Nigel Parker's Outside Line : teched

Tech.Ed New Zealand T-2 Weeks

nparker — Mon, 31 Aug 2009 03:44:00 GMT

We are now only two weeks away from Tech.Ed New Zealand!

If you haven’t purchased your ticket yet to the event there is still time to register.

Now as you may be aware Tech.Ed Australia “SOLD OUT” this year with a deal to give each delegate a netbook running Windows 7. We got a bit of feedback for not doing the same thing but I feel we have an offer available that is just as compelling. If you are attending Tech.Ed NZ you still have four days to purchase your HP Mini 5101 Notebook with Windows 7 Ultimate for an estimated saving of $500 NZD (if you compare the ticket price to Tech.Ed Australia and then convert to NZD’s the difference is approximately the cost of the netbook).

One of the things I’m working on presently is the Keynote and as you may have read in the last MSDN Flash newsletter that this years keynote is being delivered by Chris Liddell. Chris is the Chief Financial Officer of Microsoft Corporation meaning that he holds the key to the proposed 9.5 billion USD that Microsoft plans to spend on R&D this financial year. Also Chris is a New Zealander which will help give his presentation a local perspective. I have the daunting task of writing and delivering a five minute demo during Chris’ presentation so I a bit nervous and excited about stepping up to the plate.

Mike has done a great job ensuring that we have quality content at this years event and we have now published the most up-to-date information on 14 Tracks, 128 Breakout Sessions, around 100 Hands-on Labs. Please note that adding a session to your personal schedule does not guarantee a seat in the session; sessions are filled on a first-come, first-seated basis but I do recommend you take a trip to start planning your sessions to help us with room planning so that we don’t experience too much overflow during the event.

As we do every year we are running some Ancillary Events around Tech.Ed.

The first being the community run Auckland Code Camp, that is free for all to attend (not just Tech.Ed delegates) on Sunday 13th September.

Kirk Jackson has blogged about the event. Register your place for Code Camp at http://www.codecamp.net.nz

The other opportunity is the Tech Girls Dinner on Monday 14th September, 8.00pm

Tech Girls Dinner is complimentary for delegates to attend and costs $99 for others seeking individual tickets to this dinner. If you are interested in attending register now.

I have also organised for Giorgio Sardo to deliver an intense two day tour of Auckland and Wellington off the back of Tech.Ed

Giorgio Sardo is a Technical Evangelist in Microsoft Corporation working in the Internet Explorer team. Moving from Italy to the United States, he studied at Polytechnic of Turin and successfully obtained a Master of Computer Engineering with distinction. Before joining Microsoft, Giorgio leaded a national university community forum in Italy and won the Imagine Cup worldwide championship. He started his experience in Microsoft UK as User Experience Consultant, delivering stunning solutions based on Silverlight, WPF and Mobile and presenting several sessions at Microsoft conferences. In 2008 he has been nominated Best Consultant of the Year from the British Computer Society. Early 2009 Giorgio moved to Redmond, where he currently focuses on Web Client technologies, such as Internet Explorer and ASP.Net AJAX. His blog is blogs.msdn.com/Giorgio.

Giorgio, is set to present at the HTML5 Is Alive! session at the Auckland Web Meetup at 6pm on Thursday the 17th September in Auckland alongside our resident Mozilla hacker Robert O'Callahan.

At the time of writing this there are 39 spots left so Sign Up if you are interested in attending.

For those of you in Wellington we are running a similar session with Giorgio at 10:30am on Friday the 18th September as an MSDN Unplugged event. Spaces are limited for this session as well so please register now if you would like to come along.

See You At Tech.Ed!

Tech.Ed New Zealand Tickets Selling Fast!

nparker — Mon, 18 May 2009 04:34:14 GMT

Tickets for Tech.Ed New Zealand went on sale first thing this morning. By lunchtime 56% of the early bird tickets were sold!

I don’t know what to say but here we go again! Tickets will sell out once again and early bird will most probably be gone by the end of the day. The early bird 20 packs have already sold out.

To get you in the mood check out the keynote from Tech.Ed 2009 North America.

