The main conference room at GigaOM's Structure 09
Om Malik speaks to Facebook's Jonathan Heiliger
So much to talk about. Last week was great. I was fortunate enough to attend the Structure 09 conference, as well as the corresponding VIP party.
A quick day-by-day recap of my third week:
On Monday I had a meeting with our SEO/marketing guy Jon Wirt to discuss some changes that needed to be made on GigaOM Pro.
Tuesday was pretty typical. I did some graphic design, coding, and general development. Knocked out some of my tasks for the week.
Wednesday was the Structure 09 VIP reception. It was located at Terra SF, an art gallery/reception area in SOMA. Paul Walborsky was nice enough to invite me. In fact, he said that it was mandatory that I attend, which was fine by me. At around 5:00pm Greg, Jon Wirt, and I walked over to the venue from our office. I know I’ve been saying this a lot recently, but it was another amazing experience. There were probably 100+ people in the room, representing companies like Google, Sun, Microsoft, HP, Akamai, Salesforce, Amazon, Yahoo!, Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn, Automattic, and more. I was lucky to be able to chat it up with people like Scott Beale of LaughingSquid, among others. It was an amazing opportunity, and I’d like to think that I made the most of it. I also got some free swag from MediaTemple, including a sweatband that I’ll probably never wear.
Thursday was the big day: Structure 09 was finally here. I had to be at the Mission Bay center at 7am, so I woke up at 6am, and was out the door by 6:30am. My original plan was to take the bus there, so I walked to the stop which was about 10 minutes away. As I was waiting for the bus, half asleep and day-dreaming, I see a car pass me, then pull into reverse. “Andrew! Get in,” a voice shouts. It turned out to be my co-worker Jon Wirt. I thought it was the most random thing for him to actually see me on the side of a busy road and actually pick me up. It was nice.
We get to the venue right at 7:00am and got settled. We ate some breakfast, and I met up with the TEC crew, including Christiaan and Shea. They came bearing gifts; each of us got a brand new Flip Mino video camera in order to document our experiences and create a commercial for TEC. At around 8:05am, we all went upstairs into the main conference room where Om Malik kicked off the conference.
It was a long but amazing day. There were panels on topics like databases, web apps, cloud computing, bandwidth, and venture capital. Om had chats with Sun’s Greg Papadopolous, Amazon’s Werner Vogels, Facebook’s Jonathan Heiliger, and Salesforce’s Marc Benioff. There were workshops with Microsoft, Juniper, Cisco, HP, and AMD. There was a keynote by Akamai’s Paul Sagan and mininotes by HP’s Russ Daniels and IBM’s Willy Chiu. Once again, I had never seen anything like it. The amount of technical experience and accomplishment in the room was awe-inspiring.
On Friday, I sat in on a meeting with one of GigaOM’s outside consultants to discuss new changes that were going to be happening. It was another eye opening experience that allowed me to see how a company deals with consultants. I’m glad that I got to sit in.
Take a look at more Structure 09 pictures.
