Sitting here midway through day two, i gotta say, EUI (I had UM, there, oops, was talking about them, guess the initials stuck in my brain. UM is certainly a cool group too, but not my employer, LOL) is a pretty damn cool place. Coming in to say hi to the crew i already knew I never got a feel for the rest of the company. Dealing with Marketing for 360|Flex I knew them already through emails. Now they're my colleagues.

The first thing that truly struck me is the size of EUI. I've known these guys for over a year now, and always thought of them in terms of the people I initially met, so EUI was always Andy, Tony, Drew, Brook, Anthony. Then Juan came along and made it all a happy family. Then I started dealing with Rebecca and Catherine, as they haranged Tom and I for a decision on who's been approved as a speaker for our latest 360|Flex.

That's barely a 10th of the EUI crew! There's arond 70ish folks here, doing some really cool things!

I'm in the process of finding out what I can talk about and such, which sadly isn't everything! Some things are under strict embargo (WEAK) on talking about them. What ya gonna do?

As I sit in on meetings and breifings and such here, meeting my new colleagues, I'm getting more and more excited to bring what we're doing to the forefront more. You thought Ebay desktop rocked? You ain't seen nothing!

Tom and I are working with the NJFlex crew to bring 360|Flex to the east coast in a 2 day Flex Camp.

If you missed San Jose, or have never been to a 360|Flex event, this is the perfect chance to get a taste of what everyone is talking about.

Day 1, Flex training from Farata Systems

Day 2, Flex Camp action with sessions, food, sponsors, community! You name it!

Register now! Space is limited! 360|Flex San Jose sold out, no reason New Jersey won't!

OK i love the iPhone. I've gotten used to the keyboard, the camera that doesn't zoom, etc. all good.

What I HAVE NOT gotten used to is not being able to call into a conference call from the calendar entry. I mean, crackberry does it. I can only imagine windoze Mobile does it. How did Apple miss this?

I can see the number. It's even formatted so dialing it would dial the meeting, wait 3 seconds, and enter my pass code.

It was wonderful on my Crackberry. I'd pull up the meeting highlight the number, and be off to the races. Now I have to store the number or write it down or something, so I can dial it, and remember my pass code..

Please tell me I'm just missing something, pretty please. I mean for a smartphone, that sure seems dumb as hell.

Gwen twittered this on Monday and I've been noodling on it for a bit. The noodling was fast since I brought something similar up on twitter the week before 360|Flex, so my thoughts were already kinda ordered.

Gwen asked if it was 'assholish' for someone to have 5000 followers and follow 0.

My answer, yes, it is. I don't have the slightest idea why twitter exists, but I believe it to be to build community and allow (140 character) conversations to take place.

twitter isn't a PR engine, and it isn't (well it seems to be actually) an ego machine. I don't care who it is, but there's no one I'd follow that isn't actually engaging in a conversation. Following no one in return just says (to me, at least) that you don't care what anyone has to say. If that's the case, then why Twitter? Other than ego building by counting how many (largely spammers I'd guess) people are hanging on your every word.

the 360flex twitter account, get's tons of spam followers. Not only do we not follow them, but I go in and actively block the, so they can't follow.

I gotta say if twitter turns into merely another water mark of who the next Scoble is or who's as popular (heaven knows why) than Jason Calcanis, I'm not sure it's worth participating, there's other options.

I was watching the live feed from the DNC today, via Silverlight, and Move, and it occurred to me. Microsoft has scored the two biggest online video deals around. Who knows, the RNC too? Making three.

So I got to wondering, is Adobe even trying? Yeah there's 5 gagillion Flash player downloads, oh wait 5.5 gagillion now, but really, do we think the Olympics and the DNC won't boost the Silverlight numbers rather dramatically? I installed it after all.

From techCrunch:

NBCOlympics.com may have streamed 72 million videos and racked up 1.2 billion pageviews, but Yahoo Sports still edged it out with an average of 4.7 million visitors a day versus 4.3 million (source: Nieisen Online). And Yahoo didn’t even have video.

surely not unique to users, but still 4.3 million visitors a day? That's a lot of Silverlight installs.