Got a great idea for a session?

This year we are trying something a little different and we are issuing a Call for Content. If you think you could present a great Tech.Ed session (or know someone that could) why not go to the Call for Content tool and suggest it? Over the next couple of months we will be looking for great session ideas to incorporate into both Australia and New Zealand Tech.Ed conferences. Mike has posted some tips around what makes a good session.

You can contribute to Tech.Ed #tenz9 via Twitter, Flickr and blog posts. Tagging guidelines.

Tech.Ed ANZ Call For Content

nparker — Mon, 11 May 2009 02:30:57 GMT

The Tech•Ed 2009 season kicks off this week in LA, and the show comes to Australia and New Zealand in mid-September. We’ve just opened the Call for Content tool so now’s the time to submit that great idea for a session.

Go to the Call for Content tool and register with your email address and the RSVP code TechEdANZ. Fill in all the details and hit submit. You can come back to the site at any time to update or review the progress of your submission.

Before jumping in check out Andrew Coates blog post on

Tips for Successful Submissions and also the details of the different Tracks and Technologies.

As the Dust Settles

nparker — Mon, 20 Aug 2007 01:59:00 GMT

UPDATE:

Saturday, August 25, 2007 8:24 PM by Mike Fitzmaurice wrote on my blog...

What a terrible experience!

To watch a keynote online because I was unable to go sounded like a great way to see his talk. How disappointed I was to see this guy speak to a bunch of slides and photos but not be able to see those slide and photos. This despite the entire point of the talk being about the customer experience.

While the videos were shown they were too dark!

Here is my response...

Hey Mike,

I agree with you and therefore have hopefully gone someway to sorting it out.

Here are the two main issues IMO and what I have done to address them.

1) The capture that we received from the production company for the two feeds are crappy quality and used old quicktime codec's as they say you are only as good as your master.

2) I didn't test the Picture in Picture player that I posted properly so if one of the streams was to buffer the other one would get out of sync which is why I put this single stream version up as an interim solution.

What I have done.

Create one video that combines the powerpoint and the camera together in a single video (I'm still locked to the crappy original video quality but by using Adobe Premier at least we can combine the feeds), interlay the video that was played during the keynote full frame at a higher quality than the event capture, wrap the whole thing up with silverlight streaming so you can jump forward using chapters to the part of the stream that you wish to watch to save downloading the whole file. Then make the videos downloadable from the techedlive site for people that don't have (want) to install the silverlight player.

How we will stop this happening in the future. Choose a different company to capture the video during presentations, and test extensively beforehand to make sure they can capture what we want at a quality that is acceptable for online publication, you have probably noticed that the end of Lou's speech is captured from a secondary video camera pointing at the projector screen inside the venue... NOT GOOD ENOUGH. Test our delivery vehicle for buffering and slower connections. Sorry again! But please take a look at http://www.microsoft.com/nz/teched07/live/knv1.aspx hopefully things have been improved somewhat!

As the Dust Settles on Tech.Ed I find myself frantically preparing sessions for Web On The Piste.

It was great catching up with Natasha (of Trade Me and Webstock fame) at Tech.Ed last week but like Natasha after doing this for a few years now I'm starting to realise that when it is event season your job is never done!

I had a few questions about the Silverlight video we pushed onto the http://techedlive.co.nz site during the conference. Yes all the videos are hosted on Silverlight Streaming using the free account so yes you can do the same thing on your sites!

This year I had been given the job as official video guy and after the hours spent capturing, editing and uploading to silverlight streaming I'm never going to put my hand up to do that job again. It took me out of the conference for much more time than I was happy with. The most frustrating part of all of this was dealing with the Mac centric firm that had been sub contracted to capture the keynote video. They came back to us no less that 5 times during the two days after the keynote with completely unusable formats (I can work with MOV, MPEG, AVI etc but not with what they produced!). In the end they came into Tech.Ed with a version of the latest quicktime installer from apple to prove that their MOV file did play on Windows. When it failed to work they tried to blame Vista only to find that it also didn't work on Windows XP. Note to others wanting to do business with Microsoft in the future BUY A PC and test it or at least run boot camp on your Mac!

