nextMEDIA 2008 – Day 1

I promise I will blog a lot more later after the conference when I have more time to organize my thoughts and the audio & video recordings that I have created. So for now, the following is just a brief highlight of the things to come.

By the way, this year the conference is putting up lots of videos and stuff in a pretty speedy manner (same day, I think). So check out their site for some cool interviews and stuff. Better yet, come and check out the conference in person next year. (OK, OK, no more ads, I promise. :)

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- Got here safely this morning (in semi-heavy rain).

- ~ 9am-10am – The keynote from Bill Buxton was really insightful and a ton of fun to watch and learn from. You see, I have been a big fan of Bill’s ideas for some years and I have read his “Sketching User Experiences” from cover to cover when it first came out last year and I even recommended the book to a new acquaintance met at nextMEDIA last year. I will post some pictures and audio/video excerpts of Bill’s speech. Stay tune.

- ~10-10:50 Digital Media Giants – Insightful speakers from CBC, CTV, Telus, Quebecor Media, etc. Some pearls of insightful quotes. Will post some clips.

- ~11:20 – 12:00 Jeff Barr, Amazon.com talked about some really cool Cloud computing stuff. More to come.

- ~ 13:30 – 14:20 Bollywood or Bust – Some interesting insights about India. More to come later. Did an interview with the insightful Faisal Galaria, Jaman.com . And I am going to conduct another interview (with Parmesh Shahani, Mahindra & Mahindra) in 15 minutes after I post this.

- ~ 14:30 – 15:30 A wonderful presentation by Lisa Osborne, Digital Content Lab of American Film Institute. Afterwards, I had a great chat with Lisa and I will be posting my interview her later.

- ~ 15:50 – 16:30 Harnessing the Power of Social Media Platforms – There are some pearls of insightful quotes. Will post some quotes.

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P.S. On a more personal note. I bought my well-read copy of “Sketching User Experiences” for Bill Buxton to autograph. And as luck has it, a man standing next to me started commenting on my book (full of yellow stickies on all three sides of the book!!!) and suggested that I should show it to Bill. As he sounded like he knows Bill, my gut instinct was to ask, “Are you Saul ? [You see, Saul Greenberg is a great friend of Bill]” And of course he is Saul

And another more amazing thing was when Bill was taking a photo of my book (with all those ugly yellow stickies), he told me that he has actually read my blog and enjoyed my analysis and commentaries on things. Now, I have no reason to think that he was just being polite (because he didn’t have to say anything about my blog). So his kind words definitely made my day. :)

P.P.S. Now, I am going to try to connect with Saul (he is a computer science professor at University of Calgary) and attend some interesting seminars at U of C. When I was an undergrad at U of Toronto computer science department, I used to really enjoy attending those free seminars and colloquiums (those with interesting titles) intended for people (including my professors) that are way way way smarter than I was. :)