Plazes CEO: No, I didn't lie about my sick infant to get out of your conference

NICK DOUGLAS — Felix Petersen had two good reasons to cancel speaking at the Next Web Conference: "We have some severe problems with the new version that we launched yesterday and also my 9month old daughter has become sick." His wife, he added, was very concerned. So the conference holders pardoned the creator of Plazes (a service that tells the world where you are when you log onto a wifi connection). A wifi connection like the ones Felix logged into in Copenhagen, at another conference, when he was supposed to be home in Berlin with his sick infant daughter. (Exhibit #2: a photo of Felix at the conference.) So one organizer blogged it. Felix responded in the comments: His story was true and the "evidence" that he was elsewhere was a day off. Readers swiftly began the backlash, but not before Michael Arrington's TechCrunch spread the drama. Lesson all around: nasty little call-outs are best left in "draft" mode. (Not that we're ones to talk.)

Contact information for this author is not available.