Recap: Tech·Ed North America 2010 Day 1

TechEd kicked off here in New Orleans yesterday, with an opening keynote from Bob Muglia, President of the Server & Tools Business at Microsoft. There are more than 10,000 customers, partners, and staff on-site and I think all of them caught the keynote (they had to setup a few overflow rooms). John and I arrived early to register and quickly chow down some breakfast so that we could lineup for the keynote. Neither of us have sat in the front row before, but we managed to do so yesterday!

Here’s a quick video that John recorded:

The focus of the keynote, which you can watch here, was cloud computing. Some of the highlights for me included (more info here):

The public beta of Service Pack 1 for Windows Server 2008 R2 and Windows 7 will start in July.
Windows Server AppFabric is now available.
The Pivot control for Silverlight 4 will be launched this summer. Pivot is such amazing technology (it utilizes Deep Zoom for some of its magic) and being able to embed it on a web page is going to be awesome.
We saw a quick demo of Windows Phone 7, specifically related to integration with SharePoint. The enterprise features look pretty slick, so I hope they can deliver on the consumer experience too. You can see some screencaps from the demo here.
It was really interesting to hear from Tony Scott, Microsoft’s CIO, about how they are fully adopting the cloud internally. He said that Microsoft IT is now officially “cloud first”.
Also very cool: a video talking about the digital asset management system that Microsoft built for James Cameron and his team for Avatar. Cameron talked about this at D8 too.

Next up for John and I was the Developer Foundations keynote with Jason Zander. He announced quite a few interesting things for developers, including a new Feature Pack for Visual Studio 2010. Microsoft is going to release Feature Packs in between major releases to continually add functionality to the product. Some of the new stuff that excites me:

HTML clipboard support (copy code and paste it into your blog and its ready to go)
Search functionality for the Add Reference dialog
Tons of code editor improvements, such as entire-line-highlighting, and “tabify/untabify”

Jason also has a great post with links to new platform bits here. In particular, I’m very happy to see that Microsoft is working on Scrum Process Template for TFS 2010.

Throughout the day I explored the TechEd site. I visited the Community Lounge, which is where all the Hands-On Labs take place. I couldn’t resist taking a photo with the Channel9 guy:

Channel9 was livestreaming all day yesterday, and are doing the same today.

I also visited the Exhibition Hall, full of Microsoft product team representatives, as well as dozens of partners. One of the more interesting things to see was one of the Azure server containers:

After the day’s sessions were finished, there was a reception in the Exhibition Hall. I made sure to stop by the Windows Phone 7 booth, to check out the prototype:

I didn’t learn any new details, of course, but it was neat to see the phone in action.

Other thoughts on day 1:

As expected, not everything went smoothly. The Internet was down for most of the day, which was really annoying. I always wonder why some innovative company hasn’t come along to revolutionize Internet access for conferences, because it is such a common problem.
There were far more unhealthy options available for snacks than healthy options (I saw only a few bananas and oranges, but lots of popcorn, cookies, and Goldfish crackers).

In between sessions

You can see more of my TechEd photos here, and also at the TechEd group on Flickr.

Trip to New Orleans: Day 1

I arrived in New Orleans on Sunday evening, but a mix of enjoying the city and unreliable Internet access have kept me from blogging so far. I’m here until Friday for Microsoft’s Tech·Ed North America conference.

I flew from Edmonton to Houston, where I met my conference buddy John Bristowe. After a short wait, we were off to New Orleans. The flight was only supposed to take about an hour, but thunderstorms in New Orleans kept us up in the air for about an hour more. Being in the holding pattern gave me an opportunity to see the area quite well – I was reminded of the Mackenzie River Delta (in the Northwest Territories where I grew up) because of all the water. Eventually we were able to land, and were shocked at all the water on the ground!

Stepping off the plane and into the corridor, I was hit with a blast of humid, hot air. I’m still not used to how humid it is here compared to home! More than a few times I’ve gone outside from a nicely air conditioned building only to have my glasses fog up. We snagged a taxi and made it to the hotel pretty quickly, passing by the Superdome and remembering Katrina along the way.

