BizCamp Belgium

Over 90 entrepreneurs attended the first edition of Bizcamp Belgium and the overall feedback was very positive! Here are some of the comments I read on Twitter:

- Nice vibe at #bizcampbe - maybe Belgium will have more great entrepreneurs emerging in next decade?
- Had a great time at #bizcampbe ! Thank you sponsors and see you next time!
- Well done BizCamp Belgium team, this was a great event! Learned a thing or two:) Look forward to next one
- #bizcampbe was meer dan prima. Mooie mix van sessies en volk. Fijn om eens niet in een puur techie-omgeving te zitten.
- Fantastic day. Great place, presentations, people, stories, beer, food, Turkish mint tea and weird sweets. Every day should be. #bizcampbe

If you gave a presentation at Bizcamp, please send the slides to bizcampbelgium@gmail.com (or send us the link to the slides on SlideShare) so that we can make them available on our SlideShare account.

Here are some of the pictures that were taken at Bizcamp 2009 by Philippe Creytens and Leo Exter:

All the sessions at BizCamp are 20 minutes maximum. You can use a session to do a presentation or have a group discussion on a certain topic. 

Talks at BizCamp can be based on things like: skill sets which a speaker will share, experiences that are relevant for others to hear about or lessons learned that will help the audience to avoid similar ones. 

They are explicitly not about sales pitches. Hence, we will remind all attendees at the start of the day to walk out of a session if they feel they are being caught up in a sales pitch.

We kindly ask you to respect the time and that you clear the stage for the next presenter.

For a presentation of 20 minutes we recommend no more than 10 slides, using a font size of minimum 24 so that everything is readable. You can use your own template but we would appreciate it if you would add the BizCamp logo to your slides.

At registration we asked everyone to fill in what kind of topics they would like to learn more at BizCamp. Here are the answers to the question "I would like to hear others speak about:"

-the evolution of online marketing and social networks
-Anything that's not rehashing the same old themes in the same old way.?
-Exchange ideas and opinions
-How they see the years ahead for their industries, especially if related to building, using spreading and protecting knowledge, be it in IT, science, marketing techniques.
-share experience on web 2.0 entrepreneurships 
-Fundings 
-Selling out ideas 
-development of social media
-Bootstrapping SaaS products, founders stories
-New business ideas, smart ways of financing
-Innovative Tech.
-Their experiences of using what Belgium has to offer to make a company and their experience with a relatively risk averse population
-bootstrapping companies, networking, how to find ruby geeks with a sense for adventure.
-As a future web entrepreneur, I'm especially interested in how to set up your own business and how to define a concrete business plan.
-what are the next opportunities? what are the trends? what is the entrepreneur context in Belgium?
-business models, online revenue models, ...
-closing rounds
-Howto market my app
-Financing
-how social networks can help you boost your business
-Entrepreneurship in Belgium, cloud computing, web development, networking.
-online conversations
-The challenges, the pressure, the rewards, the satisfaction.
-Taking the step, combining a dayjob, challenges
-business models, use of social media, mobile devices
-How to build a startup team
-Early stage and funding experiences/anecdotes
-New trends, technologies, open source. Drupal and related stuffs.
-Online marketing; innovation; customer experience
-In general: Technology, Marketing, Innovation, Internet, Stratups in Belgium. Specifics: Freemium model, Conversion optimization, How to make money with Social Media , global e-commerce strategy.
-Creating a plan and how to sell it to VC's.
-From small to medium size Where ends works and start personal live.
-The pain and thrills of starting a business, and how the hell can we fund this !
-Entrepreneurs Network & Collaboration - It would be great to see how, we as entrepreneurs, can help each other in different ways in order to succeed.
-Everything that has to do with start-ups and entrepreneurship.
-Start-up experiences
-Inspiring entrepreneurship
-Web 2.0 trends for professional communities
-How the goverment funds your innovation and other ways to grow your business.
-How I've modelled my company on internet hypes and got away with it.

You can view the list of participants here:
http://bizcampbe.eventbrite.com/

We would like to thank KBC Hasselt and Woelf for supporting BizCamp. 

Woelf is providing us with the audio equipment that we need and KBC Hasselt was generous enough to give us some money to help pay for things.

We're still looking for a couple of sponsors to help us pay for things like location, food, drinks and t-shirts. Visit our sponsor page or get in touch with Leo Exter if you're interested in sponsoring!

Netgear was kind enough to provide us with all the stuff we need for internet and wifi, but we have no clue how to set it up :-(

So we're looking for someone that can help us with that. Please get in touch with Leo Exter at 0477 45 75 39

In less than a week, over 80 entrepreneurs registered to attend Bizcamp. If you haven't registered yet, please do so now, because we're running out of places!!!

We would like to thank the following sponsors for helping us to keep BizCamp a free event!

• Cynex
• Essentialist
• Kalimba
• Netgear
• westartup
• Zeropoint.IT

We're still looking for sponsors to help cover our costs. Click the sponsor tab for more information about sponsoring BizCamp.

We're counting on you to help us spread the word about BizCamp! 

Here are a couple of way in which you can do that:

- place a banner on your website or blog
- join our LinkedIn group
- become a fan of BizCamp on Facebook
- follow us on Twitter and re-tweet the updates we post
- write a blog post or an article about BizCamp
...

Thanks for helping us spread the word!