Gliph had a strong presence at the Bitcoin 2013 conference in San Jose, California in May and we’re just now sharing some of the media and story of the event.

Gliph Co-Founder Nicholas Asch and Gliph iOS Developer Joakim Fernstad in our freshly laid out booth at Bitcoin 2013. (It featured beanbag chairs and foliage)

The company first got involved when your blogger and co-founder (Rob Banagale) accepted a panelist spot on the Law Enforcement and Financial Privacy track at the conference. At this time our development team was working feverishly on the first release of the Bitcoin integration into Gliph.

Wanting to do something special for the earliest and most core Bitcoin adopters, we created custom Bitcoin branded merchandise for the event. This included hats and hooded sweatshirts embroidered with a great looking Bitcoin logo. We sold these for Bitcoin at our booth.

We did our release on Friday, May 17th, which included a feature article in PandoDaily. That article was written by Erin Griffith and included our news of joining the Boost VC startup accelerator.

We had a few media events scheduled for the conference as well. On Friday morning, Rob did an interview with Adam Levine of the Let’s Talk Bitcoin podcast. The discussion covered a wide range of topics, and if you’re a fan of Gliph you will probably appreciate some of the details shared in the interview.

Rob was on a media blitz of sorts and also had a chance to sit with Scott Morgan of BTC Journal on Saturday morning. A portion of that interview, which covers “The Future of Bitcoin,” includes our take on what Bitcoin needs to do to be successful:

You can view a variety of other media from the conference, including video of many of the panels and speakers on Youtube.

We decided to expand our involvement in the conference when it became clear we would be able to launch the first Bitcoin-ready Gliph feature set on the first day of the conference. We did this in two ways: we secured an exhibitor’s booth and also planned for one of our iOS developers, Joakim, to participate in the Bitcoin hackathon.

Joakim’s project was focused on using low-power bluetooth as a discovery mechanism for people around you who are capable of trading bitcoin. He went up on-stage and demo’d his work on Sunday under the guise of “Gliph Labs.”  It was really cool to see what he was able to get going in such a short period of time. We see some great applications for his hack in Gliph’s future. Sourcecode from this hack is currently available in our Github.

One of the funnier things that happened for our team was the delivery of a nearly naked mannequin to our exhibitors booth. We had rented only the torso to show off the Bitcoin jackets, but were instead treated to a full-sized athletic looking dude wearing only underwear. We hastily got a pair of shorts from our hotel room and got them on before many conference attendees had showed up.

Another interesting thing about the Bitcoin 2013 conference was the Comic Wow! convention going on at the venue at the same time. There were many people dressed up in cosplay costumes, including a full sized, highly detailed Iron Man costume, an Alien costume and many, many more. Seeing them run up next to Bitcoin enthusiasts was pretty funny. @thebitcoinwife got up close to the mannequin before we got the shorts on.

Overall, the team had a great time at the event and we hope to attend next year as well. It was a terrific place to launch the first version of Gliph with Bitcoin!