The Mobile Presenter

I don't remember how or when I first came across Garr Reynolds' Presentation Zen method of doing presentations. I do know, however, that I was reading the Presentation Zen blog even before the first book came out, since I remember pre-ordering it. So it's been a while and I do hope that if you ever saw one of my own presentations, that the influence is apparent.

Since Garr is living in Japan, chances of getting to see him live over here in Europe are rare. So when the Presentation Zen Seminar in Paris was announced, I only hesitated briefly to consider the technicalities (of getting some days off from work, and of getting to Paris) before I booked it.

I apologize in advance if this post is getting a bit fanboy-ish ;-) but to summarize, I had a great time in and around this seminar.

Yesterday saw the long-awaited release of iOS 4.2 for the iPad. But Apple had a few more surprises in store, including a nice one for users of Keynote on the iPad:

Keynote 1.3 for the iPad now has a presenter display!

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.