Media widgetised and ROW

Well last week was a whistlestop week - at least in terms of the number of events and late nights I seemed to have, so I lost my way with the blog a little! Wednesday night saw the second installment of widget week in the chinwag event where a panel discussed widgetisation, intermediation and distributed advertising models.

There were some interesting discussions and points made but I thought the good news was we haven't missed anything just yet. The same questions were popping up amongst an engaged audience and there still seems to be opportunity and ambiguity around in spades. The entertaining HeGe from Nokia and WidSets, an enlightened and enlightening BT representative George, and the ever effusive chair lead the way.

After a few attempts to define a widget (probably the most succint of which, and certainly the only one I recall in its entirety, is 'a tear off of another site') the panel followed some Q&A making a welcome change from the 8 or so uninterrupted presentations that made up MoMo on monday.

We ended up having dinner with HeGe, the lovely Jenny and Priya who turned out to be good friends with my old friend Matt Postgate (whom I should congratulate on his new appointment - congratulations!). That was followed by a trip to Adam Street, wandering into the doubleclick party and then meeting a fellow member of the Millar clan over a martini or two. What was more surprising was that I had never Fran before...

Thursday a much deserved night off, and Friday some dealings with the chaps at DotNetSolutions and Microsoft before a quick trip to Lianne's leaving do and a Curry back at the ranch. ROW just stood for Rest Of Week...

A great night at the Curve ball

Well not so much a ball as a party for the launch of the new Blackberry Curve held at the Kensington roof gardens last night. The RIM guys know how to throw a party and every effort was made to make sure the assembled crowd of celebrities, execs and the odd misfit like me had a good time.

I'll name drop those that were there and I spotted but there were probably more that I either didn't spot or worse didn't recognise; Mark Ronson and Natasha Bedingfield (who both did excellent sets), Martin Offiah, a couple of All Saints, Sophie Bexter, and a lot of people from kids TV. Big up to the really nice guys from MTV we shared seats and bad photos with.

Widget report to follow...

More mix

Well that was a non stop presentation of some quite impressive stuff. Mike Arrington is now quizzing Ray and Scott on some predictable things but his opening point was valid - it was very hard to blog about because there was too much going on...

The MLB presentation showed some interesting gui advantages of Silverlight, and previewed some good stuff for the wm6 version including live monitoring and streaming video.

The top banana application built in c and delivered with silverlight showed a simplified video editing tool with some pretty cool means of interacting with the screen elements and extremely rich feel - repeatedly pointed out in less than 50k.

There was also the announcement of ironruby and some talk about the support for dynamic scripting languages. One demo showed a simple silverlight editor allowing editing in js, ruby or python with instant preview and switching between...

Mix07 keynote

Ray arrived to whoops and cheers following the fanfare of the silverlight video you have probably seen. SaaS with the client; or software plus service was a feature early on.

He talked about bringing together universal web and 'experience first' approaches with silverlight, and the forthcoming 2 parts of the announcements about silverlight. As suspected he described it as the .Net runtime environment brought to the universal web as part 2.

Expression studio launched, and the 3rd part is silverlight streaming which provides a CDN for hosting silverlight content. Needless to say, providing consumers with the ability to take advantage of this platform will be a priority for us.

A new version of the silverlight plugin with .Net is available now.

Mixing it up

So, after a 28 hour day with an 8 hour flight losing five and a five hour flight losing three I finally made it to my vegas pit last night. Registration at the mix conference was pretty simple; and it really is an innovative conference; no bag! I guess i always expect to get a branded bag to identify me around the conference city but this time my anonymity is secured (assuming i remember to take the zippy name badge off). We did however get copies of Vista and of Expression Studio - the latter will certainly save some downloading!

It was really pre the main event last night but i briefly hung around at the mashup thing that was being held. It was quite entertaining and there were various people pushing some decent ideas about but not really enough people just yet. Tonight there's going to be a competition where the best mashup created in 4 hours wins - its been done but i've never been so we'll see.

There was of course an ice bar so that's the photo... another hasty and disappointing shot from the BB8300.

eventful week

Monday saw Rob Loch's Creative Out address future trends in the creative industries. A really varied crowd observed some really interesting things (like the 'good enough' attitude to creative work perpetuated by relentless exposure to UGC) and some not so interesting (the likening of the English to the elderly and the suggestion that we should all focus more on woodwork). Either way it was good fun and there were some good eggs there:



Monday and Tuesday Cary and I were due at the UK technology Innovation and Growth Forum for what looked like a promising programme but turned out to be a little disappointing, mostly in terms of attendance. Last night the Supper Club's social evening was a more sedate affair where it was a pleasure to meet some really great people including the intensely knowledgeable Martin from CoffeeNation and the impressive Adam King of King and Allen

Fate

This morning, quite by chance I picked up a copy of the Guardian's technology supplement kindly left by someone on the tube. My interest was piqued by the promise of a review of the Blackberry 8800 that i am expecting to receive shortly. Whilst picking over a few interesting things in there, something about Microsoft and the EU wondering whether the recent ruling will in fact undermine the whole tech patent process in Europe, the slightly disappointing review, and a comparison of the relative traffic being sent to and from GooTube by their content partners I spotted 'startup' in the title of an article by Victor Keegan. Turns out it is about Saul's OpenCoffee event, the first of which was last Thursday and the second today. This is Cary's rather shaky shot of today's OpenCoffee but there were some interesting folks there; you can just about make out David, Sam and Saul at the back there and she met some interesting potential partners and interested VC's to boot...



Victor says "Someone else is doing well selling high quality video streaming to companies" - honest guv, he means us!