View from the hotel

For dinner on Sunday evening I joined a group of fellow Canadians at Palace Cafe. I’m going to write more about the food on Sharon’s blog, so all I’ll say for now is that it was delicious! Afterward, we walked down Bourbon Street, eventually making our way to Fritzel’s European Jazz Pub for a drink and some great music. It was quite the experience, both Fritzel’s and just Bourbon Street in general. Lots of people, though I know it’s not even close to the busiest time of the year, lots of beads, lots of music, and lots of drinks. The local Abita Amber beer is pretty tasty.

Fried oyster loaf

Canal Street

Bourbon Street

I’m really enjoying New Orleans so far, and can’t wait to check out some more sights, sounds, and eats throughout the week! You can see my New Orleans photoset here (I’ll keep adding to it).

Local Action, Global Recognition at PKN7

I was one of the presenters at yesterday’s Pecha Kucha Night 7 here in Edmonton. I’ve been thinking about pitching a topic for a while, but for whatever reason never submitted anything. This time around, however, I felt compelled to at least apply to speak. As Jeff said in his post, I sort of became the face of the disappointment over Pecha Kucha 6. I’ve been to every Pecha Kucha Night we’ve had in Edmonton, and I’ve blogged about each one. I have been both critical and positive about past events and speakers, but I’ve tried to be fair. In any case, I figured if I was going to dish it out I had to be willing to take it as well.

I approached my talk at PKN7 the way I think it should be done. The topic had to be something I was passionate about (it’s almost always immediately obvious when a speaker is not passionate about their topic) and had already given some thought to. I worked hard to find images that represented my ideas, and I consciously stuck to Creative Commons licensed photos (see below). I created an outline for my talk, and then researched each idea to ensure I could back up what I was saying. Then I practiced – a few times on my own to get the timing right, and then a few times for Sharon, and once for my parents over Skype. I wanted to practice enough that I could pull it off, but not so many times that I’d be thrown off track when something inevitably changed during the actual talk.

Here’s the video of me presenting last night. I guess I went a few seconds longer than I should have. During my presentation I ended up saying slightly different things than I had practiced. Notably, I threw in the “feel free to cheer for your favorite” line which worked great for audience participation, but also meant my timing wasn’t quite as tight as I had practiced.

Here are my slides with the audio overlaid on top:

I received some great feedback on my talk, which was great to hear! I’m definitely harder on myself than others are, and if I could do it again I’d try to improve a few things. I think I looked down too much, and my excuse for that is that all I could see was the first row or two of people. I guess six minutes and forty seconds wasn’t enough time to adjust. I also would have tried to slow the pace down a little. Overall though, I am happy with it!

Here are the images I used (minus the two slides that just contained logos). You can click on each one to get the original.

Local Action, Global Recognition

The premise of my talk was that Edmonton can be recognized on the world stage if we focus on making Edmonton a better place for Edmontonians. I think there’s three key things we need in order to achieve the recognition that we seek:

Density
Storytelling
Creative Economy

If we can succeed at all three, I think there’s no question that we’ll become recognized around the world. Other cities will strive to be more like Edmonton.

With more time, I’d have expanded on the “how” in all of this, but last night I simply encouraged the audience to find something they’re passionate about and to do it here in Edmonton.

I would welcome any thoughts or comments on this – thanks!

Pecha Kucha Night: Edmonton #7

Edmonton’s seventh Pecha Kucha Night took place this evening at the Citadel Theatre in the wonderful Maclab Theatre. There were probably a little over 400 people in attendance, the vast majority of whom had never been to PKN before. I think I may as well just get right to it: PKN7 was a huge improvement over PKN6, and reaffirms to me that this event can be great!

All of the presenters brought their A-game tonight. In order of appearance, and with their topic titles:

Gregg Oldring, Designing a Business
Darryl Plunkie, Phobias
Daniel Tse, Accessibility Technology
Zoe Todd, Edmonton as an Aboriginal City
Alistair Henning, Photographs Create Our Collective Visual Idea of Place
Don Iveson, Brick by Brick: Lego & Urban Design
Tamara Stecyk, Expressions of Hunger Online Photo & Poetry Contest
Mack Male, Local Action Global Recognition
Jason Openo, Leadership Edmonton
Tad and Arlen, Improv!

It actually wasn’t Arlen (he couldn’t make it), but I can’t remember the name of his replacement. You can follow all of the presenters with Twitter accounts here.

After the debacle that was PKN6, it was refreshing to see 9 presentations with very little self-promotion. There were also very few umms, ahhs, and awkward pauses. I thought all of the talks were true to the spirit of Pecha Kucha – to share ideas that are inspiring or interesting or perhaps controversial, and that spark a conversation.

