The value of any conference has both intangible and measurable characteristics. A habit or practice to aim for that will serve you for a lifetime is come up with a personal philosophy of conferences, and way of measuring the value to you, personally, using your own metrics, so that you can compare conference apples to apples going forward.

BIL constitutes a unique opportunity, and my intention is to write several ideas that have been valuable to me, and, playing the role of capitalist philosopher, to assign these a monetary value according to my value system, to show how valuable BIL and other conferences can be. Those who play games like World of Warcraft will probably smile at how I've borrowed some of the game design elements and seek to apply them in earnest to real life.

Sources of Value from BIL

1. Quantity of People met. My general rule of thumb, from the Celestine Prophecy, is "If  you make eye contact, it means you are supposed to speak." I would add to that, introduce yourself. One value of BIL is that, with 450 people registered to come (because that's the maximum number of chairs the CSULB facilities manager would allow - I know because I spoke to her about this), there is the opportunity, in the extreme, of meeting 450 people. I think each person that you meet gives you $5 in value just by itself, so meeting 10% of the people, or 45, x $5 each is worth $225. Meeting 100 people a day (my average, I think, when I'm trying to meet people) for two days equals 200 people, or $1,000 in value.

2. Quantity of People you get to Friend you on Facebook. For "Facebook", read "whatever social networking software you prefer". I think it's worth $10 in value to have a new friend on Facebook. You get to see that person's Status, photos (of themselves), get messages, notes, links, and see their friends. With respect to Friending Friends on Facebook, there is the possibility from BIL that each person you meet will have, on average, I would estimate about 500 FB Friends. By Friending lots of people at BIL, you have the Mutual Friends advantage. The more Mutual Friends, the more likely that the next person you try to Friend will accept your invitation and be open to you, vs. being scared or not interested. In the future, the most connected people will say their precious connections for those who are multiply connected to others, which is a sort of filter for strangeness, at least that is obvious on Facebook.

If you can get 50 Friends on Facebook from BIL, a possibility if you ask people, "May I friend you?" and give them a business card or are otherwise memorable, that's worth $500 in my book.

3. Quality of People 1 - Birds of a Feather/Common Interests. BIL is set up so that anyone can talk about anything they wish, and you as an attendee can go to any talk you wish, and walk out into another talk if you wish. This gives you the chance to find those people who are interested in the what at most other conferences would be rare, hard to find common interests. For instance, if you wonder about the economics of longevity, and then you see that Sonia Arrison is speaking on this topic, you have the joy of finding a bird of a feather and possibly can follow up and share insights, drafts and links with her later. Same goes for the other speakers on the topics most of interest for you. And if you can Facebook Friend these people, there are yet more people with common interests. How do you know? You just ask, "Who else has this interest?" and write down the answer, or exchange email about it. I think meeting a person with a common interest is worth $20 a person, and you should be able to meet 10 of them at BIL, easily, for $200 in value to you.

4. Quality of People 2 - Six Degress of Separation Superconnectors/Superconductors. Pareto the mathematician described what we call the 80/20 rule - that 80% of the value comes from 20% of the members of a set. Probably 20% of the people at BIL have 80% of the possible one-degree of separation connections. That is, they personally know hundreds or thousands of people. I personally know over 10,000 people, as I found out when I put them on my newsletter. I have (or had) one of the 200 largest networks on LinkedIn. And last night I used Facebook Grader and found that I had a 97.4 out of 100 rating of my "Facebook Power" and was ranked 267th most connected out of the 10,000 or so people who had also Graded themselves. I send Friend invites to 49 of the 50 most powerful/connected people (who had rankings from 100 to 99.6), and got accepted by most of them within hours. My ranking rose from 267th to 164th, and my Grading rose to 98.5 - all from 15 minutes of activity to the Superconnectors. BIL will fill rooms with connectors, and in each room there are likely two or three Superconnectors or Superconductors. In the worlds of BIL co-founder Todd Huffman, "Superconductors take your place in a Six Degrees of Separation world, and flatten the connections, so you are much closer to many more people." My sense is that you if you can come away with 5 Superconnector connections, that this is a great thing. I think meeting a Superconnector is worth $40 each, or $200 if you meet five of them. This is added to if you FB Friend them and have common interests.

