Constellations Companies
Thanks to everyone for a great event together last Wednesday. Feedback from the attendees was unanimously positive, including my favorite "this is the best event of its type that I've ever attended, there was a real dialog between the audience and the presenting companies!" That's just the kind of event we had hoped to achieve and thankful for everyone who took time out from their busy day to attend. Its too bad that we accidentally scheduled this in parallel with the Synopsys SNUG meeting, we'll do better next time. :)
I'd also like to give a special thanks to Ted Chan from AMCC, who participated in our business session panel in the morning, and also to Ron Wilson of EDN magazine who moderated our technical session panel in the afternoon which had such enthusiastic audience participation that I finally had to stop the session after going over 75 minutes. I think you guys could have went on all night. Ron did a nice wrap up on the panel which can be found here on his EDN blog page.
Thanks to Bill Rogers who shared his experience on the event on the IPextreme blog page.
Prizes were given out during the day during the presentations that included cash, clocks, pens, and caps. It seemed everyone had some fun.
Capping off the day were two large give-aways. Hal Barbour of CAST gave away an "EYE-FI" geo-tagging SD card for your camera to automatically geotag and upload your pictures to a web site, which was won by Isaac Achler. The big prize given on behalf of all the Constellations companies was an iPad, and rather than a simple random draw, we gave a sure to be famous "pop quiz" to the audience who competed with their other attendees to win it. The quiz had 18 questions whose answer could not be found in the conference materials, rewarding those who pay attention. At the end of the day we had two guests who scored a tie at 15 correct answers, they were Alex Tesler and Zhao Wu. An executive decision was made at the end to award iPads to both people. I picked those up from the Apple store on Saturday and Alex and Zhao will receive them this week.
Finally, for those of you who missed the event and would still like to see the slides, we have uploaded them here for your benefit below. Please feel free to share the link with your colleagues who may be interested.
Constellations 2010 Silicon Valley - Complete Slide Set