The Kernel decamps to Poland for BitSpiration

The Kernel is partnering with the a new digital conference, BitSpiration, in Poland.

We are glad to announce we’ll be one of the official media partners at the BitSpiration conference, June 12-13 in Krakow, Poland. I’m guessing you haven’t heard of BitSpiration, which, to some extent, is understandable, as it’s not only a new conference but quite an exclusive one. (You know us at The Kernel, we like a bit of that.)

There’s some history to this event. For the past two years, there was a big effort by a tiny group of people in Poland to push entrepreneurship and start-ups, not only locally but in all of Easter Europe. In 2010, they joined forces with the Allegro Group, the Polish eBay, to start the e-nnovation conference in Poznan. I was asked to speak there but, to be honest, I don’t think they even knew who they were flying in.

E-nnovation is a great conference, but it has always struggled to get the right balance between the corporate and the startup crowds. So we’ve gone back, smaller-scale, on this one, and we’ve made some changes, like democratising the talks. (We not only wanted to have our friends on stage, but interesting and unknown people with cool things to share.)

And so, BitSpiration was born. So far we have a fantastic line-up ,with good friends like David Bizer from HackFWD, Jon Bradford from Springboard, Dan & Paul Bragiel from I/O ventures, Don Dodge from Google, Paul Jozefak from Liquid Labs, Paul Papadimitriou from Constellation Research and my personal favorite, John Draper, a.k.a. Cap’n Crunch, the father of Blue Boxes, phreaker and poster boy for many generations of hackers worldwide.

Check the call for papers if you want us to host your talk, or send it on to cool people who might want to join in. One thing I can assure you is that the conference is going to be a lot of fun. Hell, if you don’t enjoy it, I’ll personally buy you a beer to compensate you. And since we love our readers, we’re giving you a 20 per cent discount code (the code is “bitspiration_20″) for the first 20 people that register for the conference.