1) A new group called 1023MB. They’ve never had a gig before.
2) T-Mobile CEO John Legere, with his new Macklemore cover band. Spoiler: Their encore number goes “Carrier my wayward son, we’ll have yours when 2014’s done” or something like that. They won’t play Free Bird.
3) Lenny Kravitz joined by Imagine Dragons
If you guessed #2, I like the way you think. But if you guessed #3, you’re right.
Lenny Kravitz
Kravitz, also recognized by many as Cinna from the Hunger Games movies, will be bringing his award winning musical talents to the stage at AT&T Park in San Francisco on Wednesday, May 21. And only Cisco Live attendees can get in. (Social Pass or higher, Explorer Pass doesn’t count).
Check out his video for “Let Love Rule” at the bottom of this post for a refresher.
Imagine Dragons
Those of you who made it to VMworld last year may remember Imagine Dragons, who were on stage at that CAE, and who won a Grammy for “Radioactive.” They’ll be back in the City By The Bay to perform for Cisco Live attendees as well. Check out their performance of “Radioactive” on NBC’s Saturday Night Live at the bottom of this post.
I’m also hearing that there will be “Rock ‘n Roll Tricks” during the halftime show of the concert. I don’t know what that means, but I’m pretty sure it will be cool.
So there we have it. The biggest Cisco news of the year so far, bigger than UCS Invicta, bigger than UCS 2.2, bigger than the B460 M4 server. And you read it here.
So where do we go from here?
Are you signed up for Cisco Live yet? Check out the registration options here, including the $195 Social Event Pass which is the least costly way to get in to the World of Solutions, Keynotes, Receptions, and of course the Wednesday night Customer Appreciation Event.
If you’re going for one of the full size passes, early reg discount ends this Friday, March 14, Save up to $300 if you get your registration in now.
[I’m big on soft topics this month so far, but don’t fear, I have some other technical posts coming up.]
I was tweeting with Calvin @hpstorageguy Zito this morning, in response to an experience he had with a homeless person in San Francisco during VMware PEX (Partner Exchange).
I wish I could have done more to help him. He has a three month wait to get into a shelter.
When I was up in San Francisco for VMworld last summer, I had two encounters with homeless folks. One was a man being very aggressive outside CXIParty, which was not conducive to help, but the other was less uncomfortable.
A guy who had very recently received a tee shirt that had been given out in the vendor expo that week asked if the company on it was a good one. And it got me thinking. I couldn’t answer his question, honestly, although I had a vague memory of what that company did. I probably had the shirt in my bag back at the hotel, and it’s probably gone to Goodwill since then. So did it do anything for me? Not really. Could it have helped someone else? Almost definitely.
And having been accosted by many vendors at the shows last summer promising a chance at a free iPad, I got to thinking. The cheapest refurbished iPad on the Apple store today is $339. That’s probably going to feed a family of four for a month, maybe more. Not glamorously, and probably not at a San Francisco boutique grocery, but through a food pantry it will definitely make a difference.
Between my own experiences and Calvin’s thoughts this morning, I’m wondering what tech conferences can do to help enable attendees to help the host city’s homeless and helpless, and what attendees would do themselves.
How can we help?
It would be easy to find a local charity that helps the less fortunate, and find a way for attendees to contribute. However, there’s a lot more that could be done.
Vendors exhibiting in the Enormous Room Of Solutions could donate their leftover wearables and flashlights and other useful non-tech trinkets to local shelters. Maybe replace your tee shirt with a smaller take-home piece of swag (8GB USB drive with your glossies and demos?) and a donation on the booth visitor’s behalf to such a local shelter or food pantry or soup kitchen.
Conference organizers could simplify the donation of swag on site, for folks who don’t want to walk the mile to Glide or Goodwill or the like. Consider integrating a benefit operation into the customer apppreciation party or other large events. Make sure you have something helpful to do with the catering leftovers (no matter how much we complain about the food, it’s still better than what thousands of San Franciscans have to eat every day).
