I just wanted to mention that I'll be heading to the 1st ever NEO DevCon and I am truthfully pleased as punch. =) The organizers were kind enough (or smart enough) to give away some tickets to people who were looking to learn about the platform or I would never have been able to afford the $750 for entrance. The ticket giveaway is over, but if you couldn't make it to Essentially it is another smart contract platform, similar to Ethereum, but has a concurrently tied second token called GAS that is distributed to wallet holders. To those familiar with other coin economies, it's basically staking, the difference being that staking earns GAS (which is also SUPER EASY TO CLAIM) and not more NEO. Another thing I like is that transmission of NEO is nearly instantaneous, is confined to only integers (meaning you can't send .0164839, only 1 or 2 or 3 etc), and has no transaction fee. The aspect of confinement to integers means that since the price has risen from $0.17 upon offering to trading around $120 as of this morning, NEO is not intended to be used as a transmission of any given sum of funds as other coins are. It is essentially a voting rights token since at this point the amounts possible to send are all multiples of $120 i.e. $240, $360 etc. unless the amount you're intending to send is large enough that $120 is like shaving satoshis. =)
The conference is the 30-31 in San Francisco, and like I already indicated, $750 is just not affordable for most of us, but if you can't make it to the conference, don't feel left out. There is a vibrant open source community developing at cityofzion.io that are welcoming and are building out this platform with an open mind towards those who want to get involved but aren't quite sure how. Software development is an intimidating or esoteric field for everyone on the outside looking in. These platforms will be the future, and any platform that makes itself available to, and makes use of, the power and creativity of eager people will surely win the day.