JavaOne, Day 1

Well this is the end of probably the most tiring day of my life.

After an early pancake breakfast, Gary and I headed to the JavaOne Pavilion to do some last minute Altio booth setup and to practice our technical session presentation. At 11:30am they opened up the Pavilion to all attendees, and so we started having to deal with lots of enquiring people wanting to know who Altio was, what AltioLive does and whether they could take one or more of our free 'stress balls'.

After a couple of hours of that Gary and I did some last minute session preparation and then went to room 104 to deliver our technical session. I estimated about 80-100 attendees (it was hard to tell due to the number of lights pointed at the stage), and I thought the session went very well - everything worked, we were bang on time and people seemed interested in what we were talking about: we certainly got a lot of questions regarding applets after the session.

One strange thing that happened was that there was a weird 'beep' noise during my part of the technical session, which Gary later said someone had told him meant that Sun were warning me that I was mentioning our product too much, as it is supposed to be a technical session, not a marketing exercise. I don't know whether that's true or not, but if it is that sucks, a lot, as most of my examples were generic applet examples that included source code, and only 2 were Altio based (which still meant that they were applet demonstrations).

After our session was over we manned the Altio booth until 6:30, at which time the JavaOne Welcome session began, which meant beer and food was available for everyone, so Tom and I joined in....just to keep up appearances. Unfortunately, as I was just finished my second beer, a media crew from the Sun Developer Network website arrived at our booth and wanted a filmed, impromptu 10 minute interview about applets to put on the website. This was great news for us, but less great news for me as I was the one who had to stand in front of the camera and talk coherently and knowledgeably about AltioLive with no preparation and after a couple of beers. I think it went alright though, and apparently that visit was driven from the good response to our technical session earlier in the day, so that's great feedback.

It does seem that applets are still popular with some people, and that Sun want to re-introduce to everyone else and Altio seem to be emerging as leading advocates for using applets, which is fantastic for us and great for applets generally.

Roll on tomorrow then - just let me try and sleep off the last of my jetlag first.