For someone flying into Vegas, not knowing whether you will be able to attain a badge is a bit nerve-wracking. Now, they will collect dust.ĭEFCON has no internet waiting pool, no guarantees you bring cash to the door to get your badge. The badges were RFID chipped and branded by "The Walking Dead." Honestly not worth keeping but only for the fact they are so hard to get. The cost was $240 each - coincidently, the same cost for DEFCON! This was many months before the actual conference, so the badges were mailed to us. She nailed it in five minutes in the website waiting room, and we got all-access badges for five days. My wife and I both participated in the lottery (for the third year straight as we have been sneaking past years). Needless to say, Comic-Con is notorious for the difficulty of accessing a badge. ■ Events: after-parties and post events 1. ■ Cost: general costs around the conferences ■ Badges/Access: getting them and presentation OK now, let's start our CON comparison! Prepare yourself for cynicism, tears and happiness. Growth comes with pains let's talk about them. Each was very personable at first, but now they've grown to many thousands of people - Comic-Con at 110,000 and DEFCON at 25,000. Both conferences had an educational feel to them, with how-to presentations amongst peers to share new techniques. The purpose behind each conference was to connect with peers who they only got to communicate with over the internet or on very rare occasion. DEFCON started in 1993 and had 30 or so people. Comic-Con started in 1970 and had 300 people attend it. What makes these two conferences so special is that they both started as an idea, had a small cult following and a large, emerging industry behind them (whether the founders knew that made no difference in why they started them). Having this experience, I wanted to step back and compare the cultures and styles of these two amazing conferences that have a lot of spillover and similarities to each other. I've been to many a tech conference, marketing conference and others in between.
Being part of the startup world makes me no stranger to conferences. Having attended Comic-Con every year for the last five years, but this was my first trip to DEFCON. These two conferences could be the nerdiest of nerd in their arenas. Consequences of being a conference newb, for sure. Going "on time" doesn't stand a chance at any limited exclusives, even with the five-day passes with preview night. People are pretty aggressive here, and some of them have been sleeping outside like homeless people to get first dibs on these tickets. There lie ticket lines that can get you access to purchase conference exclusives or get into limited panels and previews. The line gets moving and is less organized as herds of people are pushing their way into a single escalator, at the bottom of which is the entrance to the floor of Comic-Con 2016. This conference smells of occasional body odor and every tenth person is cosplaying. The first presentation at DEFCON 2016 begins.īacktrack two weeks in San Diego, there are thousands of people waiting to get into preview night. A few goons give the go-ahead, and the group is funneled into a large presentation room in a very organized fashion. The few girls around are dressed like rebellious teens, and everyone is rocking backpacks. As far as the eye can see are lots of dudes - dressed-in-all-black dudes, mohawks dudes, big beards dudes and painted fingernails dudes.
The scene seems to be techies cutting core apps like mail and Slack. It was a Friday morning and a thousand degrees heat waiting in line at a stale cigarette-smelling Bally's toggling between airplane mode, getting kicked off of LTE and forced onto GSM networks, and the internet is dropping.
#2017 defcon badges full
Seems like just last week that DEFCON 2016 was in full swing. With that known, let's compare two of the best conferences on the planet: DEFCON and Comic-Con. The time to start buying plane tickets and preparing vacations days is now. Comic-Con recently sent out the attendee preregistration email for the 2017 conference, announcing that previous attendees get first dibs on tickets early next year before the lottery happens.
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