360Flex San Jose 2008, wrap up.

So my thoughts on 360|Flex... Frakkin' great! Beyond selling out, we ended up with 442 registrations! w00t!

Day 0:
We had record (a common theme for us this time around) Sunday turnout for the FREE (for registered attendees) pre-conference training. Yahoo!, Ribbit, RIAone, Lynda.com, and OpenFlux training all rocked the eBay Hizzy!

The speaker/sponsor dinner as well as the welcome reception were huge successes. Great turnouts for both!

Day 1:
Registration went smoother than normal, though still slower than we'd like. My wife was with us to help and it would have SUCKED had she not been there, so thanks honey! The keynote went well, Mark Anders talked about Flex 4 and some cool Degrafa stuff. I unfortunately wasn't in there, but it sounds like it was a bit confusing as to exactly what 'Flex 4 and Degrafa' really means. I'm sure it'll be more clear as time goes by and we get closer to Flex 4 release. It was nice that Tom and I got to actually speak at this keynote. I think Tom did in Atlanta, but it's hard for us to stop welcoming people on Monday morning.

The sessions, of course, were killer. We heard nothing but great things from attendees walking past us.

Lunch was a bit of trouble. Food didn't come out fast enough, or in great enough quantities, but that's always a problem that plagues us. It's easy if you're big, you just toss what doesn't get eaten, but we try to walk a fine line; not ordering too much or too little.

The party was fun! Tons of great conversations, Guitar Hero, BoFs, BBQ and Root Beer Floats. What else is there!?

Day 2:
Day 2 is always, kinda easy peasy. There's no keynote so it's mainly just keeping things running, making sure everything is working well, and such. It's probably the most relaxing day of the 4. Food went a bit smoother, that's always nice. It's great to be able to adjust on the fly like that!

The party was rockin'! Cynergy and Adobe rocked the house, open bar, great food, more Guitar Hero (of course!) and even more great conversations, especially during the Flex and Adobe Developer Connection teams' BoFs.

Day 3:
The sad day. As much fun as I have doing our Wednesday keynote, and I really do love doing it, it's sad that everyone I've been chillin' with for the last 3-4 days will be heading home. The keynote went well. We had Workday try again since their Monday keynote didn't pan out. Sadly we realized that it was a bit unfair to other sponsors. Oops, sorry guys. We won't make that slip again.

The video's were absolutely hilarious!!! Stucki FTW! Polygeek and Jeremy you rock! The Ribbit video was AWESOME, 'You know Doug won't be there?' OMG!

We also had the pleasure of not only announcing that we made a profit, but that we were able to give $7,000 to Second Harvest Food bank, plus $1,000 in gifts for those that participated in our second ever Charity Flex Code Jam, organized by Ali Daniali. We speak more on giving back on the company blog.

We announced the winners of our newly introduced MVP program. Details for the MVP program as well as the winners can be found in an upcoming post to the company blog.

Michael Labriola, an MVP winner, sent this to us to be shown Wednesday morning since he had to leave early. It was just a bit too late, but it's too funny to not be seen!

We announced our next two events also, 360|Flex Camp New Jersey and 360|MAX.

The east coast folks have been asking for a showing. While it's not a full fledged 3 day 360|Flex conference, 360|Flex Camp is a 1 day single track Flex Camp on top of a 1 day training with the 360|Vibe :)

We're really happy to be involved in bringing a more community vibe to MAX. 360|MAX will be a single track event running the length of MAX North America. We've got a nice little area all to ourselves, our own schedule, our own sessions and everything. Come prepared to participate! Drop a note to info@360flex.com if you're interested in sharing something to the MAX audience. Note: You must already be registered at MAX to participate in our event.

360MAX call for papers

Attending MAX in November? Applied to speak and were denied? missed the deadline?

Tom and I announced in San Jose that we're holding an unConference at MAX this year. We're calling it 360|MAX, and we're officially looking for speakers.

Any topic is welcome! Your topic didn't make it for San Jose? Try again. MAX didn't want you? Try us!

We really want advanced stuff. 360|Flex has tons (more than any other event) of advanced content, we want to bring some of that to MAX!

Email your submission to info@360flex.com

360Flex Open Source Panel call for participants

This is a call for participants in the Open Source Panel BOF on Monday night. The panel discussion will be at 6:40. Anyone that's affiliated with an OS project and interested in presenting need to send this info:

Your Name
A short 1 paragraph bio

Your Project
A short 1 paragraph description

Send this to:

Adam Flater
adamflater@gmail.com
twitter, yahoo im: adamflater

360Flex Community Keynote videos

I've been twittering about this the last week or so off and on, then it occured to me, a blog post wouldn't hurt. Ted inspired me with the MAX keynote video post. I was like duh. Luckily there's still time!

Thanks to EventVue, we can capture and display videos recorded on youtube in one place. The plan is to have the videos running in a loop before our Wednesday keynote, dubbed the community keynote. If we get enough we may do them at lunch too in one of the session rooms.

It's simple. So simple I did, and I don't use youtube, call me a Luddite if you must!

Record a video, 30 seconds, 60 seconds, whatever we don't care. tag it '360flex08'

So long as it's not completely gross, and maybe even then, we'll take 'em and show them before the keynote. Go ahead search youtube right now, you'll see my lame video! Put yours up so I'm not all alone up there with Josh.

