I’ve posted this on my personal blog, rather than on the Naked Startup as it is less to do with Gameplan and more of a personal view on the recent echelon conference. A bit like I did last year.

For me the event still struggles between two different streams of activity – although I think they combined a lot more successfully than last year, helped by the streamlining of the main conference.

Keynotes

The keynote speakers on both days were excellent, Dave McClure entertained and pointed out that a ‘small’ multi-million dollar business was a marvelous thing and that listening to users when building your product was a good idea: two things that entrepreneurs surprisingly often forget!

I’m glad Bret Terrill judged his audience and delivered a more general talk on Zynga’s startup culture rather than a talk on Social Games. The following panel’s sole highlight panelist asked the crowd if anyone knew anyone who’d ever bought anything in a social game and no-one raised their hand. It gave an idea of the scale of people required to actually begin earning cash in social games. Not a place I’d like to be.

Panels

The panels on both days were less successful, too many talking heads, typically unfocussed and often suffering from a sales pitch too many.

The product management panel, which provided some useful insights from plenty of differing views, was more interesting but I always feel a short keynote followed by audience questions is a better format.

Perhaps an idea next year would be to get either one or two ‘heavyweights’ in an interview situation with an experienced interviewer, the Joi Ito / McClure sparring on Day 1 added some spark to an otherwise awful panel.

Launchpad

I’m not a fan of the ‘launchpad’/American Idol format. I think it sensationalizes and polarizes. This startup ‘won’, this startup ‘is rubbish’. I honestly can’t see the benefit for the startups from taking part. This is particularly true in what might be your second language and pitching to what is a knowledgeable but mostly jet-lagged panel – it can lead to crankiness and fatigue as one startup is paraded after another.

It works for a Y-combinator Startup Day because the audience is full of realistic sources of funding. In this situation, you’re pitching to guests who have an outside chance of funding locally and an audience of your peers. Other than the practice of speaking in a large room I just don’t get it.

A better use of everyone’s time might have been to have the imported experts walk the startup pen a little more. This was one of the most disappointing outcomes to me, I didn’t see many invited experts exploring the ‘pen’ but that might just be our poor luck.

Highlights, for me, in the pit were inSync, Creately, myADengine – I liked the (widely rated) foound idea but was disappointed that there wasn’t a usable demo, even at the booth.

The e27 Team

The team worked extremely hard: Sneha was constantly buzzing around the startup pen making sure everyone was happy, even finding time to do interviews and introductions and the outsourced walkie-talkie organisation team also ensured the conference ran as on time as these things ever can.

The endlessly blogging and tweeting interns also deserve a lot of credit for the shear volume of content they fired onto the conference ‘backchannel’.

Running

The most bizarre decision for me was the MC was not an e27 person, the guy who did the job didn’t do it all that well (he seemed nervous and regularly mispronounced names) and it was strange decision to outsource that part of the logistics.

Food was decent and there was plenty of it. Although the caterers need to think a bit harder about what to serve to people on polystyrene plates. Prawns in their shells? And the orange juice was sub-airplane quality. Webvisions win points for a proper coffee machine.

The Loos

Last year level 4 smelt awful. This year splendid… hurrah!

In Conclusion

This should not be read as a negative article – echelon2010 was one of the finer conferences I’ve been to and e27 is clearly on upward path since the Unconference last year and the mini Techstars-related echelon.

However I wonder if there’s a more cost effective way of bringing all these startups together, certainly within Singapore. I was not aware of a lot of great work going on locally and beyond. Hopefully the e27 blog will dig out a few of these stories in the next few months. I even found out about a couple of Ruby on Rails development consultancies I hadn’t heard of and now plan to rope them into the local Ruby group.

So I guess this is also a call for e27 to step up the blogging – something that Smitty echoed in his talk on Day 2. Good stuff is happening, but we need to hear about it.

It seems there is hardly a paucity of content to be had so lets here from people and perhaps consider some mini-events, along the lines of a Ruby meetup or WebSG where a startup pitches the room or shares their experience and there’s a discussion topic and then (obviously) food and drink. Sounds like a plan?