By now, you’ve (hopefully) heard about KeenCon, Keen IO’s first-ever conference, this September in SF. It’s going to be pretty great, with amazing talks and an adorable outer space theme and a room full of brilliant lunatics, and we really, really hope you can come be one of them.
But, we thought some people might be wondering, “Why are you doing all this, anyway? Keen is pretty great and all, but it’s not comics or Harry Potteror toilets — why do you need your own conference?”
The answer? Arrogance. Blind, burning arrogance.
OK, not really. The real answer is, KeenCon isn’t actually about us. It’s about you — and the power of platforms.
See, at Keen, we’re all about platforms — so much so that it’s kind of the entire point of us. We work really hard to put together some amazing analytics building blocks, but if that was it, we’d pretty much crash and burn. We need you to take the platform we’ve built and run with it — ask questions, build things, play around, get answers, etc.
You do things with Keen we would have never thought of on our own — and the more you do, the better we get: New features, new use cases, even new ways of talking about ourselves — they all come from you building off of our platform.
So, when we started thinking about putting on a conference, we didn’t really want it to be about us (except the name — the “King Kong” pun was too weird to pass up).
We wanted KeenCon to be a platform for platforms, where we could wax poetic on why we like them so much, and hopefully create a jumping-off point for even bigger things.
We wanted KeenCon to show off our customers, show what’s possible, and show what’s coming up next.
We wanted KeenCon to do more than just have people sit and listen to a bunch of talks.
We wanted, basically, to gather a room full of genius superheroes together so they could bounce ideas off each other and walk out inspired and psyched about the next thing they’re gonna build or the next question they’re gonna answer or the next universe they’re gonna explore.
If you check out the KeenCon site (and you should — it’s way cute), you’ll notice that we mention 3 concepts that are pretty important to us: Information, Intuition, and Invention. We didn’t always put a name to those ideas, but they’ve been a driving force behind Keen IO since pretty much our inception, and we believe they’re at the heart of every discovery.
Whether you’re exploring the cosmos, setting out to travel to parts unknown, or digging through data for answers, exploration is all about gathering and mining the raw Information for insight, following your Intuition (sometimes in the face of that data) to see where it leads, and having the Invention to make your own way (figuratively or literally) when you need to. Real discovery happens when these 3 things work together — the data gives you a guide, but you need to trust your gut and make your own way, too.
These are the stories we want to share at KeenCon — not just about Keen, and not even just about tech — but stories about that balance between data and ingenuity and going with your guts. And, honestly, we’ve got some great people to tell them: A famed mathematician, the original architect of the iPhone, a freaking rocket scientist, some awesome founders and developers, and hopefully (hopefully!) you, too. We really hope you can make it!
Tickets are still available for KeenCon — including a limited number of discounted scholarship tickets. For more information about KeenCon, shoot us an email at keencon@keen.io.
(A thousand apologies to the folks at Adobe, for giving us the ability to Photoshop these terrible images.)