See you in San Jose!

360|Flex Finalized Show Schedule and Updated eProgram Guide

If you're lucky enough to have a ticket to the show, the eProgram Guide has now been fully updated with much needed info. Here's a quick rundown:

• Details on Parties
• Directions to the hotel from the 3 major airports
• Directions on how to get to the conference from the hotel
• Details on the evening festivities: Birds of a Feather and the parties
• Details on the Sunday Trainings: Free but they're "Bring your own laptop" 
• Details on the menu for Monday and Tuesday night dinners
• And did we mention the party details?
  

This in addition the in-depth session descriptions, speaker blog links and session schedule at a glance.

Please take a moment to download the eProgram Guide and get caught up on all the latest information.  If you still think there's some information missing from the Guide, drop a comment below.  I'll add the info to the Guide as fast as I can.

360Flex is Officially Sold Out!

Last time, we got close. In Atlanta, we were about 16 away. Maybe you saw Myo's note or John's post about it. Or maybe you tried to hit the registration site and saw the picture below.



Regardless, we just wanted to confirm that 360|Flex San Jose is officially sold out.  410 of you didn't procrastinate and got in.  An untold number of you didn't and will likely be emailing us sob stories this week.

The nice thing about selling out is that ticket sales is one less thing to worry about.  We can now turn our attention 100% to running the show that begins this Sunday.  We have lots of stuff in store for you.  Some of which we'll be highlighting for you this week on the blog.

For those of you that didn't make it to the reg site in time to get a ticket, shame on you.  However, not all is lost.  We have a couple of announcements to make that should help ease the pain your procrastination has caused.  Stay tuned to this blog as we'll echo the big news from the show here.

For those of you that did manage to buy your tickets, congratulations and thank you.  John and I do these shows for you and selling out lets us know that you appreciate us doing them.  Get a lot of rest before you arrive, as we have a lot planned for you next week.  Get ready for what will be the best 360|Flex yet.  See you Sunday!

360Flex We bumped into Jim Cheng at teh Halloween costume store

Down the street from Tom's house they opened one of those Halloween costume stores, the kind that show up in early September and are a vacant store building November 1st. We decided to drop in a take a look.

We walked down the aisle with the masks, and there was Jim Cheng, speaker at 360|Flex San Jose. He had what looked like a Tuxedo Mask mask on. Whipping the mask off, "Uh, hi guys."

We look at the mask, then at Jim, then the mask again, "Uh hey Kim, how's it going? Excited about San Jose?"

Picking up a Freddy Krueger mask Jim answers, "Yeah. Super excited!" He put Freddy down, and picked up A Gargamel mask.

"Nice." I say pointing to the mask. "So, who should come to your session?"

Jim keeps the mask, watching Tom pick up a Robocop mask, "Everyone.  Folk that want to see the future of web application analytics and usability tools.  Yeah, that sounds kinda boring and not very 360|Flex-ish.   So scratch that.  How about:  Everyone and anyone that wants to get a glimpse at some of the wicked cool research that we've been up to at EffectiveUI over the last year. "

I pick up a crazy looking captain kirk mask, "Why should they come?"

Jim takes the mask, and turns it inside out, handing it back to me, "There's going to be something for everyone at my session--from user interface designers to low-level compiler engineers.  They'll all be able to walk away with some new insights into how we can use Flex and the Flash platform to build and test verifiably better RIAs.  Or if I actually do end up with a baby-doll T-shirt from Tom and John because I answered so crazily late, you can at least come, take pictures, and laugh at me."

We walk towards the full costume section of the store, Tom picks up a hercules (the Kevin Sorbo one) costume, "like?"

Shuddering, I ask Jim, what the goal of his session is.

Picking up a Power Ranger (the red one, from the first US show, none of those Johnny-come-latelies after that) costume, "Show developers how to collect better analytics and usability data from RIAs.   RIAs are not websites, and as a result, we need to move beyond the world of click-throughs and page impressions.  I will be presenting a number of novel ways to monitor RIA usage and performance that you can take home and build into your own applications."

I pick up a Cousin It costume, I'm all about no fuss, and no effort when I have to wear a halloween costume, "What two sessions are you looking forward to?"

Jim puts down the Red Ranger, and moves over to a costume that's almost 11 ft tall, made up mostly of a huge cloak and these enormous arms coming out. There's a huge harness inside, Jim slides into it, "If I had to choose two right now, probably Matt Chotin's and Eric Ko's.  But I'm really looking forward to hitting as many as I can.  There's a lot of real interesting goings-on in the Flex development community these days, and I don't want to miss a thing."

Tom picks up a tron costume, "what would you tell people, watiing until the last minute to decide to attend? There's a week left, and not many spots left."

Jim walks over and politely takes the tron guy costume from Tom, shaking his head. "360|Flex is focused specifically on Flex development and gives you some serious bang-for-the buck between the included pre-conference training, the depth of the technical sessions, and the all the Flex-developing cool kids that you'll get to meet and drink beer with."

I notice that Jim didn't put the costume down, and am about say something when Tom screams and runs toward the front of the store. Jim and I look and there's a little kid with a clown costume on. Jim looks at me, I shrug and tell him we'll see him in a week and head towards the front of the store.

Wanna see Jim in 'The Tron Guy' suit? better register now. Space is incredibly limited! We're down to the final 20 seats!