Entries tagged with conferences - Channel 10

Get Your PDC Bling

sarahintampa — Thu, 14 Aug 2008 15:32:00 GMT

Are you planning on attending this year’s PDC Conference? PDC2008, the Professional Developers Conference, promises to be an interesting event this year, with over 160 technical sessions, hands-on labs, training & seminars, as well as planned keynotes from Ray Ozzie, Rick Rasid, VP of Microsoft Research, and others. If you’re planning on blogging from the event, which begins October 27th and goes through the 30th, you’ll want to go ahead and download this collection of PDC imagery which you can use in your blog posts. The collection also includes some PDC wallpaper, so you can decorate your desktop, too.

What is E for All?

Laura — Thu, 25 Oct 2007 19:46:00 GMT

There is no denying that gaming conferences are changing. The big conventions were tremendously scaled down this year while other gatherings like PAX and GDC really ramped it up. In fact, newcomers like E for All might not have been a possibility in year past as all things paled in comparison to E3. But now, thankfully, there's room for all- there's E for All. So power up and play.

Web 2.0 Expo: All these virtual worlds

Jesse — Mon, 30 Apr 2007 17:30:18 GMT

One of the most interesting talks at the Web 2.0 Expo came late on the last day, and it was clear from the people occupying the back wall and the floors that the title, “Reality Bites: The Future of Gaming + Virtual Worlds 2.0” had caught a lot of eyes. Susan Wu oversaw a panel of enthusiastic men who were each very compelling when they spoke about their creations.

Lane Merrifield of Club Penguin showed off a kid-safe Antarctic wonderland for young children to make friends and socialize. The entire team behind this world consists of parents who couldn’t find an age-appropriate place for their kids online, therefore compelling them to build one. This fact, combined with their sole priority of security, makes Club Penguin a great example of a well-executed small idea.

Ginsu Yoon from Linden Labs made a short presentation about the state of adoption of virtual worlds. According to the team behind Second Life, only in the past couple of years has the concept of virtual worlds reached the Gutenberg Press moment on the timeline. There are miles and miles of uncharted territory and development left, and the definition of a virtual world is still very much hot liquid sand at this point.

Craig Sherman of Gaia Online gave an energetic talk about his project, which allegedly made its rookie conference appearance at Web 2.0 Expo. The tried and true method of using Anime-style illustration to create Gaia to appeal to American teens has proved extremely successful, with on average 50,000 users online at once. The most interesting part of Gaia was certainly the creativity shown by its users, who have created towns, banks, shoppes, and even live theaters all on their own. These destinations and activities all make Gaia more than an augmented 3-D chat room.

Joi Ito of Creative Commons and Neoteny gave the talk that contained more, “Ah-HA!” moments for the audience than anyone else. If you subscribe to the belief that, ‘Japan is the future,’ then what Joi delivered is right up your street. In a few early slides he illustrated the difference between content and context; music is content that is valuable to a large number of people but offers very little interaction, whereas text messages are highly contextual and demand interaction, but are essentially valuable only to the recipient. Ito spent the back half of his talk discussing World of Warcraft and the real world skills that can be learned while playing. Pointing to John Seely Brown’s digital learning concepts, specifically on the important differences between simulation and metaphor, Ito stated that character traits that are developed and displayed in-game fully translate into the real world.

To close the talk, Susan asked the panel a handful of questions, the most interesting of which was focused around how the market of virtual worlds will mature (the ‘who will win’ question). The panel all seemed to agree that the market is so very young that there’s nothing but growth ahead for the next few years. Beyond that, the obvious analog, at least for us, is virtual worlds are the television channels of the new generation. There will be numerous worlds that don’t necessarily have to connect or interoperate, so long as they have sufficient followings.

Photos from a tech conference: Under The Radar

Jesse — Thu, 05 Apr 2007 22:15:00 GMT

Recently the Microsoft Silicon Valley Campus played host to Under The Radar: Why Office 2.0 Matters. The conference highlighted companies that are thinking about, “reinvigorating the way we work, and more importantly, the way we work together.” The knowledge worker has lived in desktop software for decades, and most of us were perfectly content with that. However the trend of the past few years has taken more of the enterprise tools we know and love and plugged them into our browsers. We showed up to listen to pitches and pick out some companies to follow and highlight in the future. Our photos from UTR can be found on Flickr (where else).

South by Southwest puts Austin in its place

Jesse — Fri, 23 Mar 2007 00:47:00 GMT

The South by Southwest conference series descends on Austin every year, and never before has the Interactive element made as much noise as the rock n’ roll kids.

As the lone evangelist to attend, David Shadle summed up it up: “If one was to pickup the internet, give it a good shake and dump it out, the result would be SXSW – the largest gathering of people influencing the way people interact with technology, media and each other.”

The highlights include Ze Frank making an Elvis-esque appearance as the Web Awards MC, leading up to the last episode of The Show. The award for our jealousy award goes to Caesar, who had the distinct privilege of playing the new Queens of The Stone Age album and shared out the single to everyone who was packing a Zune.

Twitter was at SXSW, in the sort of way that locusts were in Egypt low these many years ago. The frequency of updates to the Twitter – SXSW 2007 page, combined with the influx of new users to the social communication service, was enough to grant it phenomenon status; Friends Swap Twitters, and Frustration says the Wall Street Journal.

The official SXSW coverage site has collections of short videos and MP3s of panel discussions that will get released over the next few months. If you only listen to one of these, make it Bruce Sterling’s SXSW Rant, as you’ll always get the most enlightening opinions from a, “Visionary in Residence.”

Nick White relayed the report from Greg Amrofell of the Windows Vista team, “Some people have asked why we wanted to go to SXSW. Apart from the obvious answer (that it's the most fun you can legally have in Texas), it's really the perfect place to showcase Windows Vista and its strengths in mobility and multimedia. Whatever you create and wherever your creativity takes you, Windows Vista makes it easier and more fun.”

Wired’s blog Listening Post has a great collection of musical coverage from the week, including their picks for the Best YouTube Videos of SXSW07.

Expression Studio added to the MIX07 goodie bag

Jesse — Tue, 20 Mar 2007 22:25:00 GMT

The countdown to MIX07 continues and the anticipation for this year's 72-hour conversation about the web gets closer all the time. The MIX News blog has been a great way to keep up on the announcements, and yesterday's post was no exception. Every MIX07 attendee will receive a commemorative copy of Microsoft Expression Studio, the suite of tools for developing killer a killer user experience. Our favorite Netflix and Flickr clients were built with these tools by thirteen23. Add this on top of the copy of Vista Ultimate each MIX attendee will receive , and the loot to be had in Vegas is getting quite appetizing.