Launch Festival 2014 last week Feb 24-26, showcased several startups, in addition to featured keynotes and partner presentations. A streaming search for #launch captured around 7000+ tweets.
The agenda was quite bare-bones, focused on debuting and demoing some 30-odd startups. The audience was large, in the virtual and likely physical space. There were 3000+ unique users tweeting or mentioned with #launch.
The tweets are heavy with name-dropping with an average of 1.5 user mentions per tweet, and many with upto 9 mentions.
So proud of @launch team @LifeAfterCubes @gdelvac @jadetran @EmilyStu @_brandice @steepdecline @lukelightning Andrew Simon Brandon +++ !!!
— jason (@Jason) February 23, 2014
Unlike Strata, the schedule is one-track, and user mentions are a reliable indicator for session of interest. Like much of the social phenomenon, the user mentions have an uninteresting exponential drop-off in the aggregate. As we saw before, keynotes tend to garner the most tweet responses.
Finding the top 25 most tweeted users was trivial. When drilling down to find top 10 mentions on a daily basis, there was an interesting pattern. Some were mentioned almost every day, while many only showed up on a single day. Of course, we expect @Launch and @jason to be regularly talked to. The variance seems to be about anticipation and affirmation (e.g. “looking forward to @mcuban”, or “excited to hear @paulg”).
Curious about how early, and how much later people mention or reference sessions, we mapped tweets to participating sessions and counted frequency by time slots. Here is a levelplot-inspired visualization of the tweet activity during Launch.
The horizontal and the vertical axes are both time slots. Only actual presentation and panel slots are included on the vertical axis, with the left column listing the session participants. The horizontal axis also includes break periods, and the time period between 6pm to 9am next day is one slot. The slots are rendered as a heat-map, the redder the slot, the more the tweet activity.
Hovering over a cell shows the number of tweets during that slot. Slots underlined in blue correspond to the time for the session within the row. Finally, the larger bold font indicates the top 25 users and apps mentioned over the three days.
Now, if you are like me, go find out more about @yvesbehar, @Handup, @Portfolia1 and @iKnightScope. Enjoy.
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