Guest: Salim Ismail - Confabb
Host: Robert Scoble - ScobleShow

Robert Scoble - ScobleShow
Who are you?

Salim Ismail - Confabb
I am Salim Ismail.

Robert Scoble - ScobleShow
What you do?

Salim Ismail - Confabb
What do I do? Well, I start companies.

Robert Scoble - ScobleShow
You start companies?

Salim Ismail - Confabb
Yeah, so I am on my seventh or eighth startup and I have been doing this for about eight years.

Robert Scoble - ScobleShow
Wow! So, are you starting up another company then?

Salim Ismail - Confabb
I am.

Robert Scoble - ScobleShow
Is that where we are around the RSS Cache?

Salim Ismail - Confabb
Yes, sure he could be on the RSS Cache it's Orange but you know it will -- I guess it will cover that...

Robert Scoble - ScobleShow
Went to Dave Winer's house, he invited us over...

Salim Ismail - Confabb
Went to Dave Winer's house,

Robert Scoble - ScobleShow
...for lunch and a chat, so we are filming...

Salim Ismail - Confabb
Well, thank you for having me here.

Robert Scoble - ScobleShow
So, what are you -- now you're doing this tomorrow?

Salim Ismail - Confabb
It launches tomorrow.

Robert Scoble - ScobleShow
Wow!

Salim Ismail - Confabb
Or on Monday, whenever.

Robert Scoble - ScobleShow
What is it?

Salim Ismail - Confabb
What it is? Is -- so, after I left PubSub or stepped down officially in kind of March, in April, May, June; a guy called Cameron Barrett, who is one of the old bloggers of CamWorld.com came to me and said, 'Hey, we should build a Web 2.0 portal around conferences.' And I thought, well, that's a really good idea and it was especially relevant because two or three companies like had already ran a conference company. And so, I said this is a great idea, it obviously needs to be done. But what we want is when we launch, we really want a good solid database of conferences to start off with, so we spent four to six months crawling, data entering, aggregating the largest database of conferences in the world, so we have almost 17,000 conferences.

Robert Scoble - ScobleShow
17,000 in any one area or...

Salim Ismail - Confabb
No, worldwide. And we've classified them in according -- on about 400 different categories and sub categories. And we've created a whole portal around viewing sessions, rating speakers, seeing reviews, seeing Flickr photos, Technorati feeds, blog mentions, Google searches, everything that you'd kind of want in a conference portal; we've built and we are launching tomorrow.

Robert Scoble - ScobleShow
And what's the URL?

Salim Ismail - Confabb
URL is Confabb.com which is 'C-O-N-F-A-B-B'

Robert Scoble - ScobleShow
'F-A-B-B'.

Salim Ismail - Confabb
'F-A-B-B'.

Robert Scoble - ScobleShow
Now you're going to confuse me.

Salim Ismail - Confabb
Well, it's a) we couldn't get Confabb just the raw name and b) in good today's style we decided 'two b's' was the good one to do.

Robert Scoble - ScobleShow
Okay. Why do we need some Flickrs? I mean, I thought we could already look at PR tags and look at conferences.

Salim Ismail - Confabb
You can, there's a couple of issues, there's about three kind of, main areas why you'd want something like this? One is that conference is I think is a incredible collection of groupthink and social interaction and great ideas come from it, but it's temporarily limited and you lose that information.

Robert Scoble - ScobleShow
Right.

Salim Ismail -Confabb
And unless people do reviews and unless people have recorded the stuff meticulously, like you do, great job with these sessions but people don't -- forget all of that stuff and off they go. I speak as you do, you speak in lot of conferences, there's no, where that I can say, "Hey here are the 18 conferences I spoke at." There's no record of that, it disappears, a conference count -- in fact, a lot of them say, 'Oh, the online conference this year replaces last year's, and there's no -- not even a web record of it, which is a terrible thing because there's so much happens at those conferences. The Web 2.0 conference the other day was incredible for the amount of conversations and interactions and the output that came from that. So being having a place to store that information is one reason. The second is, there's no consistent view across conferences, there's no directory of conferences on the internet today. I can't say show me all the bio-tech conferences in California or anything like that, today at all, which is crazy, so there's an obvious defined need in the market place for something like this. And the third is, all these side events that happen at conferences, people spend a lot of money and they're putting out a lot of their time to go to a conference; they really want to maximize that experience. And it's not like I am going to a concert tonight at a theater; I am going for three days, I am spending thousands of dollars, I really want to make sure I can connect with the people there, and know who is coming. What about having discussions before the conference starts, on some of the panel sessions so that we maximize that hour that's so precious?