Without a doubt my favorite talk of the evening was Don Iveson’s (and I think most everyone in the audience would agree with me on that). He used Lego to share some ideas about urban planning and the kind of built form that he would like to see in Edmonton. It was smart, funny, and well-presented, as expected from Don! A close second for me was Daniel Tse’s talk on accessibility technology. He did such a good job of relating it to the audience, and so many of the people I talked to tonight were excited to learn more and to get involved. He also tweeted during his talk using an automated thing he had setup before the event – such a great idea! I agree with John that Tamara’s talk was the most emotional – her passion really shone through. I think Zoe’s talk made me want to learn more about her topic the most. As for my talk, I thought it went quite well, and I received lots of positive feedback on it. More on that in my next post.

Some other thoughts on the evening:

Our hosts, Ryan Stark and Brian Murray, did a great job of welcoming everyone and keeping the evening flowing smoothly.
There wasn’t an official theme this evening, but the theme of “Edmonton” seemed to emerge. Either that or iPads (there were a lot of them in the audience, and Alistair used one on stage).
We trended to #1 in Canada on Twitter, this time for positive reasons!
Hosting the after-party at the same place as the event was smart. You lose less people that way.
The venue was great. I love that the stage was kind of in the audience, much more intimate than some of the venues we’ve had in the past (Myer Horowitz for instance).
I thought the start time of the event could have been a little tighter…it seemed to take a while to get going, and to restart after the break. No doubt because of all the great conversations that were happening!
The final presentation, the improv, was probably a safe bet (smart on the part of the organizers) but it worked really well and was quite funny.
Props to Stephanie Chan and Gabe Wong for the awesome PKN7 posters and graphic design.

Pecha Kucha Night 7 was organized by Edmonton Next Gen, and was sponsored by the City of Edmonton and Capital Power. The next event, PKN8, is scheduled for September 23 at the brand new Interdisciplinary Sciences Centre at the University of Alberta. Stay tuned to @EdmNextGen on Twitter, or sign up for their excellent weekly email newsletter.

Thanks to Edmonton Next Gen for a great event, to all of the volunteers for making it happen, and to my fellow presenters for delivering the goods!

UPDATE: Here’s a fun video montage of PKN7 made by Raffaella.

Edmonton IT Community: What are your top 5 needs?

Along with a few other usual suspects I’ve been invited to take part in an informal IT Circle later this week. The goal is to come to some consensus about what the top 5 or 10 needs of local startups and growing IT companies are, so that we can start trying to address them. I feel very strongly that we need to be doing more for the tech community in Edmonton, particularly the part of the community that is often overlooked – web & software. I’ve written about this in the past, most notably here.

The meeting is being hosted by EEDC, who I openly criticized in that post. I’m encouraged by the progress I’ve seen them make over the last six months – I think they’re really making an effort to listen, to learn, and slowly to participate in the community. I hope to see that trend continue, through this meeting and other initiatives.

So now I need your help. If you’re a member of the local IT community, whether it’s biotech, public sector, startups, or something else, what are your top needs? What’s on your wishlist? How can we make the tech community in Edmonton better? Let me know, and I’ll bring that to the table this week. Thanks!

FWIW, here are a few on my list:

Micro/seed funding. Small amounts of money to enable entrepreneurs to try things out.
Exposure to external experience. How can we connect with people who in other places that could teach us a lot?
Storytelling. I talk about this a lot…how can we do a better job of telling local success stories to others?

I’m going to Tech·Ed North America!

Tech·Ed is one of Microsoft’s most important annual conferences for developers and IT professionals, held in several places around the world. This year, Tech·Ed North America is in New Orleans in June, and I’m going to be there! I was invited by Microsoft Canada to attend, an opportunity I jumped at. I’ll be there with John Bristowe, taking in the sessions and labs, learning as much as I can, meeting other developers & IT pros, and generally having a good time. And of course, I’ll be blogging, tweeting, photographing, and otherwise recording & sharing the whole experience.

The conference runs from June 7 to 10. There are literally hundreds of sessions during the week, as well as a couple of keynotes and other special presentations. There’ll be some awesome parties too! The sessions are organized into 21 technical tracks, everything from Architecture to Office & SharePoint. I’m particularly interested in sessions on:

Open Data (obviously)
WCF and WF in .NET Framework 4
Windows Phone 7
Azure (cloud computing)

If you’re going to Tech·Ed, what sessions are you planning to check out? If you’re not going to Tech·Ed, what do you think I should see? Let me know!

