Rick makes a good point:

"Cheap MSFT goods - The ISV Empower Program

Don Dodge has a post up about Microsoft being a good friend to start ups. He quotes some love, etc.

Love em, hate em, doesn't matter. Here's what does matter: Microsoft's ISV Empower Program.

In short, you save a ton of money on MSFT's software, most notably the MSDN program.  Memo to Slava: Sign up. Memo to Adam: Sign up.  This is a massive savings program that is a must have if you are doing any work on the Windows Platform.

 There are other start up/ISV programs that Microsoft (and IBM, and Oracle, etc ) has which may be on interest to you.  Don's  post has the highlights.

My advice: spend the $375."

I have to agree. In fact, my team works with ISVs that join the program - so I know it's a good value. (Not just on software, but also programs, advice, technical support, channel development)

Visit the partner program website for details.

My friends at Sonos (disclaimer: I LOVE MY SONOS) have partnered with Best Buy in the US to make their devices available to an even wider audience.  This comes a few weeks after their Pandora announcement (and firmware update - which has dramatically improved the Internet radio performance)

Too bad there are no plans for Canada, but you can kind units at some Future Shop stores.  (personally, I think Sonos has an exceptional online ordering site, which handles cross-border shipping better than most sites)

Some blog coverage here.

Some excuse Sonos of being too expensive.... maybe a little, but the value is there.  It's a great solution for multi-room, great music support (MP3, WMA, Urge, Zune, Itunes, etc), an AMAZING remote and rock-solid reliability.  Compared to the high-end systems (that barely do more), Sonos is great value.

We had a chance to tell everyone at EnergizeIT about matchit.ca - it received a strong round of applause, which I will take as a good thing!

Lots of people are posting content from EnergizeIT.  What a great day!

A few blog reactions:

• Thank you for coming to EnergizeIT
• EnergizeIT in Toronto was Awesome!
• EnergizeIT was Energizing!
• The REAL Truth about EnergizeIT 2007!
• Microsoft Energize IT
• EnergizeIT Recap
• This could be an issue
• My day spent at EnergizeIT! 2007
• EnergizeIT Underway
• EnergizeIT
• Technet Energize IT 2007
• Energize IT

Some content:

• PWOP Podcasts:  Welcome, Speakers Lounge, Dev Of The Year, Lunchtime, Sharepoint, Virtualization, Post-Lunch Silliness
• The Chicken Test

We are all done.  It was fun!  Ok, I talk to much - David needs a tazer or something to shut me up..... but I love the topic ;-)

Here are our slides:  http://www.slideshare.net/mrelph/energize-keynote-what-is-community-slideshare

Remember, check out Flickr and Technorati under "EnergizeIT" for pics and blog reactions. 

David and I are done the slides for our session during the keynote.  The teams are all out at the venue getting setup.  Nearly 3000 people are registered (and there is still space!).

EnergizeIT is going to rock.

Are you going?  Let me know.

Video: Barnaby Jeans on David Onley's Homepage Show on CP24

Head over to the Windows Home Server blog to see the details of the public release candidate.  There is also a great WHS blog from the UK called "We Got Served".  There you will find a cool list of add-ins.  The public Home Server site is here.  There is also the "Stop Digital Amnesia" site.

I have been running it since the early builds.  It is a solid implementation, has easy management and cool new features.

Why do I like Home Server?  My top 5:

1. It is a elegant way for multi-PC homes to centralize storage and backup.
2. Daily bit-level automatic backups
3. Dynamically expanding file system (to make adding storage simple)
4. EASY remote access to your home network
5. They are selling it as an OEM kit for do-it-yourself enthusiasts

Marketed correctly, I could see any well-connected household benefiting from Home Server.  Backup alone is a serious problem in an all-digital world.

Check it out.

Ok.  This goes in the strange category.  I mystery picture has been discovered on the Vista DVD in the hologram.  Easter Egg?  (no, I have no idea who they are).

http://www.makezine.com/blog/archive/2007/06/who_are_these_three_guys.html?CMP=OTC-0D6B48984890

Ok, he doesn't like the stickers (just kidding David) and Windows Mobile needs to grow on him, but David had some fun.  He outlines it here.

