It’s actually Tuesday now, but I was so tired last night I didn’t have the energy to post anything. 9 hours sleep though and I’m back on the ball.
Yesterday was great. Seeing Bill Gates in person was a once in a lifetime opportunity (unless I get to go to more of these great conferences!). The first part of the speech was pretty scripted as he read from the autocue quite a lot but a couple of things he got exciting about and you could tell he was going off script. Tim O’Reily and Bill Gates also had an unscripted question and answer session which was good, with the audience also asking questions. Quite brave really, although ocasionally Bill did dance around a question and not actually answer it! You can see the whole keynote here (over 2 hours long!)
A few other people also presented such as Scott Guthrie on Atlas, but the demo that really stood out for me was the BBC showing their Integrated Media Player for Vista (this bbc article has a link to the demo). Having spent a couple of days watching crap US tv I realised how great the BBC was and almost had some weird kind of being proud to be British!
After the main keynote I went to a session titled “Web 2.0 – Show me the money!” – apparently newspapers and Yellow pages are going to die die die! Mike Arrington made a bold claim that eBay was a Web 1.0 company. He’s bound to say that though after launching Edgeio!
I managed to meet Alex Barnett which was cool as I’ve been reading his blog for quite a while and following what he says on attention and opml.
In the evening there was a party at TAO which was hosted by Microsoft. A free bar and Microsoft Live ice sculptures were highlights! We left early at around 8pm as we were all tired, and waking up this morning feeling refreshed I know we did the right thing!
Lots of new cool demos of Vista in the session I’m currently in such as a WPF Yahoo! finance app. They are recording every session so hopefully they’ll be online for you all to watch.