Virtual conferences have been rising in popularity for years, but with the emergence of COVID-19, they have exploded as an industry necessity. Leveraging on the power of online presence and the rise of the virtual events, the minds behind Techila Con, adapted quickly to the new reality and launched virtually gathering techies from around Egypt and the globe to power up tech startups. The event will happen offline towards the end of the year at the Greek Campus. 

Powered by Startups Galaxy & Code Geist, Techila Con conference aims to help deliver innovative ideas that connect techies to their workplaces, businesses and startups. It gathers startup teams and enthusiasts with online talks and tools, startup and community exhibitions. The event held a series of webinars, not the regular webinars though, but more of tools, integrations, growth, product, with masterclasses by global speakers from around the world. Techila Con’s masterclasses was followed by a hackathon competition, for participants to create simple and funny games or developments and share it on social media, with a small video explaining how and why the participants created it.

Techila Con has taken place in partnership with Startups Without Borders, Seamless, Egypt Innovate, LintSchool, Swift Cairo, The Product Guys, Egdroid, Ministry of Testing and more. Also Techila Con is introducing representatives from Microsoft, Pipedrive, GoDaddy, Segment, Twilio, Adjust and Sendgrid.

When did you decide to make Techila Con online? and did it affect the event’s content?

Code Geist CEO Nour Abdel Aal: We launched the event to take place offline, but right after the coronavirus outbreak, we met and discussed all possibilities and options and settled on postponing the event to September. Later, we found that people were staying home for a while, so we decided to make a miniature version of Techila con and make it online.

Startups Galaxy’s Founder and CEO Nono Ghannam: Changing the event to online did affect the content of the event a little bit. We realized that if the networking part is not the best, then why don’t we go even bigger and get the greatest speakers in every topic. Going virtual challenged us to go beyond the traditional content and we onboarded some of the best speakers globally.

How would you rate the engagement of the attendees with Techila con online? Do you think it was beneficial to them?

Ghannam: Engagement was great, and it benefited people very much. As we didn’t want to be just an entrepreneurial event but rather a geeky nerd event that educates people with valuable content. 

Abdel Aal: It positively affected the content, as we started to expand and talk to people from Microsoft, pipe drive, adjust, and expanded the network of speakers and made our list of speakers more international. 

“Techila Con comes from a very collaborative nature, it’s stemmed from the work of many partners together,” Nono Ghannam, Founder at Startups Galaxy.

You’re typically the first event to happen online leveraging on Eventtus new tool, how was the experience?

Ghannam: We’re the first people to try Eventtus online feature and it was great. We honestly spent months and months looking for the best webinar tools in the world and nothing comes close to what we found with Eventtus and we’re happy that the best one and the one we picked is a player in the local market.