iForum has been held in Kyiv since 2009, and in 2019 it was attended by 13,286 people. LIGA.Tech named Alexey Mas, Alexander Olshansky and Sergey Korzh as the main organizers. The conference began as a celebration of the tenth anniversary of the Ukrainian Banner Network, and the move to autumn 2020 was the first in its history.
Where the conference grew from
The Ukrainian Banner Network appeared in 1999. It was launched by Mas and his classmate Ruslan Dmitrakovich, and by that time Mas had graduated from the radio physics faculty of Kyiv University and worked at NIIASS and the bank "Ukrainian Capital". From September 1997 to March 2000, he was a leading specialist at the National Bank of Ukraine, where he handled payment processing. In 2000, the Ukrainian portal UAportal, whose investor was Alexander Soroka, launched "Tree of Friends", the first social network on a Ukrainian portal. In 2007, UAportal was sold to the holding.
In parallel, the photo hosting service Infostore was developing, in which Olshansky invested as an investor. In December 2008, the police seized the project's servers, and it closed. A few months later, in 2009, the first iForum took place.
The people behind the conference
Olshansky heads the forum's organizing committee and manages Internet Invest Group. He was also a co-founder of Mail.ua, which was sold to Mail.ru in 2012 for about $0.5 million. Sergey Korzh is listed as a co-organizer of iForum, and the conference's co-founder was Artur Orudzhaliev, former owner of AIN.UA. Mas hosted the "Internet Business" track at the forum. It was these people who made the decision to postpone in March 2020.
By spring 2020, iForum itself was one of the few regular industry events in Ukraine that brought the entire IT crowd together in one place. That is why LIGA.Tech described the postponement announcement plainly: "Ukraine's largest IT conference iForum will not take place in May — it has been moved to autumn."
Ukraine's largest IT conference iForum will not take place in May — it has been moved to autumn
What was happening with Mas at the same time
In 2015, Mas joined Kyivstar as IT & Digital Advisor to the company's president, Peter Chernyshov. In April 2016, the company announced the telecom accelerator "VDNH-TECh-Kyivstar", and in December of that year, four startups from the accelerator went into production. Later, Mas headed the operator's Innovation lab. On 31 July 2019, he left Kyivstar.
Already in August 2019, Mas launched "Craft Social Networks", and participation in the project's syndicate was based on contributions of $100. By November 2019, the syndicate had about 280 members. So at the time of the conference postponement, he was working on his own project and at the same time remained one of iForum's organizers.
The exact date of the autumn iForum has not yet been announced. The organizing committee promised to report it later.
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