And whatever you do, make it clear (tastefully) what you’re doing. Many of the 20k+ people at VMworld or Cisco Live assume leftovers get thrown away at the end of the day. And we’ve all heard exhibiting vendors complain about having to take shirts home at the end of the event. If you can make a difference, make it clear.
So where do we go from here?
I’d love to hear from folks involved with organizing the big conferences, as well as those of you attending them, about what you think is practical and what you personally would do to help the host city when you go to a technology conference.
And if you’re local to San Francisco, what organizations do you think could do the most with donations (whether goods or cash) to get their benefits most effectively and efficiently to the people on the streets and shelters and underserved homes?
So it looks like I’ll be back in fish-out-of-water territory May 18-21, 2014, when Cisco Live comes back to San Francisco for the 2014 US event. Read on…
Update: 2014-05-01 big news, win a free lab pass for Cisco Live US 2014; see the update at the bottom of this post!
Fish out of water?
I went to Cisco Live US in Orlando last year. It was my first really big event, and the reasons for the fish-out-of-water comment are twofold. One is that I’m not, for the most part, a networking guy. I’ve done networking, mostly LAN/VPN and a bit of wireless, but I’m primarily a server sysadmin, bare metal all the way. And two, I learned my original network chops (beyond 10b2 Ethernet and dialup networking) supporting the Ethernet switching products division of Nortel up until the turn of the century.
But two years ago last month, my boss asked, “Want to come to the datacenter in Vegas and work on some servers?” It was something to do, and I was curious how Cisco would make servers… so I went, and started loading cards into UCS C210 M2 servers and trying to get operating systems onto them.
And for the last two years, a big part of my day job has been setting up, maintaining, deploying, and troubleshooting a pretty big pile of Cisco UCS C-series servers and related infrastructure. It’s been a wild ride, and it’s probably a relatively rare patch of expertise, and I’ve learned a lot via trial by fire (and a lot of dumb questions to my TME/savior).
So last year, when I had the opportunity to go to Cisco Live (thanks to some help from Tech Field Day), I jumped at the chance. I stretched my trip home from Tech Field Day 9 in Austin to take me through Orlando and joined in a roundtable with Opengear while there, but mostly went around being a bit overwhelmed and meeting a lot of the people from Cisco who I’d worked with indirectly during the UCS adventure.
Stay social, my friends
I also met a lot of the people I interact with daily on Twitter , and some I just started interacting with at the event. There’s a few of them above this paragraph (and I think I’m in the middle of the right side near the back). I couldn’t get anyone to give me a ride out to Disney World, even with the promise of free passes, but it was a good time anyway.
At some point as I was getting ready to leave for Orlando, I got a message on Twitter asking if I was interested in a new social media program Cisco was starting up. I was baffled but intrigued, and a month or two later I was one of the first dozen people in that program.
Will you come with me, won’t you come with me?
So this year I’m headed back, an hour’s train ride away rather than 5 hours plane ride, with some lessons in my backpack and bigger plans for this year’s adventure. This year I’m going back as a Cisco Champion, with a couple of posts on the Cisco Perspectives blog and an even wider ring of social contacts in all corners of the Cisco ecosystem. I’m planning to head into the certification forest a bit (have to branch out somehow, right?), and maybe show a bit more restraint as far as bringing tee shirts home (for the sake of domestic tranquility) .
If you’re considering going, well, by all means check it out. There’s the main site for Cisco Live US, and a page describing the packages and options for registration. If your company does a lot of business with Cisco, check to see if they have learning credits available, or see if your organization has training or professional development budgets.
If you’re local but on a tight budget (or if you can get to San Francisco cheaply anyway), consider Explorer ($49) or Explorer+ ($595) which give you access to the keynotes, the World Of Solutions vendor expo, and (with the plus) two tech sessions. Or there’s a social event pass for under $200 that lets you into the receptions, the expo, the keynotes, and the Wednesday night Customer Appreciation Event (likely a big concert and festival at AT&T Park or Treasure Island).
