Last year's ValioCon was great. My favorite talk was by Ethan Dunham (the fontsquirrel/fontspring guy) about font hinting and the current state of web fonts. (Did you know font hinting is like a programming language in and of itself?) I went in not expecting to get too much from the talks, but definitely walked away with a lot of valuable insight on a wide variety of topics. Definitely looking forward to the conf this year.