conferences means educating larger number of people about bitcoin, proselytizing the bitcoin philosophy, building local bitcoin communities and creating new networks of individuals with a common goal. It's difficult to measure infrastructure directly but one can infer that if we go from one or two conferences a year to many local conferences all over the world it means that a greater number of people are interested in taking an active role in building bitcoin and it's infrastructure. It's an indirect measurement, but I think it's a valid one.  Just off the top of my head there was the San Jose conference, a Miami Meetup, a Bratislava Meetup (Which resulted in Bratislava becoming a top bitcoin accepting city for local businesses), a German meetup, Amsterdam, London, Prague last week, and that's just what I can think of off the top of my head. That's a good sign and indicative in progress in infrastructure. People are a valuable resource- the most valuable in terms of something like bitcoin.

As for fluctuation between 100 and 130, I think that's pretty accurate myself. $100 tends to be one of those psychologically magic numbers where things easily settle.