Most of the attendees at The Next Web Conference, taking place in Amsterdam, The Netherlands, are not from The Netherlands. We are very proud of that and have always considered the conference an international event.
To make it easier for people not from The Netherlands we always try to help with hotels, travel and finding their way around Amsterdam. For this conference we’ve gone one step further and have partnered up with Droam to also make it affordable to use your devices here and enjoy cheap dataroaming without being charged absurd amounts of money by mobile operators.
We have all been there; you travel, check a bit of mail, do a bit of surfing, nothing excessive, and when you get home you are greeted with a roaming data bill that easily matches the amount of money you spent on food, during the whole trip. Well, I certainly have experienced that.
Droam is a company that offers a very elegant and simple solution for exactly this problem. They rent out a device called a Mifi that has 3G connectivity that it shares with your devices via Wifi. Their starting rates are €27.50 for a Mifi device (you rent it) and the first day of data, and €3.50 for every day after this. This includes 50MB data traffic per day. So instead of roaming on your own phone or laptop you carry your own portable and local hotspot with you.
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With some operators charging €20 per megabyte, when you roam, you can see the appeal in this offer. As Phillip Actor, CEO of Droam, puts it:
‘Because The Next Web Conference attracts so many international attendees we thought we could offer an easy and affordable solution for staying online while traveling.’
Even Werner Vogels (CTO Amazon) loves Droam:
‘(I) tested it for the last three months of 2010 when I was almost continuously on the road. All around Europe, the Middle East, India, Singapore, US, and the service worked perfect… …I used it constantly and the resulting cost for those three months was a fraction of what I would normally have to pay, while my T-Mobile roaming data bill remained at $0.00.’
For our upcoming conference we have asked Droam to be our official Data Roaming partner and offer something special to our guests from abroad. Just for us they have put together a sweet deal: € 12,50 per day and no data limit! You can pay with your credit card and you can even choose to receive your Droam at Schiphol or at your hotel.
If you are interested in taking them up on this offer please visit http://www.droam.nl/en/order/ before April 15th and use Gift certificate code “TNW2011”.
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