The Mobile Presenter

The term "tough room" usually refers to a tough crowd in said room that a presenter has to deal with. Well, here's a case where it was actually the room (if you can even call it that) itself that was causing me problems ...

Yesterday, I attended Day Camp for Developers: Soft Skills. Wait. Hmm. Do you say "attend" when the thing is not a "real" conference but happens online? Shouldn't that be "watched"?

So what was it, really? The idea was to do an online conference on the topic of "soft skills", aimed at developers. Five presenters each talked about one topic. The presentations were streamed live via GoToWebinar. As a participant / viewer, you got to see their slides (and, sometimes, their computer's desktop) and hear their voice. You did not see the presenters. Since the presenters couldn't see their audience either, this had the potential to become a series of five 1-hour monologues. Fortunately, this isn't what happened.

Barcamp Stuttgart was another interesting use case study for using the iPad as both a conference and a presentation device. Quite a few details were different from FrOSCon.

In Presenting with the iPad, I explained how the room's limitations happened to work to my advantage, given that I wanted to run the presentation off of my iPad. I thought it would be interesting to see how other speakers would deal with the limitations of this specific room. Thanks to froscon.tv, several videos from other sessions from the same weekend are now available. I've picked two below where I was mainly interested in the topic, but also watched the speakers' performance.

Please note that I don't want to criticize my fellow speakers here - I was merely curious to see how others presented in this specific room under the same circumstances (well, minus the iPad).

FrOSCon 2010 was the first real-life test for my iPad regarding two of the main functions that I bought it for:

1. as a laptop replacement and, more importantly,
2. as a presentation device

So how well did it do?