Ah! A joyful day it was. Steve Ballmer came to Belgium. I got up around 7 this morning and hopped in my car with my camera and flaptops. Drove aaaaall the way to the other side of the language border in my country and joined the local DPE team in helping to deliver a pretty sweet combo of events, hosted by Microsoft. I invited a bunch of bloggers and put them on the list of the Press so they could attend a press conference with SteveB and ask him some questions in a Q&A. As soon as I arrived, I helped out on the Silverlight demo a little by taking pictures and uploading them to Flickr so they could be pulled in live within the demo. I had 15 minutes to take pictures, upload them to Flickr and tag them so the API could fetch them. Sucked some bandwith uploading the 30 pictures (I added more later on), and saw the demo work juuust fine.
A little bit through the demo, I got the message that the press conference was about to start. I pulled some sleeves with the bloggers I saw in the keynote room, and we went to the press mezzanine. During the announcements, one of the bloggers asked Steve about social networks, and that ended up in coverage on valleywag! Talk about the power of blogging :) I bet if Steve would have burped, we’d get coverage on CollegeHumor and trillions of hits on YouTube. But let’s not drift away. Here’s the clip, courtesy of another blogger who recorded it:
In the mean time, another blogger was streaming the entire event, because as promised, there was wi-fi, and so the press conference has been broadcasted and recorded in full at the same time. Live streaming from the press conference of Ballmer, some Belgian politicians and the general manager of MSFT Belux. The news couldn’t have been hotter on a blog. Other bloggers in the room (they move in flocks) sat back and watched the scene.
The rest of the day, everyone could enjoy some sessions from the Remix event, the Beyond Hypertext or Digital Marketing track. Hundreds of attendees ate chunks of code, enjoyed exploring the tracks or sat aside in the lobby to network and discuss. Some even found their way to the sunny outdoors at the border of the lake. I loved it.
Quote SteveB: “Whooosh, and there it is.
Ballmer closed the day with a pretty interesting keynote, followed by a funny Q&A. I’m currently converting and compressing the session, and it’ll be online tomorrow. Then I drove home, got changed and was right on time for my Tai Chi lessons. I’m happy. High-Five ! Yeah!
Quote SteveB: “Bam!”
My impressions of the day: here on Flickr
Picture above: copyright by Bart Claeys
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