Hi, I'm one of the founders of the event. Ethereum took the core technology behind Bitcoin (the blockchain) and figured out a way to generalize it for any kind of decentralized application. Vitalik has a great overview you can watch here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=66SaEDzlmP4Regarding the event, you can read our philosophy here: https://ethwaterloo.com/philosophy.html. Essentially we believe that the technology has immense potential, but there is an enormous shortage of talent and general understanding of how to build applications on top of it. The simple goal we aim to achieve is to educate and inspire talented developers to build on Ethereum. There is no other agenda, and to that end it is free for all attendees.
Regarding sponsorship, we're primarily backed by Blockgeeks Lab out of Toronto (blockgeekslab.com), which is a blockchain-based accelerator started by Dmitry Buterin. We're also accepting a carefully selected group of companies with an interest in developing applications on / learning more about Ethereum to sponsor on a case-by-case basis.