Robert Scoble - ScobleShow
Right.

Salim Ismail - Confabb
Not talk about kind of things aren't really central to what the audience wants to hear.

Robert Scoble - ScobleShow
Well, and also if it's a recurring conference, I go to a lot of the conferences the same -- year after year. Am I right there?

Salim Ismail - Confabb
Right.

Robert Scoble - ScobleShow
I use to plan the Visual Basic Insiders Technical Summits, which now are Visual Studio Conferences and the same people would show up every year, year after year. We leave and make bus trips right to go. But people would create these -- really need directories for new people coming to Sans Francisco, you know I went to one of our conferences in San Francisco and so people would say Hey! If you come to San Francisco take another day, and you got to go and see the Golden Gate Bridge, you got to see the Alcatraz and they would have directories of where to learn about each of those things

Salim Ismail - Confabb
Yeah.

Robert Scoble - ScobleShow
Now could I do that on a Conference and leave it around for next year's attendees (ph)?

Salim Ismail - Confabb
Exactly, exactly, you could do all of that stuff, you can have session notes, you can have side events. So, I am having a little site launch party in another room in the hotel, and I want to announce it, I want to say to people, "Well, you can go to Confabb in the events tab say, here's the events that are happening on the site and see all of that stuff and organize all people around it for that purpose.

Robert Scoble - ScobleShow
Very cool! What we did - how do I get my conference in there, right? So, if I come up with a conference tomorrow, is there a ping server or is there a place that I go at a conference for?

Salim Ismail - Confabb
No, what you do is... Yeah, we have an 'add conference' button right on home page, because we've done a lot of extensive calling, but I think we only have about a quarter of the conferences in the world

Robert Scoble - ScobleShow
So you have 17,000 that's a quarter...

Salim Ismail - Confabb
We guess. That's our guess. And there's a lot of conferences, lot of university sessions, academic conferences, we don't even know about them. Just in our system, if you look on the homepage we say, I think there's 600 conferences happening this week. About 200 we will start tomorrow, and about 50 will end tomorrow, and then so we have a kind of a little matrix showing, what's starting what's ending et cetera. So, people can go browse that stuff.

Robert Scoble - ScobleShow
Can we see, can we follow-up people? So can I see which conference you're attending this week?

Salim Ismail - Confabb
You could if I registered for it, it's a feature that's available at the moment, we may turn that off for privacy's sake and we...

Robert Scoble - ScobleShow
You know, want people thrown here, huh?

Salim Ismail - Confabb
Let's not get into that, but in fact it's a public record that I am at certain conference, it's certainly not a secret. So, we don't think most people will care, if what conferences they have been at or spoken at? Certainly, if I'm speaking at a conference, I'd love to see that listed, because that's kind of professional credibility thing that I can look back on and point people to. And so, we want to kind of give a tool for at least speakers, to be able to say, "Here's the conferences I've spoken at," and let users review sessions, rates speakers, all of that stuff. I think the most important thing that we have done is, if you look at conference websites, they are all over the place, right? Some of them are really nicely done, some of them are terrible and just navigating the session grids requires almost a Ph.D. So, we created a standard view where the nicely jazzy looking grids, so you can navigate sessions and look-in what's going on, across all conferences.

Robert Scoble - ScobleShow
Okay.

Salim Ismail - Confabb
We won't allow the conference organizer to be able to say, "Hey! I am claiming that conference," and then enter and maintain that session grid and then publish, hey, here's a change; we've just added a keynote speaker and that change got everywhere.

Robert Scoble - ScobleShow
That's a good point. I doubt where you may conference or organize -- one, are going to know about this site real early, and two, they're pretty clueless. Let's just be honest. I used to be a conference planner, so I can say that.

