Meet Magento Switzerland 2014 Recap

I have to write this in English, because people from all over Switzerland and abroad attended the 1st Swiss Meet Magento yesterday and because my last two blog postings about the event were in German. I’m still flashed by the great evening program where we helplessly competed with a real Croatian bowling champion who was unfairly sent without warning by Inchoo, one of Croatia’s finest Magento agencies.

The day ended with an amazing live concert by Zibbz, a very energetic Trash Pop Indie Rock Band from Aargau.

The conference was kicked off by Sylvain Rayé who was also one of the organizers. Kudos to him and Matthias Zeitz for all the hard work that went into organizing the first Meet Magento event in Switzerland. The location was a little bit hard to reach for those who used public transportation, but I absolutely loved the Riverside hotel and would come back without hesitation if it would be there again next year. There were around 200 attendees which is absolutely great for the first event. I’m sure there will be a steady increase in the following years.

After Sylvain introduced Kathleen Claes, Magento Partner Manager for Switzerland, and Ben Marks, the new Magento Community Evangelist (not community manager!) Andri Mengiardi and Maurice Marzolf from Ricardo.ch started their keynote Digital Transformation – Shaping a Marketplace 2.0 which unfortunately was held in German, although all other speakers were obliged to present in English. This led to the occasional misunderstanding in the audience.

The keynote itself was very interesting, though, Ricardo.ch being the biggest e-commerce platform in Switzerland with an annual turnover of 660 million Swiss francs, leaving eBay only a tiny fraction of the Swiss e-commerce market place.

After the keynote, there were two simultaneous tracks, one with business oriented topics, the other with technically oriented topics. Alexander Haiser from Openstream gave a great talk about blogging for e-commerce, which we will present in more detail in our blog in a separate posting. All business and technical tracks were recorded on video and will be linked to from the lists below once they are available on the event website.

Meet Magento Business Track

Here a list with all talks from the business track

• Open Source and Business Development – Thomas Fleck, Netresearch App Factory AG
• Trustmarks and customer reviews when selling online – Use trust and service to increase turnover! – Cliff Reichardt, Trusted Shops GmbH
• Persuasive E-commerce – Guido Jansen, Sanoma
• Turning queries into customers – Getting the most out of your shop’s search – Alexandros Paramythis, Contexity AG
• The Future of Payment in Switzerland – Armin Schmid, PayPal
• How to increase revenue by 85% in 1 year – Ray Bogman, SupportDesk B.V.
• Onsite Search That Really Sells – Jan Beco, Unic AG and Vincent Schickel-Küng, Prediggo
• Blogging for e-commerce – Alexander Haiser, Openstream Internet Solutions
• Integrating Magento with ERPs: The fast and affordable way – Alex Ursa, netlogiq.com
• Destination Management with Magento – from Zero to the Top of Europe – Efthimios Toulas, Liip
• Magento and B2B – Does that go together? – Alain Veuve, AOE Switzerland GmbH
• Where to improve your Product Data: PIM versus Magento versus ERP – Thomas Elmiger, Stämpfli AG

Meet Magento Developer Track

• Magento – Half a Rush-Hour for Developer – Rico Neitzel, Büro71a and Fabian Blechschmidt, FireGento e.V.
• KKL Luzern – Technological Overview – Andreas von Studnitz, integer_net GmbH
• Mistake Driven Development (MDD) – David Manners, Sitewards GmbH
• Magento with composer – Marcel Hauri, Stämpfli AG
• Introduction to OroCRM and OroPlatform – Lukas Kahwe Smith, Liip
• Build Magento 2 Extension – Max Gubar, Liip
• Using Vagrant for Magento development – Alexander Turiak, HexBrain
• Magento and HHVM – Damian Luszczymak, IcyApp
• PayPal Developer Track – Bert Baumann, PayPal SE
• Refactoring Magento Modules – Dr. Nikolai Krambrock, Code4Business
• Establish reliable builds and deployments with Magento – Marco Bamert, Unic AG
• Magento as a first – DPD Shipping Integration – Michiel Van Gucht, DPD Benelux

I only saw a small fraction of the talks, because I met and talked to so many old and new friends from the Magento community, but for me personally that’s the greatest thing about Meet Magento. The passionate people of the Magento community is what attracts me most.

The final talk of the day was presented by Ben Marks, in my opinion the best talk of the day and probably the best Magento keynote I ever heard. One of his quotes:

I work with the most caring, driven, insightful and passionate people I’ve ever met. And they all love YOU.

I’m finishing this blog posting while already attending the next Magento community event: The 2nd Magento Hackathon in Zürich. I will write another recap tomorrow or during the next couple of days.