If you can’t make it at all, check out the “Learn Online with Cisco Live” section of the above registration link. You can see a lot of sessions from past events, including one or two that you’ll hear me in the background of (with the speaker’s approval), and access to live broadcasts from time to time. And of course, follow the conversation on Twitter with the hashtag #CLUS and follow @CiscoLive (the official event Twitter account).
If you’d like to read Jeff Fry’s preview post on Cisco Live 2014, and you should… click on that link. The map of official hotels (some of which may be sold out of the CLUS discount block rates) is worth the price of clicking alone!
It should be interesting to see how Cisco Live translates onto the Moscone conference space. While I won’t miss the humidity and 90-degree heat from Orlando, I will miss the $90 walking-distance hotel option. But I’ll be back, joining the social fray again, and looking forward to meeting as many of you as possible.
And as a disclaimer, if you click on the Cisco Live links above, I get entered in a contest for a free lab or technical session at the event. Other than that, I get no compensation or consideration for this post beyond the warm fuzzies of supporting an event and team I like.
Update as of May 1, 2014
I’ve been informed that I won the Cisco Live blogger contest for a free 4-hour lab or technical session at 2014’s Cisco Live conference May 18-21 in San Francisco.
This is great news, and I’m grateful to everyone who helped me win by reading my posts and clicking through to the Cisco Live website.
The downside is, I already have two labs scheduled and paid for, and my brain is likely enough to explode already. So by special dispensation, I’m going to give away my free lab pass. Here’s how to get in on the action:
If you are already registered for a Full Conference pass for Cisco Live US 2014 in San Francisco, and can use a lab or technical session, just tweet a link to your favorite blog post of mine. Include the hashtags #CLUS and #RSTS11 in any order. Up to three tweets per person will be accepted as entries, so that the first tweeters to enter aren’t left out. However, if my timeline view shows more than one tweet in a row from you, that only counts as one. So tweeting an entry 25 times in a row is nice but won’t win you the prize.
In honor of the 25th anniversary of Cisco Live, I will identify the 25th qualifying tweeter (with a link to a rsts11 blog post, and the two hashtags) and pass along your twitter handle to the Cisco Live team to arrange for your free lab or tech session. You might want to follow me (@gallifreyan) so I can DM congratulations and get your registered name to share with Cisco Live.
Note that the 25th in chronological order at the time I look at the tweet stream will be chosen, and retweeted, deleted, multiple, delayed, or incomplete tweets may not be considered or eligible. Tweets before @ciscolive announces this win will be ineligible. Bacon not included. This is only for a 4-hour lab or technical session; you must already have a valid registration for the full conference pass itself to use this prize. Neither I nor Cisco Live is responsible if your head explodes from the learning experience itself either.
This was a year of many firsts for me, including four conferences I attended for the first time: Interop Las Vegas, Cisco Live, Nth Symposium, and VMworld. This is a long one, but I wanted to share my comparison and suggestions for future events.
Disclosure: I received support from Tech Field Day, HP Storage, and VMware in attending these events. I was a delegate to roundtables with Tech Field Day at all but Nth, and a HP Tech Day delegate at Nth. None of these sponsors were promised any special consideration in my coverage (or lack thereof) of the events, nor was I compensated for any participation in or around their events.
0. Overview
Both Cisco Live US and VMworld US were huge affairs, effectively a full week with 20k+ attendees, keynotes, breakout sessions, noticeable social media engagement, and all the challenges that come with housing, feeding, entertaining, and educating a large crowd, not to mention navigating that crowd.
Cisco Live was at the Orange County Convention Center in Orlando, Florida. About a dozen official Convention Hotels were within a few blocks of the convention center.
VMworld was at the three buildings of the Moscone Center, and conference facilities in two or three nearby hotels as I recall. Attendees had choices of hotels within a mile of the conference center.
