Tech Ed US (Day 1)
Everyone was rushing in the morning to see Steve Ballmer’s keynote. He said there are some 11,000 folks at the conference. No wonder, all ice creams would disappear even before arrival! Here is some statistics that got posted on the TechEd site:
- 117,000 bottles of water
- 14,300 lattes
- 15,600 ice cream bars (it’s HOT out there)
- 4,000 pounds of chips and snack mix
- 2,300 dozen eggs
- 8,000 pounds of chicken
- 52,000 servings of juice
You get dizzy if you stay more than 10 minutes in the exhibitor hall area, so I decided to avoid at all cost, or cross it as fast as I can. Otherwise, people will run over me in an endless pursuit to get every possible t-shirt that has been handed out. I got only two but I didn’t have to fight. They were given to me by the Analysis Services and Reporting Services team. The RS one is kind of cool, with a “Got spinny?” logo. Perhaps, I can sell it on e-Bay and make a fortune one day…
I expected Steve to do a few stunts on the stage, but I guess he wasn’t in the mood. Business Intelligence was everywhere in Steve’s speech. So, were mobile technologies. I start spotting a trend here. Every show would tout mobile and smart devices as the next pervasive technology. I’ve been waiting for years to find out if the “we are here yet”, but alas… Perhaps, 2005 will be the year of wireless, who knows.
In the afternoon, I went to see Jamie MacLennan’s (Product Manager of SSAS Data Mining) presentation about building intelligent application. He demonstrated how data mining can be used for data validation. Cool stuff! Who know, one day I may actually write such an application.