I don't disagree that Flash player is still the king of the hill, but is sitting on the hill not defending your position, really the way to move forward?

Don't get me wrong, I'm under no delusion that M$ didn't pay a ton of money for their tech to be chosen, no doubt in my mind, but still, was Adobe in the bidding war?Simply outbid, or too proud to participate?

I'm in favor of the high road approach, Tom and I try to take that road more often than not, but at the same time, defending your position is kinda important. What's there to say when Silverlight installs equal Flash player installs?

I was bummed I couldn't try this out in San Jose, but turns out the MacBook Air has a bunk audio port, and Frank's Workday preso needed audio, so we had to move our keynote deck to his box. Not to mention Ebay blocks the port for Bonjour so my iPhone and MBA couldn't see each other.

But next time, damnit, I'm gonna be a keynote/iPhone enabled presentation making foo!

I picked up Stage Hand/Stage Manager on the App Store, and I gotta say, it's damn cool!

You gotta install a helper app on your mac, but once that's done, bam! You're controlling your slide deck from the iPhone, reading your presenter notes on the iPhone screen.

Once you pair the two apps, you an pick a starting slide, turn a timer on and off (good for my upcoming Ignite).

Supposedly you can use a cool highlighter to interact with the preso, but I haven't figured that part out yet, so not sure.

The UI is a bit rough on the phone, if you have additional effects/transitions, they show up in the slide counter as x/y, but you can't really tell what's there or what they are. It's still young though, so I'm sure it's gonna get better.

I definitely give it a thumbs up. If you're a frequent presenter, I think it beats the Apple remote, and certainly the space bar.

just making sure that everythign is working right.

[more/]

fingers crossed!

This week, at 360|Flex I accepted a job. Not just any job, what I believe will be THE job. No Tom and I aren't quitting our day jobs to do 360|Flex, in all likely hood, that ain't gonna happen for a long while, if ever, who knows.

Rather, I've accept a job at as Community Evangelist.

I'm really stoked! It's something I've been looking at for a while now, as possibly my next step in my career evolution. I love writing code and don't see that stopping really, though it will no doubt lessen, and be more along the lines of demos and POCs, etc. I'm really excited about this opportunity! I came up with what I felt was a good job description, and EUI, agreed, and we all shook hands, then Andy hugged me, then the rest lined up and hugged me.. kinda weird but hey, you know I might get used to it ;)

I'll be helping take some of the pressure off the team to be at events, blogging, etc (thought they'll certainly continue to blog and speak, etc, since they're more interesting than me.) and to help be a public figure for EUI, in the twittersphere, blogosphere, real life-o-sphere, etc :)

I'll be making sure the cool things that EUI is working on, are out there and being seen, since they (we, I guess now, LOL) are doing some really cool stuff that the rest of the world and Flex-dev-o-sphere should know about.

Wish me luck! See you at 360|MAX

I'll also be offering my community building expertise (that sounds showy, I don't think it's the right word) to clients as they role out applications, and such.

Wait, what about 360|Flex?

If you're wondering how this might impact 360|Flex, it doesn't. EUI made it clear when we were talking, that they didn't want anything special on that front, they'd earn and pay for sponsorships like any other company. Speakers will still be picked on the merits of their topic, same as always. Which is good since I had no intention of providing special treatment, or preference for speakers. I'm really proud and happy that they brought it up first, that says a lot to me, and certainly eliminates one potentially awkward employer/employee moment, LOL.

360|Conferences, inc. is a separate entity, run by Tom and myself and short of being purchased outright, it'll remain independent and objective regarding sponsors and speakers. So for anyone worrying about that, don't 360|Flex ain't changing, well it actually is, all the time, but not in that bad, schilly kind of way. :)

I will say it's great to have an employer that is actually even remotely interested in 360|Flex. I'm thrilled to work for someone that appreciates the efforts and supports them!

I'll be starting with EUI on 9/2

AppleInsider reports, that one of my fave comedians, Jerry Seinfeld, will be schilling for Microsoft on their new and terribly named, "Windows not Walls" campaign.

ok 1. they might as well have taken that 10 mil, and just started mailing random checks to people, for all the good this will do. The Care Bears couldn't hep with M$'s image. If you're not a die hard "enterprise" user or windowz fanboy, you simply don't care what they say, when their products are lame, useless, and/or unstable.

