What is Gnomedex all about? People. Technology. Social. I would put it in that order. I was fortunate to be a part of Gnomedex 9.0 with Microsoft Surface. Six months ago, I had no idea what Gnomedex was and I had only heard of Chris Pirillo. Then Betsy (from Bing) emailed me in February and said Chris’ team really really really wanted a Microsoft Surface in the expo area.

Gnomedex 2009 from kk+

The initial plan was for me to throw a Surface unit in the back of my Toyota Matrix and evolved to three of them in the truck and two of my colleagues (Briand and James) coming with me to Gnomedex.

I was able to see a few amazing conference sessions myself (Warren Etheredge, Chris Brogan & Julien Smith, Firas Khatib, Todd Friesen, Best of Ignite and Drew Olanoff) and wish I could have seen more. If you want to see some blog recaps, check out Twitter.

Wait! You say you are reading this blog to hear about Microsoft Surface? Surface is a large horizontal table-top that sees with a camera for a reason. It allows people to socially come together around the computer to interact with each other WITH the technology. The human and social atmosphere of conferences is what our Event Live application was created for.

Baby photo from Futileboy

What was great about Gnomedex was that Twitter on Event Live wasn’t just an interesting pastime for Gnomedex’ers – Twitter, Flickr and social media is what they live and breathe. They were able to spend time talking to others while sharing Tweets and pics that were happening live at the conference. The result was pure awesome that so many attendees won’t soon forget.

I encourage you to mark Gnomedex 10 on your calendar for next year.

Cheers.
Eric