Vonage co-founder Pulver introduces 140conf social media meetup, but is it needed?

140conf organizers make introductions at National Mechanics in Old City before founder Jeff Pulver takes the stage.

Updated: 2:19 p.m., Copy error.
Updated: 2:26 p.m., Added final attendance figures.

When Vonage co-founder Jeff Pulver decided to take a closer look at social media last year, it was not without skepticism.

“I wanted to see how much of it was bullshit. But it’s real,” Pulver, dressed in a purple checkered shirt, said to a crowd of more than 50 attendees of Philly’s first 140conf, a new social media meetup, its name a play on Twitter’s character limit.

The quiet, bespectacled Pulver, who organized the first 140conf, a larger, semiannual event held so far in New York, Los Angeles, London and Tel Aviv, told Technically Philly in a pre-event interview that so many folks were making the trip from Philadelphia to New York that he decided to cut their trip. With local help, he introduced a Philly-centric monthly installment of the semiannual conference Tuesday evening.

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