Teched Israel that took place in Eilat was just done a couple of days ago. Here are my slides and demos from my talk:
It also includes the lyrics to the new song I sang (by Bob Marley) - "Reflection Song".
The talk went well except for a little power outage in the middle that caused the talk to stop midway. I whipped out the guitar and played the first half of the song until the power came back. It passed the time nicely :) Someone promised to put the video on on youtube but I hadn't found it yet..
Feedback about Teched's Organization:
The Good:
- overall it seemed to have gone pretty well
- The business center with the games and other stuff was pretty cool
- Microsoft inviting 25 bloggers on its own dime to come in and blog at the event was extraordinary and was very well planned and executed. way to go!
- Continuous live blog coverage of the event at blogs.microsoft.co.il was awesome.
- The teched website had lots of "web 2.0"ish features and "Yosi and Lior's broadcasts" was a good idea
- I only got to go to a coupe of talks: David Chappell's and Daniel Moth's. They were both good and executed professionally. I can learn a lot from both of these guys.
- Mostly Great food, and lots of it.
The Not so good
- No speaker names on the agenda. People like to also make decisions based on who the speaker is. Having only talk titles on the little agenda that we were wearing made it really difficult to decide.
- Wifi not available in most conference rooms. Hey, Microsoft. if you're going to be paying for 25 bloggers to come into teched, you might want to enable them to do live blogging from the sessions the attend...
- Speaker room: Only had one speaker room in one hotel, while the conference was being held in about 5 different hotels at once. I never even got into the speaker room because it was always too far away and I didn't want to walk all the way over there. If there is one place you usually want to be in during conferences, it's the speaker room, since that's the the main information hub for meeting all the other speakers, get refreshed and be able to work on rehearsals, equipment and so on. My suggestion: have a speaker room at each conference hotel.
- The teched staff was invisible by email. I'm talking about the people organizing the event. Some even had a "we'll be offline for 3 days so only get us by cellphone" messages.
- No Printers. I needed to quickly print my song lyrics before my talk - and I couldn't find any printer to use at the hotel I was speaking in. I ended up writing them by hand. My suggestion: have a printer at every hotel for general use.
- Slowish wifi in many places.
The verging on disaster
- No rehearsal schedule in the room where you speak. No one contacted me on coming to do a rehearsal even once during the conference. That is a must.
- before my talk: There was no one "in charge" of the room I was speaking in. There should always be someone in charge in case things are needed. I had no one to contact 10 minutes before my talk when no image would be shown on the screen from my laptop.
- The audio and video staff - Not the ones from sela, but the ones that actually manipulated the screener and the audio hookups. I heard many complaints about them but for me it was pretty bad as well: I only had 15 minutes between the talk before and my own, and I wanted to check audio and video plus see that my guitar plays well. The video guy said he can't see my video, but then said "but its ok we still have 10 minutes" and then left the room. I was puzzled and annoyed, plus scared of what might happen. 2 minutes before the talk another person came in and helped fix it but just because I almost begged him to do it. That is not the way to run a conference room.