The Little Black Booth: Veedow goes to FOWA ‘08

Veedow had the pleasure of joining major European start-ups and the tech industry experts at the Future of Web Apps (FOWA) conference held at London’s ExCel in the heart of London’s Royal Docks. FOWA is recognized as the best place to learn directly from the developers, designers and entrepreneurs behind the web’s brightest stars in a relaxed and fun environment.

Two days before FOWA, Stewart Townsend of Sun Microsystems called our team and offered us a booth at the conference. We were thrilled for the opportunity to give demonstrations of our website. Special thanks to Stewart and Sun Startup Essentials!

Of course, second to this reaction was how the heck do we pull together a booth in less than two days. If you attended the event, you might have recognized our booth as the simplest booth in history. I like to call it “the little black booth”. At most conferences, it’s the candy, cookies, contests or catchy signs that draw you in, the Veedow booth took a new approach: simplicity. A classy black booth, with bright white lighting that shone directly on our Veedow poster that glistened “Shopping Without Searching”, a demonstration table and our snazzy black tees that read “we help you discover products you’ll love” (Ok, I guess our shirts were not quite as snazzy as the bright red “I love my church” ones that greeted us all bright and EARLY in the A.M.)! Although, at first glance, our booth may have looked a little sad, we found that our tag line, “shopping without searching”, our bright personalities and cool t shirts (Thanks to Neil at Ninjazoo) were enough to draw in the crowd. We shared great conversations about Veedow.com with respected attendees such as Jaan Orvet of Sharpenr , Sam Downie of Bristol Sounds and our booth neighbour One Four Forty. Also, check out our interview podcast with Bristol Sounds here.

The little and minimal black booth was a success!

Meanwhile, outside of the little black booth, highlights of the conference included special guest speakers Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook, Kathy Sierra, Blaine Cook of Twitter, Kevin Rose of Digg, David Recordon of Six Apart and Tim Bray amongst several others, in depth workshops such as “how to grow and nurture your community” and “how to survive outside of Silicon Valley”. When conference attendees weren’t getting down to tech business, they were getting down to partying business! Attendees enjoyed the FOWA wrap up party with Diggnation and Facebook and drinks sponsored by Google.

Some of the highlights of the Expo can be found here on video. In sum, the conference was a big hit and as Andy McLoughlin of Huddle.net so aptly stated, relationships + partnerships + networking = winning! Special thanks to Carsonifield, Sun Microsystems, Diggnation and many others.