April 7th, 2007
Dx3 Conference officially cancelled
The Dx3 conference website and eWeek have both announced that the event is cancelled. As you've probably read here, I was very excited about Dx3. From my perspective, we need a conference that isn't vendor specific and where everyone can come and show off what they're doing. This happens in other industries, like NAB for video/media, 3GSM for mobile and E3 for video games. My hope was that Dx3 could grow to be the equivalent conference for Rich Internet Applications. This year it would have been Microsoft and Adobe, but next year who is to say that OpenLaszlo, The Mozilla Foundation, or Dekoh wouldn't have come. I was excited to see the space grow with the help of the conference.
It's a bit of a reminder that the world of Rich Internet Applications is still small. I think there were a number of factors that led to not having enough registrants, but it's still a bummer that despite all of those, not enough people were going to come to Dx3. Microsoft is holding their big Designer/Developer conference, MIX, a couple weeks before, and so I think people interested in the Microsoft side primarily couldn't afford to pay for another conference two weeks later. Dx3 originally supposed to be a event, and I wish a lot of those usual FlashForward attendees would have gone to Dx3, but it doesn't look like that happened.
In the end, it just seems like growing pains. A lot of people thought the price was too high, so I wonder if there is anything they can do about that down the road. I hope the idea of Dx3 doesn't die, because I think if you do it right, there are a number of people who would love an industry conference around Rich Internet Applications. Interest and excitement in the space reaches new and bigger audiences all the time. In the eWeek article, Lynda seems to imply that if they had planned for a smaller conference, it would have been very successful. I think Dx3 just ended up trying to be too big because of the FlashForward history.
Ryan Stewart, a Rich Internet Application developer and industry analyst, recently joined Adobe's Platform Team as a Rich Internet Application Evangelist. full profile and disclosure of his industry affiliations.
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