With all the activity and inevitable disruption surrounding our acquisition, I haven’t had as much chance as usual to talk about and work on X Change. We‘re a couple of months out from the Berlin event, however, and I wanted to spend a little bit of time covering some of the highlights of this year’s event – starting with the Keynote.
Several years back at the X Change U.S. we did a Four Founders Keynote that was, and has remained, my all time favorite X Change opening. That session featured four pioneers in the industry all of whom had started Web analytics technology companies and had helped shape and mature the industry. Every one of them had spent years growing a business, struggling, succeeding, adapting to, and shaping our small digital analytics world. They weren’t there to sell anything. Most of them were on to 2nd or 3rd generation startups and, in any case, they weren’t sales-people. Their talk (ably facilitated by Eric) was relaxed, personal, and reflective. It felt as if we were listening to a particularly interesting after-dinner, at the bar, conversation between four uniquely experienced and talented old-hands discussing a game we were still learning. It remains, in my mind, the quintessential X Change experience. Relaxed, honest, personal, and fascinating.
When Michael, Matthias and I were kicking around concepts for this year’s Berlin X Change, we all agreed that something similar might work very well in Europe. There are, after all, many respects in which the European market is more challenging than the U.S. – it’s certainly more fractured – and there are a host of EU companies that have pushed the boundaries of digital analytics and helped shape the market there. The hard part, was narrowing down who to ask (and some of that just came down to who we knew well).
In the end, we settled on Mathieu Liorens (CEO of AT Internet), Simon Burton (CEO of Celebrus), John Woods (Founder and CTO at iJento) and Christain Sauer (CEO at WebTrekk). Not only does this present a cross-section of key European markets, it reflects the diversity and breadth of the digital analytics space. And if you know any of these guys, you know it should be a pretty special conversation.
AT Internet and WebTrekk are both classic digital
analytics solutions that have carved out significant national markets and deliver distinctive capabilities. iJento has built an
open platform for data warehousing analytics and has been aggresively working
to make the very challenging leap to the U.S. market. Celebrus provides a
real-time data collection infrastructure for the warehouse. Classic Web analytics, open digital data warehousing, real-time data collection (and personalization)...a pretty good picture of the world of digital analytics.
So all of these companies have an interesting story to tell (and long-time readers will know that I’ve written about Celebrus, iJento and WebTrekk in the past). But more than the technologies, it’s the people that I think are fascinating. To be the Founder or CEO of a startup digital analytics company is, almost without exception in my experience, to be an interesting person. A blend of the evangelist, the technologist, the dreamer, and the pragmatist. To be good in that role requires a seemingly impossible combination of personality traits. As someone who loves technology, who started working life as a programmer, who once tried to build Web analytics software company (with dismal success), I find myself deeply resonant with their world-view and with the things they care to talk about. I suspect most of us in the digital analytics community feel the same.
When I sit in meetings with or tip a pint (as I do with Simon whenever I get the rare opportunity) with these guys, I find myself in conversations that make sense, mean more, and cut deeper than in 99% of what I do.
I hope to bring that same magic to X Change and catch, one more time, lightning in a bottle.
We’re also bringing more of the classic X Change experience to Berlin. Last year, we concentrated on just getting the basic Conference together and making sure it worked in Europe. This year, we’ve expanded the concept and added some of the longstanding features of the U.S. version. Probably the biggest addition is the day of Think Tank training prior to the actual class. Think Tank Training sessions are designed to be deep-dive, small group sessions led by top consultants. In a world where training seems almost universally focused on basic point-and-click tool usage, Think Tank is designed to something completely different.
I’m teaching two sessions there (Attribution and my Analyst's Toolkit course - which covers a full range of methods for digital analytics). Matthias Bettag is deep-diving into metrics and Michael Feiner is covering another topic dear to my heart - Voice of Customer. Maybe I can drop in for a minute and we can argue about it! It's a full day of training - you pick the classes you want - and if you are planning to come out to the Conference, it’s more than worth it to add the Think Tank day. Heck, if you can’t make the Conference, it’s worth it to make the one-day hop to Berlin and just sign-up for the training!
We’ve also, I think, found a very X Change-like venue. In a lovely neighborhood I explored last year (while taking my daughters to the nearby zoo – highly recommended by the way), the InterContinental is very, very nice and has the sophisticated but relaxed feel I consistently strive for (don't get me started on X Change's U.S. venue - the Ritz Carlton at Laguna Niguel).
Add in, of course, the two-day, all conversation, peer-to-peer Conference itself and it should be a wonderful, valuable, deeply worthwhile experience.
Hope to see you there!
Register for X Change Berlin
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