My team organized the “Re-Mix” event in Mountain View last week (Friday 6/22). The MIX conference in Las Vegas in May 07 created a lot of buzz in the Web 2.0 space. Many people were not able to attend the event because it was sold out. So we decided to create a ‘ReMIX’ event in Silicon Valley with the most successful sessions of MIX. ReMix was sold out as well…
It was effectively an informal discussion with the Silicon Valley developers and designers. The highlights were a keynote from Scott Guthrie who runs Microsoft’s Silverlight and ASP.Net development teams (among others). Scott demonstrated the version 1.1 of Silverlight with .Net support and the new Expression tools for designers. John Richards, Director Windows Live Platform, Microsoft presented the latest news regarding Windows Live Services (new services, new Terms of Use) in the session Using Windows Live Services in Your Own Web Applications.
I was responsible for organizing the panel: Services on the Web: Build or Buy. The moderator was John Richards and the panelists were Don MacAskill (CEO and Founder, SmugMug), James Hamilton (Architect, Microsoft), Jeff Somers (Director of Partner Relations, Zillow.com) and Anita Garimella(Director of Products, Wallop). SmugMug and Wallop both use Amazon S3 and Zillow uses Microsoft Virtual Earth. These companies also provide Web APIs to access their services. The panelists discussed the reasons why they decided to buy web services from service providers (such as mapping and storage), the challenges they faced and they gave some thoughtful advices on what services should be outsourced vs built. Although there was a panel on the same topic at Mix, most of the panelists were not the same and so they had different perspectives. It was not just a “re-run” of the Mix session: it was a new dialogue.
What made this event particularly interesting to me were the questions from the attendees and the 2-way dialogue that happened. It was informal and very open: for example, during the session “Using Windows Live Services in Your Own Web Applications”, someone from the audience asked for a demo of Popfly (Microsoft Mashup web tool). Although no demo of Popfly had been prepared for this session, someone from the audience came on stage to show Popfly and we started discussing how Popfly fits into the Windows Live Services strategy.
Remix was not recorded but the videos and presentations of the Mix sessions are available on http://sessions.visitmix.com/.
