MIX: the conference

I spent last week at MIX, described by Joey DeVilla (thanks for the invite!) as “Microsoft’s right brain conference.”

First impression: it’s a well-organized conference. I spent university helping organize student conferences and our events were slightly more haphazard.

At MIX, the lineups moved quickly (logistics outsourced to Eventforce, the wifi worked (except right after announcements of new betas), and the keynotes were well-lit. Like Oreilly’s OSCON last year, it was interesting to observe how a big-budget conference operates.

A thank you to mobile developers

Apple’s WWDC featured a wall of icons showing the 50,00 apps that had been developed for the App Store. Here’s Microsoft’s low-fi version for Windows Marketplace:

Channel 9 Live

Some broadcasts are archived here.

Sketching the keynotes

During the two morning keynotes, the messages were transformed into giant sketches by Nora Herting and Heather Willems of Image Think.

The results:

Remote control cars!

Kyosho set up a track. There were a few people who spent most of the conference with a controller in hand.

And great swag

In addition to a grid IE-branded Moleskine, everyone got to go home with an Xbox Kinect (xbox not included). Hopefully I’ll get some time to hack on the new SDK.

Coming up

Posts about session highlights + IE’s future.