I’ll be speaking at the Virtual World Conference in NYC the end of March, so I spent a few minutes speaking with Chris Sherman, the Executive Director of the conference. Chris founded the Austin Game Developer’s Conference and recently sold it to CMP Publications. He grows and sells boutique media, conference, and tradeshow companies.

Q: Why come to Virtual Worlds Conference in NYC?

A: NYC is the first time ever that we’ve pulled together all the major platform providers of all the virtual worlds. You get the insight of all the innovative folks that are making the platforms. Then you get all the shops that are building all the applications on top of the platforms. And the clients and customers that are getting something out of it. There’s never been an opportunity to bring all these people together before. It will be enlightening, entertaining, and unexpected.

Q: What are you particularly excited about?

A: The CDC will be there talking about their presence in Second Life and Whyville.

AOL is going to be interesting because we’ll hear about the strategy behind AOL Pointe in Second Life.

We’re going to have additional folks from MTV & Nickelodeon talking about the various strategies they’re working on.

Q: What’s the biggest surprise so far?

A: The number of international people. Japan, Holland, Germany, England…for an event that didn’t exist 2 1/2 months ago! We’ve put this together in a short time period, and the fact that we’ve got worldwide interest is just astounding. That’s on top of the people coming from the US. I don’t know what to make of it. It’ll be interesting to see what the international attendees are looking to get out of the show.

Q: Will attendess hear about how to make money with this new medium?

A: That’s going to be a topic of conversation that will be pervasive throughout the event. In some cases it’s going to be where you think it’ll be, in some cases it’ll be where you don’t think it’ll be.

Early registration offically ends today, but we’ll keep it open throughout the weekend.