While Nick was on stage at Launch Conference receiving the award for “Startup most likely to be acquired in the next 100 days,” I was already on a plane to meet Matt for SuperConf in Miami. This was the conference’s first year, and, in short, we had a spectacular time.

The first day was “Startup Blastoff,” where 7 different companies pitched for the chance to win $25,000 in cash and prizes. We really enjoyed the presentations. My favorites were viinyl.com, a fantastic new way to experience music in the browser, and luxset.com, a Groupon’ish site for luxury goods. We were last to present, but it was for the best, as the judges selected us as winners of the pitch contest! We even got a big check (although this proved to be more trouble than it was worth… try explaining to a panhandler that you don’t have any change when you’ve got a comically large check in one hand).

Day 2 was a line-up of great speakers. My favorites were Zed Shaw’s on design considerations for API’s over HTTP, and Wufoo’s Kevin Hale’s “5 laws of user interface design”. Kevin quantified laws like “placing few, large items on the page is good” in a way I’d never seen before. And he backed it up with a litany of psychology experiments. It was incredibly informative.

But the first 2 days were just the beginning of the SuperConf excitement. After day 2, Matt did an interview with Startup Foundry. The following Monday, Paul posted his article: Shoefitr: The company Amazon must buy immediately. Someone submitted it to Hacker News, where it promptly hit the front page. The article was up-voted so fast, the HN admins thought it was the work of a voting ring, and added extra weight to it (to make it harder to stay on the front page). Even with the extra weight, the article received > 100 up votes, peaking at#1, and stayed on the front page for more than 12 hours. The next day Time did an article. What a week!

We can’t thank SuperConf’s organizer Austin Bunsen enough for all the work he did. SuperConf was amazing, and we look forward to returning next year!