The newest kids on the block are above - with no rock-star speakers at all and a big idea to do a conference in HCMC. They asked me to speak (yeah, like I'm a rock star), but like SDM, I told them that I charge a fee to speak. As we all should. Speakers get paid at conferences if the conference is a profit making venture - and if you don't, it's simply a big sales pitch that other people pay to see. It makes you a shill - and I don't want that. I get more contacts from this blog than any conference can give me. Last year, I covered DLD (Digital Life Design) in Munich and although it was full of digital rock stars (Jimmy Wales from Wikipedia, Mitchel Baker from Mozilla, Jonathan Harris/TED Speaker, Cheryl Cole/Singer, etc) I never saw a huge bump in readership here from my posts about it.
Watch these Pacific people. And see how much they charge for how much they deliver. They're in it for the money. Make sure you get your money's worth.
