This past week we had the great pleasure of attending the North by Northeast Interactive (NXNEi) festival in Toronto.  It’s kind of a smaller, more intimate (and more Canadian!) spin on the world famous South By Southwest Interactive (SXSWi) festival.

It’s kind of ironic given that we are working on a largely pictorial project – creating the first ever magazine about young adult cancer survivors and fighters BY young adult cancer survivors and fighters – that we have not been taking many photos of the events we have been attending.  We will take more photos!!  🙂

Anyway… we here at These Are My Scars are so excited about the future after an amazing conference this week.  Here are a few of the highlights:

1. We originally planned to attend a workshop on social media strategy, but it was sold out.  This was fate.. and a very good thing!  Instead, we attended, “Marketing for the Shy Creative Type” and it was absolutely incredible!  We learned sooo much from Daniel Schutzsmith (@schutzsmith) of Mark & Phil that our heads are still spinning!Later on in the week, we had an epiphany and have already begun devising a cool campaign to help bring together many more young adult cancer survivors and fighters and build a strong global community.  We want to credit Daniel with helping to spark our creativity and get us thinking about other approaches we can take to find and connect people.
2. I learned a lot about mobile from a session called “Content is King, but Transactions are Everything…”  Afterwards Tal chatted with the awesome Marlon Rodrigues (@marlonrodrigues) and we look forward to connecting with him in the future to talk more about ‘Scars’ and how we can leverage mobile to spread the word!
3. After the great panel discussion at “Beyond Media Queries: Responsive Design and Cross-Device Thinking” Tal had the great pleasure of meeting Rick Mason (@egnaro).  Rick has worn many, many hats at NOW magazine and at FITC.  Hard to imagine anyone with more insight about how we the people can curate and publish multimedia content both online and in print as simply and efficiently as possible.  We would like to take Rick and his team out for some beverages and discussion our passions in the near future.  We have so much to learn from them!

There were many more excellent presentations!  These are just a few of the ones that we are most excited about from this past week.  We have so many ideas we want to share with you!