Live in Europe: Conference

Asus & Windows Live at Cebit

Thu, 13 Mar 2008 22:38:04 GMT

At Cebit last week to do a press launch with the ASUS EPC team and T-Mobile. The ASUS EPC is a great little laptop that will now come with Windows Live services pre-installed – I did a demo of Windows Live Mail, Messenger and Photo Gallery to the assembled media. In Germany, the machine will come with a bundle of wireless Internet access.

To prepare my demo, I borrowed an ASUS EPC for a couple of weeks. It was running Windows XP with the Live Suite and worked extremely well. My three kids were entranced by this “mini PC”. I got Windows Live Family Safety settings up and running and left them with it for a couple of hours – they decided to play with the machine rather than watch the Simpsons, so I think ASUS are on the right track here.

Live in Europe: CEBIT 08

These photos are of the booth that Windows Live and ASUS had set up to allow visitors to use Windows Live applications on the new machines. There was a great deal of consumer and press buzz about this stand (Cebit is a really a monster of an event – like a large prairie farm in middle America but with technology instead of tractors in the grain barns).

- Alex Dale (Marketing Director)

Want to join us at Mix08?

Wed, 13 Feb 2008 14:32:24 GMT

Are you going to Mix08 in Las Vegas this year? If you haven't heard of it, MIX is for creative, technical, and business people and offers an opportunity for all of us that fit into those categories to talk to Microsoft employees about redefining the boundaries between Content & Commerce, PC & TV, and Windows & the Web. Kris and I will be there and if you would like to meet up with us, please send us an e-mail. Even as an employee with (sometimes) inside information, I am looking forward to seeing all of the great demos and hearing from our top executives. Of course, I hear the parties are good too.

If you would like to get together during the conference, please contact us at Kris Hoet (KrisHoet@Live.com) and Brian Groth (BrianGroth@Live.com) and we can figure out when and where to meet up.

- Brian Groth (Product Manager)

Generation Y at LIFT08

Mon, 11 Feb 2008 20:30:47 GMT

As I mentioned in one of my earlier posts, I attended the LIFT Conference in Geneva last week. The conference was about the challenges and opportunities of technology in our society so not only about web technology. If you're interested in the presentations than I suggest you take a look here, as all the presentations have been filmed and are there for your viewing.

While the presentations in the main room where on Thursday and Friday, the conference started already on Wednesday with some workshops, and it's one of these workshops that I wanted to talk about a bit more here. The afternoon workshop that I selected was called 'Teenagers / Generation Y and technology' and about 20 people joined me in the room, including some of the speakers of the other 2 days like Stephanie Booth (former teacher, now free-lancer) or Robin Hunicke (game designer for EA) for instance.

Taken from Live in Europe: LIFT08

David Brown (co-founder of Buyat.com which just got acquired by AOL) lead the workshop (since he suggested it) and we were joined by Chloe, Luisa, Elliot and Liam (not sure if I spelled their names right) from the International School in Geneva.

We talked about social media, online video, IM, advertising, creative commons, ... and much more during the 3 hour workshop. With questions related to the use of email with Facebook vs. regular webmail, or about the difference between 'online' friends and 'real' friends and whether there's actually still a difference for them.

Most curious learning's for me:

Wikipedia is not seen as a very good/valuable source in school when it comes to usage in school work.
They don't like to buy online much and as a result don't do it very often, whereas especially for these kids finance is not really a problem. It's a trust issue.
Although they consider their online friends and real friends to be the same (even if that's talking about 300 people), the 'real world' is very important for them and don't want to spend too much time online.
Facebook is definitely still very hot! It's used for planning of the immediate future and also for homework. Email within Facebook is used, but for totally different reasons as regular webmail such as Windows Live Hotmail.

Last stunning fact: The images you find within the results of an image search are free to use for whatever reason, why else are they there? That's the reaction when someone talked about Creative Commons. So we told them these images still are owned by someone and have some kind of copyright applied to it.

PS: Since I uploaded some images of the conference to the photo album of Live In Europe first, I wanted to add them from there in this post and to do so I stumbled upon this Windows Live Writer plugin that was created by our friend Scott. Good stuff!

- Kris Hoet (Marketing Manager)

On my way to LIFT08

Tue, 05 Feb 2008 09:19:37 GMT

I'm getting ready for Geneva to attend the 3rd LIFT conference there. As you can see on the badge below, it's a conference about the challenges and opportunities in our society. The conference was on my list since last year's edition and meeting with people like Laurent and Cristiana (who are behind this conference) made me even more sure this was the conference to go to.

I'll try to blog (no live blogging though) about the conference while I'm there or right after the event on this blog. And if you happen to be at LIFT as well, look me up (you can always email me at liveineurope@live.com).

- Kris Hoet (Marketing Manager)