Salim Ismail - Confabb
That are pretty clear that's about how to market themselves or how to participate and they have don't time and they are busy chasing speakers for slides, most slides go in and looking for anew sites where they can keep the grid up-to-date, quite like that.

Robert Scoble - ScobleShow
How did you think -- are you going to continue trolling or crawling or you're going to have a spider that continues...

Salim Ismail - Confabb
Yeah, we will continue crawling and data entering, that's a kind of a core asset for us, because we want to make sure we are pretty exhaustive on the conferences that we track, certainly on the major ones we'll try and have. We are going to miss a lot certainly as been launch, we won't have a lot of them in there. So, relying on users to enter conferences and say, "Hey, I was up this conference and so on." And also as conference attendees are talking about three or four of them, and they are all very excited about it, because they are saying, "Wow! I could actually have my -- you could actually use it for speaker management," and if you run a conference, you know what is like, trying to aggregate all the speakers, like hurting caps, So, if you have one place where you can say, "Hey, here are the speakers for these, invite them by email, and let them register, and say yes I am speaking and everything is fine." We've got a lot of that workflow built in. Also, we want to cater to the un-conferences and the other types, so that anybody can go and create a conference and run it, and it's generally free. Our business model comes from other areas.

Robert Scoble - ScobleShow
What is your business models?

Salim Ismail - Confabb
Well, what we will do is, for basic use the site is completely free,for enhanced presence of a conference, if you want to use -- people want to use this site, if conference want to use Confabb to promote themselves, be a featured conference on the home page et cetera, we will charge them a fee.

Robert Scoble - ScobleShow
Okay.

Salim Ismail - Confabb
Right? And use some of the more advanced speakers -- we are not sure yet but we need to do some price testing, but typically a conference spends about $10,000 or $15,000 on a website, and it's always a mess, so we'll take some portion of that -- a small portion somewhere around a third or something like that and say, "Hey, we will manage your entire web presence for you, give your Euro, put an nice skin on it and manage the whole conference from this space and we will help you to market it and so on."

Robert Scoble - ScobleShow
Now, I am planning a blog house at the Consumer Electronic Show in January, so the Consumer Electronic Show would probably have its own - what you call a Confabb site or a Confabb area or?

Salim Ismail - Confabb
Yeah, it would be their own Confabb page.

Robert Scoble - ScobleShow
Okay. And I doubt they would keep it up -- it's users like me, will come in and keep it for me.

Salim Ismail - Confabb
Right.

Robert Scoble - ScobleShow
So, is it a like a Wiki? Can more and more people come in there and change the site and say, oh that's wrong it's actually in Las Vegas not in Los Angeles.

Salim Ismail - Confabb
Yes, A normal person come in there, if for adding conferences we do have moderator, so that people can't spam it too badly. Everything gets moderated with a queue in for the conference of sessions and speakers and so on and can added any body. And if somebody says, I am the conference organizer and I want to own what's on there, they can come in and tell us what they are about and then take ownership of that.

Robert Scoble - ScobleShow
Okay.

Salim Ismail - Confabb
They can lock or say they want a panel session as kind of decided the moderator and all the speakers who are known. Thy can pretty well say, "Okay tick, that one is now closed and don't let anybody change that." So, there's all that functionality in there.

Robert Scoble - ScobleShow
Interesting. Now, as anI attendee to conferences, I had blogged a lot about, I mean I blogged a little bit from the Web 2.0 conference this week, or Web 2.0 summit as they like to call them. I don't know why they change name? Is that going to really cause you havoc when the conference changes the name.

Salim Ismail - Confabb
Don't know. No, actually it's -- we just change it once and you're done.

Robert Scoble - ScobleShow
Okay. So, I'd blogged and other people had blogged in, a lot of times we'll find out the unofficial or official tag. And will tag each one of our post with that tag,. so that we show up in Technorati and the blog -- Google blogs search and all that fun stuff. Are you going to use tags?

Salim Ismail - Confabb
Very, very important, yeah, we do use tags. And we want -- we have a place where you can save that's the tag for that conference. Okay, so everybody knows that, that's the tag and if there is -- people use it. That's worth it isn't it?

