While I have been away
by Volker Weber
I was kind of busy last week, since I had to finish a couple of articles for iX before leaving for München: editorial, Lotusphere report, iPhone device management and a short piece on BlackBerry management.
Then I went to München for two days. We stayed in Pullach just south of Munich, right in the village center. I figured the church bells would wake us at seven in the morning, but it turned out the snow plows started their serious business at a quarter to five. And they did not really finish their work until it was time to get up.
I went to München to co-host Edcom Nachlese, which tries to bring to best of Lotusphere to their customers. It's a joy to work with Anneliese, Otto and Wolfgang. They are my kind of people. Honest, generous, with good taste. We only do this once a year, but I guess none of us would mind doing it every three months.
This was our seventh event, and I believe it went really well. By now we know most of the audience, and we know what they want. For me there were three highlights: the opening session with Ron Sebastian who delivered what IBM should have done at the Lotusphere OGS, then at the end a very relaxed Ed Brill who did not have to race through his presentation, because there were no partners taking up 20 minutes of the hour, followed by a great questions and answers session. Last year we tried something we had not done before. It goes like this: we take questions in German, I translate them to English, Ed answers them in English, and I translate a short summary back to German, sometimes completely contradicting his answer, which is always a great joke. Anyway, last year Ed was a good sport, but this year, this concept was working really, really well. The audience was in a good mood, and we almost had a conversation. Even Ron was chiming in with some answers. The q&a session went for three quarters of an hour and it was just a great finale. There was hardly anything left to say but "thank you and now go home".
As it is at Lotusphere, the real value is in the breakout sessions, and there is always good ones, excellent ones, and some that don't work as well as intended. But overall, I believe, this was a really great event. Thank you to all who attended or helped putting it together. And now I have to stay away from beer for a few days.
A couple of unrelated things happened while I was away. Microsoft released SP1 for Windows 7 and a small update for Windows Phone 7 that I have not yet downloaded. I finally got the chance to upgrade the Pre Plus to webOS 2.1. And there is a Nokia E7 waiting to be delivered tomorrow. I shall not be bored for the rest of the week.
The hardest part today was giving back the MacBook Air. I got a little bit attached to it. ;-)
Comments
Thanks Volker for the fun at the show. It was well organized and most of the sessions had additional valuable content. Social networking at the evening event was amusingly interesting and inspiring. I'll be back :-)
While you're in a device upgrade mood, you may want to get the N1 to Android 2.3.3 as well. ;)
