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I’ve almost recovered from my Hectic week of Jet-setting for this year , starting with the VCAP-DCD Beta Exam in Amsterdam and culminating in a few days of visiting vendors for talks and roundtables in Silicon Valley. It was my first visit to the west coast , so I was initially star struck by it all – names you only ever see as a URL on buildings really pushes home how close you are to the technology and its not hard to get caught up with the buzz of it – I lost count of the number of startup ideas I heard over the course of the event!

For those of you who haven’t heard of the Tech Field Day concept before , here is a brief guide.  Following on from a concept launched by HP , the field day brings a number of delegates from the user community together with a vendor or vendors for a session that should be a little bit more in depth that your average marketing pitch. The delegates are not there to buy anything , and are no way obliged to write about their experiences, although Food & Drink , Travel & Accommodation expenses are covered by the sponsoring vendors.

This particular event marked a new direction for TFD in that it was streamed live over the web via ustream.tv . This potentially changed things in a couple of ways – The cameras were far form hidden and I wonder if the fact that they were being broadcast affected some peoples candour and in a couple of circumstances the sponsors where prepared to say some things off camera that they were not prepared to when they were rolling. That said , the greater audience did mean that a few questions were asked that may have not been bought up had it not for being mentioned on twitter by someone watching the stream. I would like to think that I was as honest as I’d have been on and off camera!

I think the event is possibly better suited to the smaller vendors with a less refined marketing function – Of the larger vendors that we saw , the sessions felt a little pre-canned with PowerPoint hitting a critical mass at one particular site. Making use of an “Executive Briefing Centre” , while it gives you access to nice comfy rooms with wireless internet access does nudge conversations to wards that more marketing side of things. Just using a regular conference room facilitated a more in depth discussion and 2 way communication.Perhaps there is a case for presentations to be done “in the round” to use a theatrical example , with delegates sitting in a "”doughnut” around the presenter.Presenters that had a real passion about their product held the audience much better , a prime example of which was Dave Hitz – founder of NetApp. He was only booked in for a 15 minute slot , but stayed for most of the 4 hours session , which is a lot of time to dedicate for a guy in his position. Outside of his own slides he was active in the discussions around the topics. It was a shame he wasn’t able to stay for lunch, where I believe the best dialog with the NetApp guys occurred.

I my next few blog posts I’m going to try and write about subjects that came up during the sessions , rather than a summary of each session , which you would better off getting from watching the excellent recordings made by the PrimeImage Media guys.

 

For those that missed it , have a look at the following video from the day (my wonderful piece to camera is at about 1:41 )

Tech Field Day 4 – Day 1 – NetApp 2 from Stephen Foskett on Vimeo.

 

One last thing – you may well have noticed my fledgling upper lip furniture – I’m growing a moustache this month as part of Movember – donating my face to men’s health. If you would like to donate to help men who have problems growing good facial hair like myself , then my MoSpace page is at http://uk.movember.com/mospace/1067584/


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