2. "The ads will use some variation of the slogan "Windows, Not Walls,"according to the report, and "stress breaking down barriers thatprevent people and ideas from connecting." They'll be just one part ofa much broader $300 million campaign, however, which is said to be oneof the largest in Microsoft's history."

Uh, last time I checked, it was Windows that was blocking people from connecting and slowing idea flow down. outlook, fine, but bloated, sharepoint... well it's sharepoint, almost like a large sucking vortex of information.

"In the competition between PCs and Macs, we outsell Apple 30-to-1. Butthere is no doubt that Apple is thriving," Microsoft chief executiveSteve Ballmer wrote in the email to employees last month. "Why? Becausethey are good at providing an experience that is narrow but complete,while our commitment to choice often comes with some compromises to theend-to-end experience."

Again, I think that's more windows. I will say, Apple has a leg up and it's not M$'s fault. there's no knock offs, and no other provider of hardware. If you buy a macbook Pro, it's made of metal, made the same as all others (except for the random and sadly increasing number of really shitty ones that make it to customers), and it works like all it's little shiny brothers and sisters. Windowz is running on any POS plastic laptop to come out of any third world, quality be-damned. That's not M$'s fault.

What's funny, when I read the headline, my first thought was, "Wasn't it always a Mac in Seinfeld?"

Sure enough, "Ironically, the computers featured in the 9-year situation comedy Seinfeld, for which the comedian payed a semi-fictional version of himself, were always Macs."

Jake posted this the other day.

First let me say, I don't read crunchgear, i don't read giga Om. No offense to Om, or the Arington Army, I just don't need my news or info from them, there's other sources, and the below is why I read them.

This is cust-pasted from Jake

Both Om and Erick have concerns about basically the same issues:

• Too many apps are being downloaded to be manageable
• Email is the killer app for the iPhone
• Usage is minimal, perhaps in only 5 minute bursts
• Users aren’t using the apps daily

well duh. It's christmas morning! I've downloaded butt-loads of apps, some make the cut, some don't. There's thousands of apps out there, 80% of which are pretty lame, and wonky, and will sell a few copies and that's that. They'll stick around, or go away.

Email is the killer app. It's the killer app on the crackberry, on the laptop, on the Windoze mobile devices. DUH.  Frankly I'm not thrilled with the email app the iPhone comes so for me the killer app is everything but email, including red.green, Shazam, pandora, internet radio tuner, etc.

And yeah, I use them all in small bursts. Who sits around and stares at their phone for hours? Who sits and uses pandora for an hour exclusively? who IMs exclusively for an hour? Even with my Crackberry I didn't IM on it exclusively. When mobile I'd fire it up check in, chat a bit if needed, and move on. Same as I do with my iPhone now. So I'm lost as to why Om and the CG team think using an app in a burst is some how an indicator of death. Oh and Omni focus, laptop or iPhone. I open, look at, mark things off or add things, and close.

Use what apps daily? Crazy lighter? Jared? I don't use photoshop daily either, nor Flash or Dreamweaver, or Pages, or Numbers, or any number of apps onmy Macbook Air. They're still installed, ready when I need them. How is the iPhone different? I personally don't want 20 home screens, but you could if you felt the need. That's teh beauty of mobile devices, why pick/choose when you can have what you want, and if you only need it once a quarter, or blue moon, or leap year, it's there, where you want it.

Don’t pay too much attention to either of these articles - they’re focused both on the writer’s personal usage patterns and the very short term view.

I couldn't agree more. I'm guessing both writers carry their install discs with them everywhere since they don't see a reason to have apps available. Maybe both moved from Motorola razors to iPhone? I really don't know but coming from one smart phone that had crappy apps, and few, and oh yeah crappy. to the iPhone, I can only say, it's sad that they have the influence and readership they do. They clearly can't see the forest for the trees in this matter.

I see the iPhone as the next major platform for apps. I'm working on one for 360Conferences (well learning Obj-C first) and can easily think up a few more I'm sure. The potential, even with Apples retarded stiffling NDA, and terrible app store practices, is huge!!