Last two days to vote for your favorites SXSW sessions.

SXSW is one of the most prestigious music, film, and interactive events. I submitted a couple of panels I hope you find them interesting, and if you do please support me by voting for them; it only takes a couple of minutes.

Panel 1: Emerging trends of Mobile Technology (by Rob Gonda and experts TBD)

iPhone 2.0, Android, Flash Lite 3.0, Streaming Video, Electronic Wallets, … Mobile technology is growing rapidly and becoming an intrinsic part of consumer mentality. Hear the experts discuss the role of mobile in today’s lifestyle, discuss emerging technology, and predict national and international trends.

Panel 2: Rich Internet Applications Death Match (by Rob Gonda, Adobe, Microsoft)

Entertaining and informative event where evangelists from industry top players try to defend their products in a competitive death match. Flash, Silverlight, Ajax, AIR, Gears, Curl, WPF, many familiar names, but which one is the best solution for your particular needs? This intense event will reveal the answer.

Sapient submitted a total of 14 sessions, creating for the first time a huge presence on this event. I also wrote the content of the RIA+SOA and the RIA Security panels.

Feedback, comments, and suggestions more than welcome. Hope to see you there.

SXSW 2009 registration is now open. I submitted four panels for the interactive event, so I'm definitely going. Amazing conference, you can't miss it.

I will be speaking at the New York ColdFusion User Group this Wednesday, April 16, with the topic of "AJAXify Your ColdFusion Applications". I promise it will be fun, a good learning experience, and perhaps we may even go out afterwards and have some drinks.

There will be tons of nice give-aways:
1 x Ticket to CFUNITED ($999 Value!)
2 x jQuery Reference Guide
2 x Learning jQuery: Better Interaction Design and Web Development with Simple JavaScript Techniques
2 x Tickets to Flex Camp Wall Street
1 x FusionDebug License....

They're all excellent... I love jQuery and CFUnited is the most popular CF event of the year .... hope to see many familiar faces, so don't miss it.

I think I was not meant to speak at CFUnited in 2008. I was initially scheduled to speak at the main event in D.C. and the European event in London. Unfortunately, I won't be able to make either. The main event was moved a week early and I will be in Cannes that week. Brian Rinaldi will be covering my RIA Security session, and my Advanced SQL topic was replaced with another in the same arena.

I was really looking forward to these events, but I guess there's always next year, and I'll see you at Adobe Max 2008.

This year's CFUnited is going to be great again... they added more tracks and consolidated the frameworks conference into it.

I want to publicly congratulate two of my very talented friends, which I have seen grow the last couple of years and I'm proud to speak with them at CFUnited this year. Luis Majano, author of ColdBox, will be presenting ColdBox 101; and Tom de Manincor, who I have the pleasure to work with at ichameleon/group/, will be presenting on leveraging databases.

I will be speaking at CFUnited Europe: Embrace Factories and ColdFusion Powered Ajax; as well as the traditional conference in D.C: RIA Security and Real time data manipulation with SQL.

Hope to see you all there.

Updated 02/2008: I will no longer be speaking at CFUnited after the date change. Unfortunately, it conflicted with another conference. I will miss you all.

That's right. If you're planning to speak at CFUnited 2008, tomorrow is your deadline. If you don't plan to speak, you can still suggest topics or speakers.

I just submitted a few topics, including but not limited to advanced framework development, enhanced service layers for ria's, ria's data security, db real time data manipulation, some facebook secrets, and more ...

See you at CFUN08.

Thermo is amazing! It will bridge the gap between designers and developers, allowing developers to get in the game at an earlier stage; allow customers to feel the application and not just see it in planning phase... Prototyping just upgraded to a whole new meaning. The customer doesn't know what he wants until he sees it; now this applies to RIAs as well, how nice is that?! I really can't wait to start using it.
You read about it on the blogs, but there's nothing like seeing it in action ... even on early stages, I can already visualize us being an early adopted and using it on every RIA project.

Without getting too deep into the demo, Thermo allows to create a new RIA project, spits out Flex code... allow designers to use familiar tools such as layers ... or you can import a PSD, separate all assets, convert graphics into controls, group data into arrays for dummy data.... it's amazing ...

Max is huge! The hotel is huge, the conference center is huge, the attendance is huge ... Amazing conference ... kudos to Adobe for putting this together.

There is more ColdFusion emphasis that I expected, which is great.

The opening keynote was impressive; first of all, feating 5000 people in a single room is impressive... then speaking for 2.5h, go Kevin! One of the most impressive demos was 1080p HD Flash Video using h.264...

Afterwards, for a change, I didn't attend any session, but the networking was worth it ...

Tomorrow I have my ColdFusion Powered Ajax session and then I may attend a few others...

Will post more tomorrow.

Oh yes, the Adobe Media Player has potential! More on that later too.

Announcements: AIR Beta 2 available. Flex 3 Beta 2 Available. AIR Beta 3 will incorporate h.264. Flash 10 / Astro will incorporate Text Rendering API. Flash 10 / Astro will incorporate 3d capabilities, such as rotateX,Y,Z. Adobe Media Player has tons of monetizing opportunities through Ad Capabilities. ColdFusion 9 will allow server side ActionScript 3.

Leaving to Max. My session will be ...... >take a guess< ............ ColdFusion Powered Ajax, where I will demonstrate ColdFusion MX8's capabilities, but also talk about the engine powering it -- YUI, EXT --, provide examples on how to tweak it, improve performance, and show some amazing examples of Ext 2.0, which has not been confirmed to be part of a future release of ColdFusion, but we can only hope.

* I'm finally back from all my traveling.
* Cannes was great; we got shortlisted for the Guinness Hands microsite
* CFUnited was great; gave the 8h flex class to about 20 students. IMHO it went pretty well; tons of examples, started slow and then got well advanced. Then I gave two sessions, one on Factories and one of Flex and Ajax. I liked the factories one, but I wasn't fully satistied with the Flex/Ajax one.
* Happy 4th of July.
* I ordered my new MacBook Pro yesterday. It may take a few weeks (so they said), because I chose to upgrade the HD to a 7200RPM one.
* I will be speaking at Max on ColdFusion (CFMX8) Powered Ajax
* I'm officially hooked into ANT now and will release some scripts soon.