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Posts Tagged ‘tech field day’

Day 1 – Good Morning Silicon Valley!

Today is day one of the Tech Field Day and I am about to head downstairs to the hotel lobby to meet up with the group, jump on the bus, and head to our first destination – VMware’s Briefing Center in Palo Alto.

My flight was one of the last to arrive last night, but I did get to spend some “table time” with a few attendees before calling it quits due to the early start and busy schedule Stephen Foskett has arranged for us today.

I’m not sure I will be able to actually live blog since we are changing locations frequently, but I’ll do my best to update this post as the day goes on. Think of this post as a journal that will be refreshed as often as possible.

Please also check out my embedded Tweetgrid after the page break to follow my real time reactions as the day goes by. You can also follow all the Tech Field Day bloggers and their tweets with the multi column, web based Tech Field Day Tweetgrid.

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Disclosure: The GestaltIT Tech Field Day is an independent event being held in Sillicon Valley on Thursday 11/12 and Friday 11/13.  The event brings together a unique group of bloggers for sponsored technical presentations, demos, and hands on excercises. Tech Field Day bloggers are free to disclose all information presented on their respective sites and using social media. Although all bloggers attending have had their travel expenses covered by the event sponsors, none of the attendees are being compensated for posts or comments, and all are free to express opinions whether positive or negative in nature. For complete information about the event, the attendees, and the sponsors check out the Tech Field Day web page.

Day 0 – Travel & Tweetgrids

I’m putting in 2/3 of a work day today before my flight to SFO. Even so, I expect the twitter chatter to ramp up as the day advances, so I’ve started an embedded Tweetgrid filtered for just my tweets and the event hashtag , #techfieldday, after the break in this post. For a full web browser experience with all of the attendees check out my TechFieldDay Tweetgrid here. If you already have a Twitter account you can also quickly follow all Tech Field Day attendees and sponsors with a single click by following these Twitter lists:

• gestaltit/authors
• techfieldday/attendees
• techfieldday/sponsors

Did You Know Contest Winner

The winner of the pre event “Did You Know Contest” was selected and announced yesterday via this tweet:

“Congratulations to @DavidFix of Mr. X! He is the winner of our #TechFieldDay “Do You Know” contest!”

Look for more information about Tech Field Day Day 0 and the rest of the event here on VM /ETC over the next few days!

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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.”

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