Reflections on TechWeekend@the Dolphins by Frank Haggar

by Steve Earle | Oct 27, 2014 | Events, Marketing, Newsletters

Tech Weekend @ The Dolphins was held on Oct 25/26th at Sun Life Stadium.  The event was filled with activities, including a Hackathon, Teach-a-thon, Coding Track, IT Track and a variety of user group meetings.  The size and layout of the event had to be seen in person, as it kept going on and on.  Just when you thought you’d come to the end, there would be more rooms and more events further down the hall. There were over 900 registrants.  Even with the distraction of beautiful S. Fla weather, over 450 came to the free event the first day, and 100 the second.

Folks from all age groups were in attendance, from 5th graders to retired programmers that wanted to get back into the community.   The Ranger Kids were all dressed in matching orange T-Shirts, drawing attention as they paraded through the large stadium layout.    The attendees learned, and then networked afterwards, sharing what they’d discovered.  The hackers worked feverishly to get their latest ideas into presentable form.

The results were remarkable.   The presentations included ideas like ways to help cut lines at the women’s restrooms, how to use the stadium for other events like Tech Weekend, how to use the time between plays to add extra excitement with the game by earning game tokens for trivia and micro-bets, and it even spilled out into the parking lot where an app showed how to have the perfect tailgating event.  There were so many exciting ideas that it must have been near impossible to select a winner.  Some of the strongest statements happened when an investor from the crowd told an attendee he would back her idea even before she finished her presentation.  The IT judge from the Dolphins said he’d use one of the apps as a statistician and scorekeeper for the Dolphins.  Even the event organizers jumped on board as we plan to use the app to help us organize our Tech Tailgating @ The Dolphins for the November 13th game against the Buffalo Bills.

While all of this is remarkable, I found the best comment of all when I came to my desk Monday morning.  I’d received an invitation to connect on LinkedIn from James Stephenson, an attendee who I’d chatted with throughout the event.  He brought his daughter to the event as part of the Teach-a-thon.  She is a remarkable middle school student that was interested in the entire event.  His note to me said: “My daughter was so enthusiastic, we spent the rest of the evening together working on her projects”.  As an event organizer, what more can dream for but to inspire our attendees, especially our youth, to study technology, try hard and reach for excellence?
We thank Microsoft and Citrix for their phenomenal support by staffing many of the tracks with experts and allowing us to award tickets to attendees of those tracks.    We thank the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, without whom this event would not have been possible.  And, we especially thank our hosts. The Miami Dolphins, who’s support and execution made this the largest-ever Tech Event for an NFL team, held at an NFL stadium!

News from Microsoft’s Blain Barton

by Steve Earle | Oct 20, 2014 | Events, Marketing, Newsletters

Blain is a Senior Technical Evangelist, US Developer Experience and Evangelism – DX Team, Eastern Region – Florida with Microsoft Corporation.

Blain would like to share these Microsoft centric events and resources:

Meetup http://www.meetup.com/Florida-IT-Professionals
Blog – http://aka.ms/blainbarton
Early Experts – http://aka.ms/itproexpert
Microsoft Azure – http://aka.ms/try-azure
BizSpark Champ – BizSpark Program http://aka.ms/go-bizspark
Twitter @blainbar
Facebook and LinkedIn – Blain Barton
IT TIME RADIO http://aka.ms/it-time-radio

News from Microsoft's Blain Barton

by joshuapiller | Oct 20, 2014 | Events, Marketing, Newsletters

Blain is a Senior Technical Evangelist, US Developer Experience and Evangelism – DX Team, Eastern Region – Florida with Microsoft Corporation.

Blain would like to share these Microsoft centric events and resources:

Meetup http://www.meetup.com/Florida-IT-Professionals
Blog – http://aka.ms/blainbarton
Early Experts – http://aka.ms/itproexpert
Microsoft Azure – http://aka.ms/try-azure
BizSpark Champ – BizSpark Program http://aka.ms/go-bizspark
Twitter @blainbar
Facebook and LinkedIn – Blain Barton
IT TIME RADIO http://aka.ms/it-time-radio