Robert Scoble - ScobleShow
That alone might make it -- yeah because then we'll just say go to Confabb and check up tag and then make sure and become the MEEM of the year.

Salim Ismail - Confabb
Well, so that we want to make sure that we have a tag, so that you can pull in. We won't to be able to -- the place where we can see all those stuff that's going on. If you want to go see more photographs on flicker book, we'll put in the first dozen or so. And all the blog feeds and blog mentions and we'll use the tags as the basis for that.

Robert Scoble - ScobleShow
Okay, do you show us the latest Flickr photos?

Salim Ismail - Confabb
I think we had, yeah.

Robert Scoble - ScobleShow
Or just the - So, could I keep coming back to that page -- I mean the conference and see everything in one place.

Salim Ismail - Confabb
Yeah you could. Well, if you're not going to do that, you might Woodpress one subscribed at the Flickr feed.

Robert Scoble - ScobleShow
Maybe. I might be lazy.

Salim Ismail - Confabb
Yeah, we don't know to replace that, we might be lazy.

Robert Scoble - ScobleShow
Actually I'm learning not to subscribe the stuff like that because it stamps up my jewelry, so now though open another Google, a lot of times, I just like to come to a page and set that as a home page one day.

Salim Ismail - Confabb
Okay. Yeah, you can definitely, you can definitely do that.

Robert Scoble - ScobleShow
As a conference planner, I can probably set all the computers to be set to the home page for that, as well. What else is cool about it. what else are you helping people do?

Salim Ismail - Confabb
Well, though, I think we're going to allow people to put session notes into there, also have discussions, there's a discussion board pro-conference. We'd say, "Hey, does anybody know where Wi-Fi, what the Wi-Fi passwords are, or things like that?" And so, there's a whole -- there's a discussion board there, you can look up sessions, add-sessions.

Robert Scoble - ScobleShow
Is there a chat room?

Salim Ismail - Confabb
Not as such, we have back chat......

Robert Scoble - ScobleShow
We've back chat -- we need a back channel place. And a lot of people, they start passing around the IRFC passes...

Salim Ismail - Confabb
Yes. Well, we'll have a back channel, but we don't have it today - we won't have it at launch. So, there's a number of things that are coming after launch. We are launching as a pure research facility plus seeing what's happening, firstly believe you're putting reviews and ratings and see who the top speakers are. After we launch the first kind of wave of development we do will add social networking, seeing who's coming, who's coming conference updates subscribed...

Robert Scoble - ScobleShow
Build another session they are working.

Salim Ismail - Confabb
No, no, no it's not from my point of view. Excuse me. It's not a social network in the traditional sense at all. It's purely for the purposes of that temporal event, right? I'd like to connect with that guy, because of you, I know he's going, that's really useful for me. That's where the conference -- the attendee lists et cetera...

Robert Scoble - ScobleShow
Some like say, I am going to this event.

Salim Ismail - Confabb
Yeah, yeah.

Robert Scoble - ScobleShow
I'll put my cell phone number there, or put a Google talk --name...

Salim Ismail - Confabb
So, if you register, then you can say, I am marked that your attending or not attending, and if people will kind of get hold of you, if you'll allow that. So, that's the kind of thing we'll add. We'll also add more advanced search and categorization. Because if you're a kind of a podcasting guy, then you'd like to say, "Hey, show me all conferences that appear with the word podcast anywhere in them." Right? So, subscribe, to feeds, of new conferences that get announced, by category or by key word. So, that will be announced, plus if you're going to a conference, you want to subscribe the feed for that conference. So, you see anything new that's coming along for that particular conference.

Robert Scoble - ScobleShow
Excellent.

Salim Ismail - Confabb
So, the idea is to create a Data Base of -- research Database for conferences that's reasonably exhaustive -- allow users to enter all the data that they'd like to, and manage the data that they like to run that conference. And then have on top of that the tracking features and so on that come along.

Robert Scoble - ScobleShow
Okay, very cool.

Salim Ismail - Confabb
Yeah. So, we did this, yeah this is kind of a very interesting way in which this happened, as we built this in four months with six people all working part time. And we've not spent a dime, not a single so, Dave is putting...

