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Posts Tagged ‘gestaltit field day’

The GestaltIT Tech Field Day is one week away. This time next week I will be just arriving in the San Francisco Bay Area and getting ready for 2 full days of storage and virtualization product sessions about which I will be reporting here on VM /ETC in the form of tweets and posts. Stephen Foskett, the event coordinator, has already hinted about special announcements and sessions during the event planning, but he’s not even letting the attendees know what’s exactly in store. Although we know the presenters, we haven’t received and agenda. All I know is I had to change my return home flight times so that I wouldn’t miss something important. I am looking forward to the experience that is for sure!

As a warm up to Tech Field Day, GestaltIT.com has announced the Do You Know Contest. Multiple “Do You Know” posts per day are appearing on www.gestaltit.com. In each post is a short quiz to complete in order to receive an entry in a drawing for a prize package including an iPod Nano with video. The winner will be drawn randomly from the list of entries on November 10th. For each quiz you take you get another contest entry up to a maximum of 7. You don’t even need to answer the questions correctly, so just take the quizs to increase your chance to win. All VM /ETC readers are invited to participate.

Hurry up an take the first 2 quizs released today.

• Do You Know MDS Micro?
• Do You Know Xsigo?

Look for more quizs over the next few days on GestaltIT.com.

You didn’t get to participate in School Field Days if you didn’t complete your testing first, right?

Follow the links above for the contest page, but here’s the general contest information: Read the rest of this entry »

Social networking continues to prove to be a valuable communication and marketing channel for vendors. Large technical conferences have been the shining example so far, but the recent HP Storage Tech Day event in Colorado Springs was a small event with a big reaction. HP sponsored a handful of bloggers who were able to engage IT professionals world-wide with real time commentary. It was a simple but effective format: 2 days of interactive presentations, demonstrations, and hand on labs without non-disclosure agreements (NDAs). The bloggers were free to tweet, podcast and post about the experience.

The event proved to be so successful in it’s reach that other vendors immediately expressed interest in doing the same. GestaltIT founder Stephen Foskett contacted me shortly afterwards with the news that because there was enough sponsor interest he would be organizing a new series of multi-vendor events called GestaltIT Field Days. The first one has already been scheduled and will be held in Silicon Valley on November 12 and 13, 2009.

Stephen describes the event on the GesatltIT Field Day web page:

“This is not a trade show, a junket, or an analyst day. Rather, the participating sponsors will be engaging the attendees, inviting feedback, and fostering open communication. We were inspired by HP’s series of Tech Days and wanted to broaden the concept, bringing in more products and a broader range of technologies. We also liked the idea of creating and managing a similar event as an independent third party.”

Read the rest of this entry »