When I decided to end Kingston BETA – the first and longest running Caribbean Tech Startup Event, it wasn’t easy, even as I was at peace with the decision. It was 11years, we had achieved alot and I made the personal decision a year ago to make SiliconCaribe a real media and events business that started as a passion project that grew into a mission.

In the process, I’m being interviewed by fellow tech entrepreneurs, blogger and podcasters. The interview I did recently was with Xavier Murphy FOunder of Jamaicans.com. Read it below.

“We kickstarted a community…” –  A Conversation with Ingrid Riley on the Kingston BETA Finale

Ingrid Riley is the co-founder, producer, and host of the first technology start-up event in the Caribbean, Kingston BETA. She also founded Silicon Caribe Media, a firm involved with information, inspiration, and connection. Riley is enthusiastic about the limitless potential of the digital Caribbean and has served as Private Sector Organization of Jamaica (PSOJ) 50Under50 Business Leader Gamer Changer Awardee + TechLink Game Changer Social Entrepreneurship Awardee.

She was recognized for her work in kick-starting Jamaica’s tech startup community in 2007 and for her pioneering work in helping the development of the Caribbean Startup Ecosystem. Riley is also an award-winning tech blogger and has been a Dow Jones syndicated and newspaper technology columnist. She has written over 2,000 articles on topics such as startups, startup ecosystems, social media, digital culture, and trends. she also speaks on Caribbean innovation, tech entrepreneurship and startup ecosystems, social media, digital culture and digital business trends.

KingstonBETA is the longest-running tech start-up event in the region’s technology sector. It is a signature brand from SiliconCaribe. Since its establishment, KingstonBETA has produced more than 100 events that attracted over 10,000 attendees, along with 400 tech entrepreneurs from eight Caribbean nations and the Diaspora in the United States and the United Kingdom. Event attendees include high school and college students, young professionals, social media stakeholders, digital creatives, entrepreneurs from the private sector, investors, and officials from government and academia.

Kingston BETA has been instrumental in creating Digital Jam 2.0, a joint venture between the World Bank, the Jamaican government, and early adopters among Jamaican businesses. Kingston BETA also introduced the first Sports Hackathon in the Caribbean region. As a brand, the organization has worked with more than 50 Jamaican, Caribbean, and international brands that span the private sector, governmental agencies, and global development agencies including JAMPRO.

KingstonBETA maintains active and growing online communities that are designed to facilitate engagement from the Caribbean community and the Diaspora, including Facebook’s SiliconCaribe Group, the KingstonBETA Group on LinkedIn.

Looking back did the growth and popularity of the Kingston Beta surprise you?

The growth, longevity and influence of Kingston BETA has been nothing but a surprise to me and all of us involved. We didn’t start out thinking that this event would kickstart a community and a movement and then influence what so many others did and are doing still across the Caribbean.

It came from a place of wanting to connect and know more. You see my co-founder Susan LeeQuee and I had an interactive agency at the time – Dutchpot Interactive, the first of its kind headed by two women in the Caribbean. Coming from creating iGuide Jamaica- an internet directory and magazine the first of its kind in Jamaica and the Region, we had gathered some media attention and attention from people who were also playing in the internet space. We had also met some really cool people in the Caribbean when we were both scooped up by and working for an American dot-com startup called HomeView in 1999/2000. So from that background and running our own ship, we wanted to know who else was crazy, passionate and doing things in the digital space and what were they working on.

We did some research about what was happening in the United States and I can’t recall the details but the name Kingston BETA was born, Susan did the branding, I did the messaging, invites to people and so at the first Kingston BETA, February 28th, 2007, at the Jamaica Pegasus Hotel- we had 90 people, paying $600 bucks. We had three speakers – Sandor Panton, Top5Jamaica, Rodney Browne of CaribbeanMassive.com/ECaribbean Limited (St. Kitts) and Marc Allen who was part of a duo of co-founders of NetVision Interactive that was scooped up and taken to Hohn Kong. He spoke from Hong Kong. We in fact still have that first list of attendees.

Read the rest of the article here