Robert Scoble - ScobleShow
No VC money is involved in this.

Salim Ismail - Confabb
No VC is involved, Dave is putting a little bit of money into it.

Robert Scoble - ScobleShow
To buy server or something?

Salim Ismail - Confabb
Well no, what we did was our -- we talked to the over the -- so, it's all built in rails.

Robert Scoble - ScobleShow
Okay.

Salim Ismail - Confabb
Okay. So, we have a team of a...

Robert Scoble - ScobleShow
Ruby on Rails.

Salim Ismail - Confabb
Ruby on Rails. We have a team of a Marketing PR.

Robert Scoble - ScobleShow
(Voice Overlap) and don't know what Rails is.

Salim Ismail - Confabb
Yeah, so we've got a team of a PR Marketing guy, a business developing guy and operations guy, three developers and I'm kind of the chief stir -in ..

Robert Scoble - ScobleShow
You buy them pizza.

Salim Ismail - Confabb
Exactly, I buy them pizza.

Robert Scoble - ScobleShow
And take the credit.

Salim Ismail - Confabb
Chief Secretary -- no -- well, Cameron gets a lot of credit for having the idea because this is an obvious problem that he solved

Robert Scoble - ScobleShow
That's what -- it's an inside joke. Whenever I met program managers at Microsoft I said, "They had -- that's their job; to buy the pizza..."

Salim Ismail - Confabb
Actually if the printer breaks we don't have a printer but if you broke I would be the guy trying to fix it. So what happened was, we built this thing and then after PubSub kind of totally collapsed in June, a bunch of the guys there said, "Hey, what you're doing?" And so, a few of them were working on -- like quite a few the PubSub guys helped in one way or the other. But the key is, what we did was, I took chunks of founder stock, divide it up into three slices of: starting off, launch time, and post launch, vesting over like a six rate month period and then said, "If you are interested come on board, we can build this thing, we are going to do, part time, if it takes off, well it's going to be nice for every body." And everybody signed up. The whole team has never met, in fact, most of the team members haven't met each other. Everybody is a virtual...

Robert Scoble - ScobleShow
All over the place?

Salim Ismail - Confabb
All over the place in the US and one guy in Canada.

Robert Scoble - ScobleShow
Well, you can all come to the Consumer Electronics Show and hang out in my blog outside, give me their...

Salim Ismail - Confabb
Well, we'll do that. We'll definitely do that. And then our engineers who are the Ruby on Rails hostess, they said, "Hey, this is a great idea." and I convinced myself, "Look, can we differ the hosting cost for a couple of months, and we'll give you attribution etc, etc?" And they've been phenomenal; they kind of helped us, tune the application and get it all running as well.

Robert Scoble - ScobleShow
Yeah, I am hearing that more and more that the cost of getting a company started are going dramatically down in the last few years?

Salim Ismail - Confabb
Well, I think this is an extreme. This is not a minor application, this is a pretty solid thing we'll actually launch.

Robert Scoble - ScobleShow
It was 17,000.

Salim Ismail - Confabb
Well, 17,000 conferences plus all the features that we've built so far. Rails allows you to build things so quickly, and the future set can go lot pretty quickly. If we really need incredible scale, then we can worry about that at a time. But to get out of the door, we've been able to build this thing, it's pretty robust. We think it looks pretty nice, I've shown it to Doc Searls who loves it, and so I can't wait to start using it, and he is going to be on our advisory board.

Robert Scoble - ScobleShow
Excellent.

Salim Ismail - Confabb
So, we'll have a few people that are kind of brain knowledgeable in that area, who know all about conferences that they'll kind of take advice from. But it was really key cooled to be able to build this thing and everybody worked phenomenally well together and get the thing launched. And now we can see if it takes traction, everybody wins.

Robert Scoble - ScobleShow
Can it be -- do you have features yet for the conference planner to use it as a work flow, like conference slides and stuff because that's always making sure they got their agreement and what else do you need, is there hotel or air plane and all that thing, is there a private area where I could just have a conversation in the speaker's conferences?