5. Quality of People 3 - Sources of Friendship. If you can make a friend who likes you and hangs out with you, who you can talk with later about just about anything, this is a great outcome, and worth the conference by itself. I'll be conservative, and value this at $80, and say to aim for three friends, or $240 worth of friends!

6. Quality of People 4 - Sources of Love, Romance, and Sex. Though it's likely that men will outnumber women, and that heterosexuals will outnumber gay/lesbian attendees, there are still thousands, even tens of thousands of mathematically possible pairings of future boyfriends, girlfriends, couples, out of BIL. This is especially true if you are bi-sexual. The nature of futurism and human potential sends to attract people who are more open minded about their bodies and sexual orientation, so you are probably more likely to score at a BIL conference than at, say, an Adult Show in Las Vegas. And if you end up getting married, you will likely have found the statistically improbably: one high IQ person mating with another, and thereby creating a likely higher IQ kid or two. I think that one date out of BIL would be lucky indeed, and I'll value that at $160. I'd value it higher if sex resulted, though that's statistically improbable unless you are Mystery, the PUA (Pick UP Artist) featured in The Game by Neil Strauss, his own book The Mystery Method, and in his TV show. Now that I mention it, if you made friend with Mystery, that would be, well, priceless. And this is relevant because Mystery will be attending BIL. I've heard he's not going to talk about being a PUA. : (

7. Quality of People 5 - Sources of Employment, Consulting and Finance. In 20000 I met a young man at a software conference in Irvine, California named Clinton. He introduced me to his father, and this led to my receiving millions of dollars. I have met at least ten people through Clinton who have provided me, directly or indirectly, with money, in the form of equity, debt, convertible debentures, public stock, etc. In fact, I should be doing a business plan for him right now. I didn't know when I met Clinton that any of this would happen, but, by meeting a business person and mutually following up,

8. Quality of People 6 - Sources of Entrepreneurial Collaboration. To do what you want to do in life and to get rich, you need to write a business plan, get a full management team of complimentary people who are really, really good at their specialty, and raise money from the investors who didn't have their money in Iceland Bank, Bernie Maddoff funds, or oil futures in the last six months. BIL can help you to find potential team members for your entrepreneurial venture, and I'd say meeting one of these, while perhaps a 1 in 5 chance, would be worth potentially hundreds of thousands up to millions of dollars to you as an entrepreneur. More likely is that you will meet someone who will put you in touch with someone you can collaborate with. Remember the first law of Entrepreneurship, however", "Limit the Primary Participants to those who can contribute directly to the primary goals of the enterprise."

9. Quantity of Ideas - This is where BIL will shine. I think it's likely that BIL will give you more ideas that you hadn't heard or thought of before than just about any conference. I'd say a new idea was worth $20 each, and that BIL will give you at least 50 of these, for $1,000 in value.

10. Quality of Ideas - This depends upon you, your openness, your filters, your ability to pay attention to people even when they aren't famous and paying you to listen them. If you can listen without fatiguing or whispering or excessive texting at crucial moments, you will probably hear or read three to ten really, really high quality ideas that will save you time, money, possibly even save your life or that of one of your loved ones. I think very high quality ideas are worth $250 (what you'd pay for an hour of a professional's time to teach you something new and awesome), and I think you can get two to four of these from BIL, for $500 to $1,000 in value.

11. Life Changing Transformation - To get the most out of BIL, you can have a life changing transformation. You might become enlightening, make a decision to become smarter, decide to be a professional writer or speaker, find that hypothesis that changes the nature of your scientific inquiry, or invent an awesome new product that changes the world, perhaps via software or a new form of social networking. Stephen Spielberg saw the movie, "The Greatest Show on Earth" as a six year old, and decided then and there to make movies, so that was a movie worth billions to him, in retrospect. BIL could make you change your life and that, like having Mystery as your wingman in pick up situations, would be priceless.

The total value of BIL will be,  by my calculation, worth more than $4,300 to me, and much more if the big value items (funding, girlfriend, business collaborator, co-author) come through. If you find this way of looking at BIL interesting, please send me your actual experience, with dollars attached. I will send you mine in exchange.

Good luck at BIL. Feel free to friend me on Facebook and invite me to dinner to try out your new knowledge, hit on me, amaze me, pick my brain about exercise, healthy bacteria, wearable computers, IPv6, raising money, making and losing a fortune, and anything else you think would be interesting. alex@innofone.com