I’m going to blog about my experience a little here, but also at Techvibes and the Canadian Developers blog. I’ll be tweeting about it too, using the official hashtag #teched. Can’t wait!

State of the Calgary Twittersphere – April 2010

Welcome to the fourth State of the Calgary Twittersphere of 2010, my look at the intersection of Twitter and Calgary, AB. You can see last month’s stats here.

For information on the data, definitions, and other background, click here.

For April 2010:

# of local users: 10108 (an increase of 194 from March)
# of tweets by local users: 499825
# of tweets by local users containing #yyc: 18291 (3.7%)
# of tweets by local users that were replies: 148981 (29.8%)
# of tweets by local users containing links: 147895 (29.6%)
# of tweets by local users that were retweets: 27169 (5.4%)
# of tweets by local users that were twooshes: 16932 (3.4%)

Here are the numbers above in graphic form:

Here are the top clients used by local users for posting updates:

Some other interesting stats for the month:

Just under 49% of all local tweets were posted between 9 AM and 5 PM.
Local users posted roughly 11.6 tweets per minute in April (compared to 10.6 tweets per minute in March).
The day with the most local tweets posted was April 28 at 20061. On average, 16661 local tweets were posted each day (compared to 15259 in March).
Of the 148981 replies posted by local users this month, 41125 or 27.6% were to other local users.
A total of 1883 users posted 50 times or more in April. In comparison, 1502 users posted just once.

Here are the top ten most followed local users:

Here are the top ten most listed local users:

Here are the top ten most active local users:

Here are the top ten most active local users using #yyc:

Here are the top ten most replied to local users:

Here are the top ten most retweeted local users (by other local users):

Final Thoughts

Calgary crossed the 10,000 active user mark this month! And came tantalizingly close to breaking the 500,000 tweets per month mark too. User growth was smaller than the month before, at least partially due to improvements I made in my algorithm for identifying local users.

I think the “most retweeted” list is useful for measuring influence, though it alone doesn’t tell the whole story. Just to clarify, the most retweeted list only accounts for standard-style retweets (those using Twitter’s retweet feature or those starting with RT @) made by other local users. I hope to improve this over time.

State of the Victoria Twittersphere – April 2010

Welcome to the fourth State of the Victoria Twittersphere, my look at the intersection of Twitter and Victoria, BC. You can see last month’s stats here.

For information on the data, definitions, and other background, click here.

For April 2010:

# of local users: 2755 (an increase of 289 over March)
# of tweets by local users: 112561
# of tweets by local users containing #yyj: 8561 (7.6%)
# of tweets by local users that were replies: 35218 (31.3%)
# of tweets by local users containing links: 36733 (32.6%)
# of tweets by local users that were retweets: 8783 (7.8%)
# of tweets by local users that were twooshes: 3645 (3.2%)

Here are the numbers above in graphic form:

Here are the top clients used by local users for posting updates:

Some other interesting stats for the month:

Just over 52% of all local tweets were posted between 9 AM and 5 PM.
Local users posted roughly 2.6 tweets per minute in April (compared with 1.8 tweets per minute in March).
The day with the most local tweets posted was April 19 at 5740. On average, 3752 local tweets were posted each day (compared with 2634 in March).
Of the 35218 replies posted by local users this month, 11865 or 33.7% were to other local users.
A total of 526 users posted 50 times or more in March. In comparison, 241 users posted just once.

Here are the top ten most followed local users:

Here are the top ten most listed local users:

Here are the top ten most active local users:

Here are the top ten most active local users using #yyj:

Here are the top ten most replied to local users:

Here are the top ten most retweeted local users (by other local users):

Final Thoughts

I did some additional work on my algorithm for identifying local users, which accounts for the smaller increase in the number of users from last month. I think the “most retweeted” list is useful for measuring influence, though it alone doesn’t tell the whole story.

Just to clarify, the most retweeted list only accounts for standard-style retweets (those using Twitter’s retweet feature or those starting with RT @) made by other local users. I hope to improve this over time.