On the plus side although I didn't present myself at Tech.Ed on Thursday I presented 3 sessions at Tech.Ed Student day in sky city theatre to 600+ students. I loved the sessions and presenting along side the famous Steve Riley I think they were well received.

I have received a few questions about how we created the keynote Picture in Picture player that streams the two keynote feeds simultaneously. I realised after watching the video on this player that there are a few sync issues if the streams need to buffer so it appears that there is still a bit of work required to address the sync'ing issues.

I grabbed the base code for this from Michael Scherotter opened it in the August preview of Blend 2 and pimped it a little for the event (my source code here).

The interesting thing about this piece is that it combines two Windows Media Streams that are hosted on the Microsoft site.

mms://wm.microsoft.com/ms/nz/teched07/keynote_deck.wmv
mms://wm.microsoft.com/ms/nz/teched07/keynote_speaker.wmv

Because these streams are external resources you can "repackage" them using other player designs. Here is another Silverlight player skin that I uploaded to Silverlight Streaming that points to the keynote_speaker.wmv stream and contains chapters to different parts of the keynote presentation.

To embed this video I have put the following HTML below

Click here to view!

Note to self... I should have really hooked it up with the awesome MIX video skin and hosted it for free using Astoria! Check out the screencast here... or it running live here.

The one surprise for me over the event was the quality of the Canon HV20 consumer camcorder, check out this video from TechFest that I shot and uploaded to Silverlight Streaming, the codex going from true HD to streaming produced a video that is smaller than 10MB and the quality IMO is still fantastic!

Tech.Ed Is Open!

nparker — Mon, 13 Aug 2007 03:13:00 GMT

I have been working for a long time on creating the content and speakers for the Tech.Ed keynote. It is an amazing feeling to finally have it all come together.

I first saw Lou Carbone when I was up at MIX in Vegas in May, Will had invited Lou to present there after seeing him at adaptive path. After Lou's presentation there I knew that I wanted Lou for the NZ Tech.Ed keynote... so much so that I sent him this email.

"Hi Lou,

I have just arrived home to New Zealand from Mix Las Vegas. I watched your presentation "again" on the plane and now I just have to send you this email right away!

Your tone, your message and your delivery is phenomenal!

Every year in little old New Zealand we (Microsoft) have a conference called Tech.Ed. Each year we sell out the largest venue our country has to offer with more than 140 sessions and 90 speakers. The conference opens with a keynote presenting to all 2000 people that attend the event.

This year I am in charge of organising the keynote for the event. I have for a number of months now been talking to peers, customers and partners regarding who they would like to see, which speakers and messages we should target and how can we make this years keynote a memorable experience. I have previously talked to and invited a handful of speakers that have and continue each day to do their little bit to change the world. So far I have missed either on availability or cost to confirm a speaker for the occasion. I came to Mix with an open mind; quietly hoping that I would attend a session that spoke to what we have collectively agreed is necessary for the event. Your session did that and you are that person.

Are you available and excited about coming to New Zealand on August the 13th 2007 to connect with our most cherished partners and customers? Please email me back soon with your response.

As you said in your presentation "the power of Disney to create such value that people are willing to part with cash"... your presentation created that value for me."

Last Sunday I took Lou and Dorothy to Ponsonby Road to experience the New Zealand coffee experience and then to Piha to experience the New Zealand experience. Lou delivered a pre cursor to this presentation at the UPA group last Thursday night which turned into a 2 hour focus group as we collectively discussed the impact of customer experience in the software industry.

To support Lou I really wanted to portray New Zealanders in an inspiring and positive light. I personality hate the customer video where x customer gets on stage and talks about how y product made their life easier. I took a leaf out of Lou''s book and rallied the troops internally at Microsoft New Zealand to reach out to their networks to create a video that really talked to New Zealander's making their mark.

This is what we came up with... what do you think?

There is an extended version as well.

We will be putting up the keynote video and other short videos and photos on http://techedlive.co.nz over the next few days so if you are not here at Tech.Ed make sure to check in tomorrow morning!