Today had an exiting start with a briefing for press and analysts and lots of announcements, which I unfortunately can’t share with you due to NDA, but there is more to follow during the keynotes. Last night I found out how to broadcast live video using my cell phone, while at the same time Youtube records it, which gets rid of the uploading process of hours and hours of video! I worked with Alexandre and unfortunately we missed the official opening ceremony by Mark Templeton, but today we’re getting a second chance during his keynote. People around me are leaving. The press room is almost empty and I need to hurry. Talk soon!

Wow! Time flies, here! Last night I spent hours uploading my video to Youtube, missing the fancy Michelin star press dinner. But I got the Summit keynote video with Mark Templeton out and that feels good! Here it is, in case you missed it 🙂

Well, it wasn’t an official keynote, but since Summit doesn’t have a real keynote, it felt like one nevertheless.

Content & speed
Twitter keeps surprising me. The huge impact it has had on our lives. On my live, anyway, and on the technology event Summit is. More and more often I meet somebody in real life and then connected with them using Twitter, or the other way around. Setting up a Twitter List makes it easier to track these people and read their tweets. You can also use that List for a separate tile in Flipboard on your iPad! A Citrix employee just told me Citrix “is experiencing issues with you blogger guys”. Of course no real issues, but this employee was referring to the speed our information travels with nowadays. The big thing for me to get that video out yesterday was not its quality, but the fact that anybody who didn’t make it to Barcelona can see what I saw. Within the next few hours/days/weeks a proper video will be shared by Citrix TV, but by then everybody will already know what it was about. And I think that this is what news (or just sharing information, as I like to call it) is all about. And I was already upset my video stream didn’t make it to the internet realtime. Shooting video is one, but uploading it through a straw is a nightmare. Google+ offers realtime video sharing, as well as Youtube (also part of Google – the possibilities are tremendous!) and I’ll figure it out today to see if I can get some live video going. For Synergy, Citrix has SynergyTV for live video broadcast. Let’s see what that is all about!

Footage
I decided to group my Flickr footage per day and per event, so there is a Flickr Set for Citrix Summit 2012 – Day 1, Citrix Summit 2012 – Day 2 and a compiled Set for Citrix Summit 2012. I started a Flickr Group called CitrixSummit (because it didn’t exist yet) and I’m putting all my stuff in there. If you are here and if you have footage, feel free to share it with the Group. I’ll make it an Open Group, so you don’t need my permission to join. There is a Flickr Group for CitrixSynergy, so I guess this is just a bit new to them.
This is the content of my CitrixSummit Group:
No photos

This morning I woke up at the Hilton in Barcelona. How did that happen? I was invited by Citrix to come to their Summit & Synergy to blog, tweet, interview people and do those things I normally would when visiting any other technology event. I arrived yesterday and today I’m learning more and more about these two events.

Here’s what I found out:

Summit
This is Citrix’s B2B partner event to meet and train partners (Monday-Tuesday). More information: http://www.citrixsummit.com/

Synergy
Citrix addresses end users during this B2C event (Wednesday-Thursday). More information: http://www.citrixsynergy.com/

Social Media & cool stuff
There are two hashtags: #CitrixSummit and #CitrixSynergy
These aren’t only very long and hard to type, but they don’t include a year, which makes it more difficult to track online stuff acurately. Twitter may keep search results for only two weeks, but tagged pictures may survive longer and it would be better to file content with the proper event. I would suggest #citsum12 and #citsyn12, so next year’s events could be #citsum13, #citsyn13 and so on. But event hashtags are generally difficult to manage, as there are no rules and nobody wants their event hashtags to conflict another event.
Be sure to get the app Citrix developed for both events. You can get it from: https://bitly.com/QjjdGV
And, with Bitly’s public statistics (add a + sign behind the link), here is some interesting information on Citrix’s app: https://bitly.com/QjjdGV+
Want to know more about the author of the Bitly link? Check out benzee’s Bitly timeline here: http://bitly.com/u/benzee

Plan
Here’s my plan (may be subject to change): This week I’ll study Citrix technology from a business point of view as well as an end user point of view (try and get most out of the two events) and I’ll share with you the threats and opportunities I see. Do you have any questions for me or Citrix? Be sure to leave them below in the comment box. Stay tuned!

You can find my #CitrixSummit pictures (and possibly video) on Flickr:

Here’s the video: