspiration for my startup, meet and learn from someone who have done a startup and get some inspiration for my life (Small issue). I have achieved all my goals for the conference. And what it even better, I had real fun in the process.

There were two days packed with all kind of talks. A large number of the talks were about something that I found interesting. It was difficult to pick the talks, because many of the talks, I wanted to hear, was at the same time. Luckily it was just to select one, and have fun with it.

The networking part of the conference was really easy. Everybody wanted to talk and learn from each others. I’m just starting to be a better networker, and be able to find the right people. But at this conference, it was really easy to start a conversation with other participants.

What did I learn on the conference? The reason for going to a conference is go meet new people, sell or learn something new. I did not sell anything, and it was not a goal. I have not processes my notes from Reboot yet, they are on my todo list. I don’t think I learned something, I can use on my job tomorrow. It has mostly some tools to help create, a vision for what I would like my future to be.

I think that the issue, with not learning something which can be used on the job tomorrow, can make it difficult to sell the idea of the conference to ones Boss. A way to justify the conference could be by seing this as a part of Stephen Covey’s 7.th habit. Habit 7 is about shaping the saw, get inspiration from outside. I see reboot as a way to step back from reality and get other inputs which will make life better.

I noticed some things which were different from my previous conferences.

• The conference was ideological with the idea of Action. The Action was in many of the talks and thereby giving the word meaning.
• Many presentations just had one word pr slide. This was a different way of presenting, than I have learned in my presentation courses. My previous experiences were just one slide pr 5 minutes, and then it should be a different way to paraphrase what was said or some graphics. The slides at reboot were more used to enhance the statement of the word. I have to learn more about this type of presenting, if it helps the learning experience.
• People were working the whole time on their computers. But they were not doing work e-mails. It more looked like it was blogging or twitting. I was unable to follow the twitter stream and find interesting stories and blogs, hopefully I’ll find that information now.

The last part of the conference was probably the most interesting. The After party. It was held in “Kødbyen” and was a street party. In the beginning it did look really boring, just a few people sitting on chairs, but it turned out to be the coolest party. I did not know if it was possible to get 50+ people dancing in the street. The only bad thing about the party, was that it was shutdown because of noise regulations at 1am.

Then I want to say thanks to Thomas Mygdal-Madsen and all the other creators of the conference. Also the presenters did a great job, maybe a shame that they did not get evaluated. It was a blast to be a part of the conference and I hope that I’ll be able to be there next year also.

I did not bring my camera, but would have liked to have spiced up this post with some images. Instead try to look at flickr or Marias photos.