Last Monday was the 2nd day of the Lotusphere 2012 #ls12 and was the day that the Opening General Session took place. I was part of the demo team so for me this was the day that Lotusphere actually started as up until then we were backstage getting ready for the big keynote.
As you probably know, the keynote was live streamed. The main speaker was Michael J. Fox and the opening band was Ok Go which made Lotusphere trend in Twitter. Michael J. Fox did a tremendous job on stage and was very funny. I'm sure that every time someone brings up a problem, I'm going to say: "Hey, a lady had a baby in a tree, what do you got?". If you don't get the reference, you'll have to watch the live stream replay here.
Or if you are short on time, here's the OGS in 60 seconds:
The feedback from the audience in Twitter was extremely positive. I loved every minute of the experience of getting the demo ready and getting to know what it takes to put together the best demo ever for Lotusphere. Hope that next year I get to participate in this as well. Here's a picture of the demo team taken by Alistair Rennie.
Immediately after the main keynote, customer and business partner meetings started. Throughout the conference, the attitude was extremely positive and everyone was very excited about what's coming in 2012.
At the same time, Guy Kawasaki took the stage for the Opening General Session at the IBM Connect conference. Guy had a great message around trust, where you have to trust others before they start trusting you. Guy also insisted that you have to accept others the way they are, and not to try to change them. Next, he emphasized the importance to always think how you can help the other person, and not how they can help you.
If you missed it, here's a quick chat recorded with Guy:
or his actual keynote is here:
Monday afternoon was also my first session of the conference where I co-presented with Mike Roche, Chief Architect for IBM Connections. Since our session wasn't on the Application Development track, we wanted to stay away from code and instead highlight the art of the possible and show how customers and business partners have extended the IBM Connections Platform. I often find that not everyone is aware of all the integration points that are available today so that's why we wanted to focus on that.
Here's the presentation that we used:
Monday night, the OGS team headed out for dinner and it was great. I had such a good time. I think I hadn't laughed that hard before so it was a great way to end the day and hang out with colleagues who are often remote.
More to come in other posts...