Salim Ismail - Confabb
There is a place like that but we don't have it all alive yet. We want to -- the focus on the conference planners and organizers will come a little bit later. We want to make the site 'A' usable and useful on launch one. And then we need a little bit cash, so right after we launch we'll raise a little bit of money and then take the thing out and really roll out the business model.

Robert Scoble - ScobleShow
Okay, because yeah it could be used as a place to take proposals for next year.

Salim Ismail - Confabb
Oh, yeah.

Robert Scoble - ScobleShow
There's a whole bunch of ...

Salim Ismail - Confabb
It's a messy...

Robert Scoble - ScobleShow
Yes.

Salim Ismail - Confabb
Messy, I mean I remember...

Robert Scoble - ScobleShow
It's not easy and if the conference plan gets hit by bus, God knows how that person did all that work and where are all the slides and are they in, has the speaker been paid yet?

Salim Ismail - Confabb
I have such total empathy for that world. In 2001 the company I was running, it was hard to run the Venture Capital Conference for New York City. The three days Marriott Marquis, 1,200 people, Julianne giving the keynote and I went through the whole experience. I'm trying to manage a team of doing that, it was just absolute. I don't know how conference planners to do it? It was just unreal. So, it's drugs and lot of caffeine.

Robert Scoble - ScobleShow
No sleeping drugs.

Salim Ismail - Confabb
No sleeping drugs and such a huge thing.

Robert Scoble - ScobleShow
Unusually legal but sometimes not.

Salim Ismail - Confabb
Yeah, and if it's any good, then it's not legal.

Robert Scoble - ScobleShow
Starbucks.

Salim Ismail - Confabb
There you go.

Robert Scoble - ScobleShow
A frequent Starbucks star.

Salim Ismail - Confabb
Absolutely. So we'll add them...

Robert Scoble - ScobleShow
(Voice Overlap) keep us alive.

Salim Ismail - Confabb
Man, yeah I remember those days. So, this I think will help those guys as well that constituency. So, we want to build something for all the different constituents. So, speakers can kind of have a reputation system in there, and see how things are rated. In fact, I think you've got a couple of ratings in the system already.

Robert Scoble - ScobleShow
(Inaudible).

Salim Ismail - Confabb
Yeah, actually because I've seen you speak a couple of times in your (Inaudible). So, yeah.

Robert Scoble - ScobleShow
Thank you. Well, it's a lot of fun. I'm going to try it out and you're going to give me a demo.

Salim Ismail - Confabb
I'll give you a demo so you think of it.

Robert Scoble - ScobleShow
That sounds good.

Salim Ismail - Confabb
Okay.

Robert Scoble - ScobleShow
Thanks.

Salim Ismail - Confabb
You're very welcome.

Robert Scoble - ScobleShow
Thanks man.

Salim Ismail - Confabb
Okay.

Robert Scoble - ScobleShow
And you let them launch (ph) tomorrow.

Salim Ismail - Confabb
Thank you very much.

Robert Scoble - ScobleShow
Is it all nerve wrecking again?

Salim Ismail - Confabb
It is, and we're trying to see where everybody is and just have all the last minutes features been built in and how well we'll decide to cope with the flood of traffic. So, we'll see how it works.

Robert Scoble - ScobleShow
Big flood game.

Salim Ismail - Confabb
Well...

Robert Scoble - ScobleShow
Few hundred people.

Salim Ismail - Confabb
Well, I think once we launch it, I think it'll be covered by some of the major blogs.

Robert Scoble - ScobleShow
Oh, you've got my guarantee to write about it. Didn't you?

Salim Ismail - Confabb
Well, no. well we'll see I don't know what Mike's going to write about it.

Robert Scoble - ScobleShow
Is Om going to write about it?

Salim Ismail - Confabb
Om may -- I think we reset him and we'll see if he does.

Robert Scoble - ScobleShow
All right.

Salim Ismail - Confabb
All right?

Robert Scoble - ScobleShow
All the cool kids.

Salim Ismail - Confabb
Thank you.

Robert Scoble - ScobleShow
Well, I'm a cool kid.

Salim Ismail - Confabb
Well, you're at the top of that list.

Robert Scoble - ScobleShow
Well, thank you very much.