David and I are keynoting at EnergizeIT - we will be talking Community!!

Check over at the Canadian UX Community Blog for some details on the Design / UX track at EnergizeIT.

"Both Qixing and I will be presenting in the Designer breakout; we hope you can make it!  If you can, please feel free to come up and introduce yourself to us - we would be very happy to meet you and we're looking forward to presenting some exciting content for you!"

From the Rodney on IT Pro Community Blog:

"Just in time for Energize IT 07 our team has been outfitted with the very cool Nikon Coolpix S50c digital camera.  It has some typical features for a point and shoot digital camera (3x optical zoom, 7.2 Megapixels, auto-everything, etc...) but the one that caught all our attention was 802.11 b/g support.  Yes, a digital camera with 802.11 b/g Wi-fi support!  The camera can connect to wireless access points (WEP, WPA, WPA2 support) and has built in tools to upload pictures (to a free service Nikon provides with 2GB storage) and email a link to people you put in your camera's address book.  You can upload to Flickr through this service as well."

The EnergizeIT flicker stream is ready to go.  If you are at the event on Saturday, please contribute!

Tag:  EnergizeIT

We had high hopes for MatchIT.ca when we launched a few weeks ago.  There are now 600+ technical folks registered and 55 organizations.  Amazing.  Right now the matching process is taking place and I hope to hear about the great work that gets done over the next few months.

Also - watch for some future news on MatchIT and CodeForGood potentially working together.

This weekend is EnergizeIT - our extra-special technical community event.  It's the 2nd time we have run this event.  The team takes a slightly different approach to Energize than some of our other activities and we hope the result is that this really is the "flagship" community event we run.

David Crow and I will be one of the keynotes.  We will be talking about the importance of community and Microsoft's commitment to the technical community in Canada.

There is a mountain of great sessions to take advantage of and this year the team has added a handy agenda builder for your convenience. 

There is a lot of other info on the day.  Check out the IT Pro and Developer Connection Blogs.  (Rick has a good post here.)

2 other cool facts. 

1. This will also be our 2nd event powered by Bullfrog.
2. Lots of ways to get engaged with the day:
• Facebook - join the Facebook Event or the ongoing Facebook group
• twitter page
• share your photos LIVE using Flickr

Want to attend?  Here are the details:

Date:
Saturday June 16, 2007

Location:
Metro Toronto Convention Center - Toronto, Ontario MAP IT

Time:
9:30 am – 4:30pm. Registration opens at 9:00am

Cost:
Free of charge. Come and enjoy the day! Register Now.

See you there!

Rafe Needleman thinks that the current batch of Apple apps on Windows isn't as impressive as Apple makes it out to be.  He also thinks it is a ploy to convert more Windows users (a point I agree with).

He points out that Safari is not an application people need use:

"Yet they will, and some will be smitten by Safari's unobtrusive design, fancy roll-up interface features, and possibly its speed. They'll wonder why their Windows PC doesn't have the same (non-Windows) look and feel. And they'll think, If only I had a Mac, then all my apps would be this nice."

and goes on to make the more important point:  "But if Apple was really serious about bringing good apps to the PC, it'd release good PC versions of iLife and Final Cut for Windows."

The folks at Torontoist aren't big fans.  I think it's about time the tower got some light - maybe not neon, but something is better than nothing.

Robert Steiner over at the University Of Toronto talked to me at MESH and mentioned this cool new job they are looking to fill.  Seems like a very unique opportunity.

SOCIAL MEDIA OFFICER - JOB DESCRIPTION

The University of Toronto is hiring its first-ever Social Media Officer.

The Social Media Officer will be responsible for planning and then executing social media strategies so the communication between the University and its 11,000 faculty/staff and 70,000 students will be easier, more open and two-way. S/he will be a member of a new, dynamic team, the Department of Strategic Communications - a team whose job is to pioneer new communications strategies for U of T. As Canada's leading research university, we aim to be pioneering in everything we do.

