Going Solo, a conference for Freelancers and Small Business owners in Lausanne, Switzerland is going down on the 16th of May. It is organized by Stephanie Booth, a co-speaker at Paris Web this year and is aimed at providing freelancers and small business owners with viable information for their business:

skills a freelancer needs, fixing prices, closing deals, negotiating contracts, what kind of work freelancers in the 2.0 world do, marketing and taking care of one’s social capitall, tools of the trade, coworking and staying in touch with “colleagues”, challenges in making a passion into a job, dealing with the blurring of the life/work distinction, international clients, travel, different laws and tax rules, accounting and adapting to different kinds of clients (in particular, how do you deal with big corporations that you approach or who have approached you)

In addition to Stephanie and her endless enthusiasm you’ll get gems of information from Suw Charman, Stowe Boyd, and Martin Roell.

Early Bird is 300 CHF, which’ll go up to 400 this coming Monday.

Once in a while you realize that a lot of people are like you. When I joined a big internet corporation a lot of people asked me if I will shut up about bad things on my blog or if I will become a company drone now. The joke never gets old and I told some other people in the same situation about it. Well, we drank some beers, chatted and now it is time to take action:

PlugLondon is a meetup for developers in London in December sponsored by ebay, Yahoo, Skype and Paypal.

The catch? All of the people involved agreed on leaving both HR and PR out the door and do the thing ourselves. So on the 8th of December we want all the London people who drive software innovation to show up, chat with us about their products, how they use our APIs, get info from our experts and of course have several beers and food.

We are planning on repeating the exercise every half year and basically want to show that London can be as cool as the Valley but not as annoying to get to for UK folks.

The event has no branding yet and we invite people to give us logo ideas. The audience at the first meetup will choose which is the best and we go from there.

So come around, check out the different parts:

• PlugLondon web site
• PlugLondon wiki
• The Flickr Group to upload your logo design
• Upcoming site

See you there,

Chris