Well in this case, I’ll break with tradition and spill the hot gossip from Sin City.

Mix was a blur, perhaps a ‘blend’ (ouch) of drinking, debauchery and people talking about technology. This particular mix of ingredients seems like the only kind of Vegas I’ve ever experienced (my four previous adventures where all at technology conferences). It was truly a 72 hour conversation, as the conference leads you to believe, I think I got 8 hours of sleep in 3 days. Suffice to say several days later I still feel hoarse and hungover, but have managed to gather a few of the personal highlights.

Ballmer vs Kawasaki – Ballmer by a knock out. I wasn’t looking forward to this keynote, but it turned out to be real laugh. Guy Kawasaki (former Apple evangelist, Venture capitalist and author of The Art of the Start, did a kind of Rude QA with Steve Ballmer. Steve handled most of the questions skillfully, honestly and directly without the marketing spin, and managed to be very entertaining in the process. Qudos to organizers for this frank and earnest format which I thought was fascinating and informative, qudos to Steve and Guy for making it fun. The incident with the Macbook Air is a news story in its own right. Steve Ballmers opinion about Apple is pretty interesting. Worth watching in its entirety if you are interested in Msft’s overall viewpoint about how its sees its business interests and its competitors.

Paul Dawson, Conchango did a talk showing how they do ‘total experience design’, he showed some nice examples of their personas and a really nice spec project for Virgin galactic on the total experience of buying a mega expensive seat on Virgins space program. I really liked the process innovation they showed and it seemed like a great business development process.

Nice demo from the Hardrock Cafes museum curator. This site is using deep zoom technology (formally called Seadragon). The deep zoom is apparently now available as part of the Silverlight platform. To get really nice zoom effect you need lots of pixels. I mean like “Billions” of pixels. This along with Silverlight 2 could enable us to build the Nau demo almost identical. Also great for deep tunneling 3d presentations. Check out this how too guide.

NBC 2008 Olympics – Didn’t think much of the design but Schematic are working with NBC on the 2008 Bejing games website saw a glimpse during the keynote. It promises 2200 hours of streaming live video coverage that will happen in during the Olympics, and kudos to NBC as it will be ‘Free’ . However, expect to have viewed as much commercial content by the end of the games as you would have 5 years ago watching it on TV, because it seems every event will have lots of uninterruptable sponsored advertising video as part of the experience. Needless to say not a big fan of interstitial video.

Silverlight 2.0-Silverlight Looks good, features common controls, re-layout, data binding, skinning styling, and more performance, it’s a tad bigger than before 2.48mb?, and install is still a 12 click process on Vista. Siliverlight is arriving on mobile platforms, we saw a couple of demos of Silverlight output running on Smartphone (Nokia) platform which doesn’t require any kind of recompile. One of the nice things I heard is that there is now some support for SharePoint and Silverlight, which has potential interest. Check out this Silverlight Financials Demonstrator application built in Silverlight it gives you some idea of the power.

David Armano (critical mass.com) did a Fuzzy talk on how it helps to remain not too Rigid as you become an expert in your domain. Interesting implications for organizational structures, and what it means to collaborate. If I’m not mistaken he was advocating ‘forgetting that you are an expert in anything’ because everything (especially in the technology world is changing so quickly).

Dan Roam, gave an entertaining and excellent promotion of his book, called the ‘back of the napkin’. His pitch is about visual thinking and he handed out napkins to everyone in the audience to participate as he talked. He also got everyone to self access their ‘whiteboard’ skills. I scored a 9.

Overall the conference seemed a bit more developer oriented this year than last, but it was worthwhile. Thanks to Microsoft’s evangelism community for putting this on.