S/he will be the go-to person for advice on the whole range of U of T's online media. This includes helping U of T re-work its websites so that they are places where all of the people we interact with - from 17 year old prospective students, to leading academic researchers and government and business decision makers - can intuitively find what they're looking for.  The Social Media Officer will help re-shape the way one of the world's best universities speaks with a global audience, and the way it talks to and engages its own community.  If you're interested, please apply online at http://www.jobs.utoronto.ca/Career_Opportunities.htm, click on "External" and, under "job number search", enter: 0700181.

Thanks to PhotoJunkie for the photo.

MESH was overall a great event.  From all reports, people felt it was a valuable use of time, although the crowd was much different than last year.  I moderated a session called "Building Communities - How & Why It Matters".  I was lucky enough to have 3 amazing speakers on the panel - Will Pate, Jordan Banks and Lionel Menchaca.  We had a really solid discussion with great audience questions.

Some folks blogged the details of the session:

• http://thebankwatch.com/2007/05/31/mesh07-building-communities/
• http://thebigjc.org/articles/2007/05/31/building-a-community-how-and-why-it-matters
• http://www.deepjiveinterests.com/2007/05/31/live-at-mesh07-day-2-1505h-how-to-build-a-community-part-1/
  • http://www.deepjiveinterests.com/2007/05/31/live-at-mesh07-day-2-1505h-how-to-build-a-community-part-2/
• http://www.behindthebuzz.com/mesh-and-building-a-community/

After the session one of the folks in the crowd came over to talk to me.  "When are you going to get into community engagement?", he asked.  I was shocked / saddened by this.  Between TechNet, MSDN, Channel9, Port25, On10, User Groups, Forums, etc we spend A LOT of time in the community.  Heck, that is a major part of my job.  "Ya, I guess so", he said.  "But it isn't easy - you guys should do what Dell did with Ideastorm". 

I think that is good advice in 3 ways:

• We need to get back to our roots and give people / the community more reasons to value having a relationship with us and to be loyal (like ebay has with their users)
• We need to make it easier for people to interface with our community efforts (something we are working on as we speak)
• We need to have a really clear place for people to give us ideas / suggestions / comments.  Personally, I love the "ideastorm" style approach.

Thanks for the feedback.

Some interesting stories from the 2 days:

• I met with three amazing groups doing some cool work here in Canada:
  • ConceptShare Web collaboration for creative agencies (more on them later)
  • Givemeaning.com - social networking for philanthropy
  • Zerofootprint.net - social networking for all things green.
• At the speaker / sponsor thank-you dinner I was sat at a table of 10 people.  Of those ten I was the only Windows user.  That doesn't really bother me per se, but it was a interesting statistic I thought.  Most Mac folks aren't particularly militant about their views on Vista - we usually have a good conversation about why they feel one OS or the other suits their needs.  One gentlemen from Demo Fuse, was a little more direct blunt open with his feelings (not good ones) towards Windows and Microsoft.  That's ok - as a company we need to ensure that we earn the right to have him be our customer and we clearly haven't done that in his case.

Some thoughts on the conference itself - the guys organizing the event like to refer to it as the "third way" of running a conference - not quite a barcamp style un-conference and not your standard conference either.  Well, not to burst their bubble, but it isn't the "third way" - it's just a good conference. (Disclosure - we are a sponsor....)

The good:

• The networking / people meeting was great.  Really great.
• MARS is a good facility in a great location, so keep that for sure.
• Most of the sessions were really great.
• Good keynote speakers.
• It puts Toronto on the Web 2.0 map
• It is a critical part of keeping the Toronto community alive.
• They treat their speakers and sponsors really well :-)

Room for improvement:

• Web 2.0 "101" day before MESH - there seemed to be a lot of people at the event who were there to learn the basics of this new world.  Perhaps there should be a pre-conference session on the "101" basics for those folks so they can be better prepared for the main sessions.
• The keynotes - you couldn't see from the back because everyone speaking was sitting in chairs at the front that weren't elevated above the crowd enough.
• The energy - honestly, I thought that some of the organizing committee could have let their passion for the event come out during their time on stage.
• Power.  run a few power cords for those not sitting on top of an outlet.
• Bring back the community folks - a lot of the "campers" (Torcamp, Barcamp, etc) and user group folks didn't seem to be at the event like last year.

But, sorry Ottawa...........better luck next time.

http://tsn.ca/nhl/news_story/?ID=210049&hubname=nhl