*** April is the moon cycle for dreamers and doers as the conference circuit heats up and we roll headlong into nerd season. This month, startups, cats, and forays into the third dimension.
April 3-6: Startup Salad
You remember the bonus rounds from the original Sonic on Sega Genesis? Curled into a ball, pinballing around an ever-changing landscape of psychedelia and grappling against gravity, hellbent on collision with a Chaos emerald? Startup Salad is that, except the plucky hedgehog has been replaced with a few score type-A 20-somethings with big ideas. We’re talking a 2.5-day crucible of get-‘er-done madness, a galvanizing romp through a killing field of like-minded achievers. Beginning on Friday night at Tech Temple in Dongcheng, and continuing through until late Sunday, participants pitch their concepts, form groups of copacetic creators, and get advice from industry luminaries. Gladiators can opt in for 300rmb per pass, but if you’re not there to build and hone your pitch deck, you can snag a plain ol' audience ticket for 100rmb. Come with nothing but your dreams, leave with a team and prototype. Info here. (Chinese.) Speaking of pitch decks:
April 4-7: The 100,000 Cats Project
You’ve heard this before, right? You know what the internet’s made of? You know that if you opened its stomach and looked into its ropey guts, all you’d see is cats?
Well Ling Pan Studios most certainly does. On October 15 of last year, organizers sounded the clarion call, asking mobile device users to sketch a cat on their screen, submit the finished product, and pass the challenge on. If you swing by SZ Art Center at 798 from April 4 to April 7, you can catch the resulting 100,000 finger-painted graffiti kitties in alarming battle array.
April 18-20: Unite 2015 Beijing – Unity3D Conference
I have a friend who’s been to one of those 5D movies, so I know that the fourth dimension is smell and the fifth dimension is amusement park rides, what the hell is the third dimension, exactly? I mean, if you had to give it a definition. “Thickness, depth and solidity”, the dictionary says. Sounds hot.
Anyway, Unity, currently in version five, is a 3D game development platform that allows creators to push their games to a whole host of systems and devices, from Android and iOS to Oculus Rift rigs and browser-based mediums like WebGL. UNITE -- set to go off at the Beijing National Convention Center -- plans to bring all the Unity dweebs together under one ginormous roof for a few days of training, workshops, and virtual reality demos.
With a 2014 head count of 4,500 attendees, we’re not talking a minor blip in the meetup bucket here, and if game dev is your bailiwick, you should probably go to this. Everyone’s gonna be there: Unity’s founder David Hegalson and CEO John Riccitiello and Alan Foo and all the other honchos.
Tickets run from 600rmb for an individual single-day pass to 1,200rmb for the full slog – not bad as far as these things go. More info here. (Chinese.)
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