Celebrate Your Neighbourhood Spirit: Edmonton Community Challenge

Last July I attended an event called the Community Challenge, co-hosted by Edmonton Next Gen and the Edmonton Federation of Community Leagues. Its purpose was to bring next-geners together to discuss how to improve and work with community leagues. That event was the first collaboration between the two organizations, and it was pretty successful!

Now NextGen and EFCL have teamed up again, this time for the Edmonton Community Challenge:

The Edmonton Community Challenge is a volunteer-driven event that aims to promote community spirit through friendly competition. By registering to join teams that represent community leagues throughout the city, individuals can support local charities, get to know others in their community, and win some great prizes! The event challenges will take place throughout the month of June, and teams will be rewarded based on a pre-determined point system for their energy, creativity, and commitment to sustainability.

I think it’s a neat idea. The big prize is a $15,000 fund for the winning community league which will be spent on a capital project in the neighbourhood. There are also smaller individual prizes to be won along the way.

Here’s how it works:

Register, by June 1.
Get a passport from your team captain.
Bring your passport when you participate in the events and get it stamped! The key events are the Pancake Breakfast (on ShareEdmonton), the Neighbourhood Cleanup (on ShareEdmonton), the 24 Hour Bike Repair-a-Thon (on ShareEdmonton), and the “Can It” Challenge (on ShareEdmonton).
Check the rankings. The team with the most points at the end of June wins.

If you need a little nudge to register, how about this: one of the prizes will be an Apple iPad! Remember, you have less than a week to register!

Stay tuned to the ECC website for news & updates, as well as Edmonton Next Gen on Twitter.

Mapping where Edmonton’s kids live and learn

On Friday evening, an interactive map I worked on with Edmonton Journal education reporter Sarah O’Donnell went live. Sarah’s first story based on the data was published in the paper today. Here’s our introduction to the project:

With five schools closing in Edmonton’s core and nine new suburban schools opening in September, education reporter Sarah O’Donnell wondered, “Just where do children live?” Local programmer Mack Male worked with The Journal to create an interactive map showing at a glance where children live and where they learn.

Here’s the map we created:

You can also see the map on ShareEdmonton here.

We showed a little of this at MediaCamp a few weeks ago, citing it as an example of traditional media and new media working together to tell a story. Newspapers like the New York Times often publish interactive story elements of course, but this is fairly new for the Journal. And I think it’s just the beginning!

I wanted to share a few notes on how the map was built:

I used the Google Maps Javascript API v2 to power the map.
Some of the JavaScript libraries I used (in addition to Google Maps) include: jQuery, RequireJS, and MapIconMaker.
Some of the data behind the map is available in the City of Edmonton’s data catalogue. The specific data sets include: Edmonton Public Schools, Edmonton Catholic Schools. You’ll also need the neighbourhood census data, which is available here (should be in the catalogue soon).
Data we used that isn’t in the catalogue (but should be): neighbourhood boundaries, EPSB & ECSD school attendance figures current as of September 2009.
I tried to minify, gzip, and cache as much as possible, so that the map loads quickly. It is noticeably slower on Internet Explorer than other browsers, and surprisingly fast on Chrome. This is because of the difference in performance of the various JavaScript engines.

It was an interesting experience for me! We had to double-check the data many times, and had to make decisions about how much/little to show. In that way, it was more like writing words than building a map. Thanks to Sarah for working with me on this!

Here’s what Sarah wrote in her story:

Nine new suburban schools will open next September; like Sister Annata Brockman, some will be close to capacity from the moment they open their doors. One look at a map of where children live shows why.

Most neighbourhoods with the highest number of children are on the city’s fringes. Those are the communities where the new schools are opening.

I was hoping the map would result in some discussion, and it has. Beth Sanders blogged about it this afternoon. She tackles the issue, highlighting as others have that city planning doesn’t “just happen”, rather its the result of many decisions made over time. We need to align our decisions – City Council and EPSB need to be on the same page! Beth finishes with some thoughts on open data:

The City of Edmonton, in creating and providing open source data, is providing a critical feedback loop for Edmontonians to understand how the city we are creating works. There are exciting conversations ahead in Edmonton’s future.

I agree completely. Kudos to the City of Edmonton, Edmonton Public Schools, and Edmonton Catholic Schools for making the data available for this mapping project. I’m positive it is just the first of many tools to come that will help Edmontonians better understand the data and contribute to the future of the city.

If you have any feedback on the map, let me know!

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