Tuesday at AU2008 finished perfectly for me, with cookies and ice cold milk. I am not kidding I wimped out on staying out late last night and I returned to my room to find big cookies and ice cold milk awaiting me courtesy of the AU 2008 team.
In the afternoon the first Blogger Social was held and a success. Many Autodesk employees and company bloggers and most importantly customer bloggers showed up to meet face to face. Autodesk Senior Vice presidents were in attendance with Senior Vice President, Chief Marketing Officer Chris Bradshaw and Senior Vice President, Platform Solutions and Emerging Business Amar Hanspal thanking the bloggers for all they do and confirming Autodesk does listen and react and wanted to make sure to extend more connections as “bloggers add credibility with most also sitting in design seats all week long”. I gave a few Flip cameras out and thanked Mr. AU Joseph Wurcher and Cheryl Romero and everyone for making the Blogger Social a reality. Blogging is a powerful medium and certainly not a person speaking into an empty room if done right and with knowledgeable and interesting information as well as comments interaction. I have run into a few people that had been pushed into blogging or jumped before thinking about it and they wondered why blogging, well no wonder they are lost sheep as you have to be passionate and committed in order to be successful at blogging and have readers. Blogging is like a television channel and you don't want to write a infomercial as people will tune out, treat it like a conversation and spread knowledge. Blogging is amazing on how it can be harnessed and subscribed to unlike older mediums like forums which are great but knowledge becomes lost in threads and many times not indexed by search engines or available by RSS. Blogging is a long term commitment like a newspaper column and not for everyone. Besides, could I really make a topic varied post like this one in a forum without getting flamed <g>. ;-) BLOG ON!
One of the best stories of the night was when Tommie Richardson told me how she met up with another blogger via Twitter. It seems they had never met before but on Twitter realized they were in the same class. Social networking Technology is getting so advanced.
Next year I will make sure to get some stickers with blog names as it was difficult to place a name to blog but I did have many introduce themselves not by their names but “hi I am Lazy Drafter (Josh Jones)” or “Hi I am CAD Geek”. Industry veterans were everywhere like Roopinder Tara of both tenlinks.com and his blog CAD Insider. Autodesk bloggers http://blogs.autodesk.com were also there mingling like Scott Sheppard of Autodesk Labs blog It's Alive in the Lab. Before I forget make sure to stop by all their exhibits in the AU exhibition hall as they have super cool future stuff that not even I had seen like Inventor Fusion Technology, Project Newport, Augmented reality, the big touch wall with Autodesk software like Autodesk Mudbox and more. Kate of LT Unlimited was there as was Volker of Beyond the Paper
DWF Blog, Lee of Through the Interface, Kean of Inside the System and many more.
The evening ended with thousands of AU attendees at the exhibit hall. It was the largest exhibition hall of any AU I have ever attended. There were so many cool booths including AUGI, TechSmith, and James Wedding of Engineered Efficiency and civil3d.com who drew in a loud and large crowd with the video game Rock Band and competitions. What better than beer and video games to attract a loud crowd. By the way Rock Band and Guitar Hero are developed in Autodesk’s own 3ds max.
The big news, after many suggestions on how to retire the infamous Matt Murphy Clay Head Sculpture even in a blender or reshaping it, I decided to give it to the real Matt Murphy. Although I will miss my global travel sidekick, I know it will be in good hands and I don't need to check it into my luggage anymore. It was amazing how a piece of clay born at AU 2007 could end up with so many followers and visits around the world including appearing in a photo with celebrity Jay Leno.
Wednesday will be more great classes and industry keynotes. The general design keynote will be featuring Hollywood’s best kept secret Eddie Paul who as he says “dreams in AutoCAD”.
Hollywood Prop Maker Attacks Shark Design with AutoCAD 2009
Here are a few other links to posts from bloggers' attending AU
AU 2008 – Day 1
By CAD Geek Donnie Gladfelter
Autodesk University - Day 1
By Lazy Drafter aka Josh Jones
Autodesk University 2008: Follow AUGIatAU on Twitter
AU 2008-First Official Day Review
By Beth Powel
Autodesk University 2008: And we're off.
Dispatches from Autodesk University 2008: Day One
By Kenneth Wong
Autodesk University ‘08 in photos
By Jesse
Autodesk University 2008 - Day Two
By CADDManager
see more photo and aggregated items from AU at:
Flickr group for AU2008 and #AU2008
Cheers,
Shaan
