Losing our Diamond Sponsor 10 days before the conference was definitely a huge blow ($75,000), but it forced us to be creative, and focus our efforts on what makes this conference unique, as Susan and Gadi so eloquently pointed out — its community-driven nature. The Office 2.0 Conference would not exist without the help it receives from its sponsors, but many early-stage startups cannot afford even our entry-level package ($2,500). In fact, they can barely afford the cost of flying to California today. Yet many innovations come from the smallest companies with the tightest budgets, and we've always been looking for ways to engage with them. The Office 2.0 Launchpad might be the answer.

Less than 24 hours after announcing it, we confirmed the participation of 8 companies, and are reviewing another 5. With a little bit more help from the bloggers community, we should easily reach 20 to 30, creating a nice balance with our more established paying sponsors. This is a perfect example of how powerful a community of online contributors can be, and a real-time illustration of how this event is put together, in less than 2 months.

Back in early July, we did not have a single sponsor, nor a single speaker, and were about to open our attendee registration system. Our website came a full month later, prompting even our most ardent supporters to question whether or not the conference would even take place this year. Today, we have 35 sponsors, 71 speakers, and more registrations than we had last year at the same time. It's fast, a bit scary, quite stressful, but it works, and it's a perfect illustration of how online communities work, and how effective Office 2.0 tools can be.

Now, let's be fair, and give back credit to who truly deserves it. A community is made of people, and some contribute more than others, which is the way it should be. But a few give everything they can, for reasons I cannot always explain, and they deserve special credit. Among them, I would like to thank Susan Scrupski and Oliver Marks who essentially recruited most of our speakers, Gadi Shamia, who made our partnership with Intacct possible and recruited many other speakers, Susan D'Elia and her team at TECHMarket, who are handling all our Public Relations, and my wife May Ghalimi, who is doing pretty much everything else, including shipping these cool mobile devices to our paying attendees. To all of you (and many others), I would like to say "thank you," for this event would not exist without your contributions.

With so much goodwill being put into this event, it is our responsibility to make it the best it can be, and you can help. We need more paying registrations to make up for the loss of our top sponsor, more VC attendees to provide feedback to the companies participating in the Office 2.0 Launchpad, and more bloggers to cover the event. And speaking about bloggers, I've heard that many of them will write about the event tomorrow, Monday, August 25, so if you feel like joining the party, please blog about the conference as well, and link to this post.

I thank you for your help, and look forward to meeting you all next week.

-Ismael