I have a couple of thoughts/observations my prep for this event, and my adventures to Interop Las Vegas, Cisco Live, and Nth Symposium this “summer.”
I’d welcome your feedback and other suggestions… maybe this will all end up in front of the right eyes.
And maybe people planning other similar events can take this advice and at least think about it over a scotch on the rocks next weekend.
Make Scheduling Easier
I think the Cisco Live and VMworld scheduler sites are the same back-end. However, as I pointed out when I first tuned into Schedule Builder, VMworld’s schedule is far more limited in usefulness.
Admittedly, Cisco Live didn’t give 5 minute granularity for scheduling, which has to be useful for people who want to attend 15 minutes of each presentation. But I can live without that granularity.
What I find more difficult to deal with is the inability to schedule after-hours “personal time” to keep track of social and vendor events. Sure, I can load everything into Google Calendar or Outlook, but then if I change things in the Schedule Builder, it’s a manual resync or I miss something.
As a bonus option, it would be great if vendors could get unlisted codes for their events, so instead of manually adding, say, VMware Customer Event, I could put in 9EVT2039 or something and have the details populate. Password-protect if you want, so people can’t randomly find the events as easily, but it’d be nice to make the scheduling and planning as uneventful (heh) as possible.
Manage Scanner Pouncing, or, I just want free stuff
I try to manage my badge scanning. I know I’m going to get a year or five of random untargeted emails from most companies that scan my badge, and while the free iPad you’re giving away would be a nice late birthday present for my fiancee at home, you’re not going to note on the contact form on your scanner that I’m not really interested in your call management system considering my job is running Hadoop clusters.
I’d love to have two scan codes… one for “yes, I want to hear more about your products,” and one for “no, I’m not interested in your products, but I’d like to be entered in your giveaway so you don’t stalk me everytime I walk by.”
I’d love a third one for “my employer spent 7 figures with you already this year, but thanks for asking” (I’d use that one a few times most likely, even if I’m not wearing my mouse ears) and maybe a fourth one for “I’ve had dinner with your CEO and I suggested that new feature you’re touting between the fourth and fifth scotches” but then the name badges would get really crowded. And Hans would probably only scan that last one all week.
Don’t Be That Idiot, or, control your devices
I have probably tweeted about this during conferences dozens of times already this year… and it would be really great if presenters and organizers would help remind the less considerate/professional in the crowd…
We’re not here to hear your cell phone, pager, IM tone, etc… or to see the presenter/musical guest/keynoter through your iPad.
Before your session begins, set your mobile devices to silent, or vibrate only if they’re not sitting on a table or other noise-amplifying surface.
If you’re expecting a call that you absolutely have to take, sit near the door. And don’t take a call until you have left the room. If we needed to be on the call, they’d have called us too, right?
And as much as you want to share the experience with all your Instagram/Facebook/Vine/blog followers–you don’t need to block the view of people behind you by holding your iPad up pretending you’re a videographer. If your iPad wasn’t in the way, we could still see the speakers/performers, so you’re not doing anyone a favor. . Just don’t do it. Put the iPad away and enjoy the show.
This is what it ends up looking like, and we don’t want this .
Speaking of hygiene…
I’ve often thought someone like Right Guard or Axe should be a sponsor for job fairs, expo floors, etc. There are always people who don’t bathe/shower/change clothes, and people who thought the TSA 3oz figure was a suggestion for daily cologne/perfume use.
Unless you’re trying to snag a Kardashian, you can go easy on the fragrances. Beyond that, wear a clean shirt, and clean up a bit before going into close quarters with other people who’ve hopefully have done the same.
Like the rest of this, it should go without saying, but there always seems to be at least one or two of what a hairstylist friend of mine used to call “the peanut butter people.” As in warm peanut butter fragrance. Not becoming, I tell you.
So where do we go from here?
If you’re a presenter or organizer, consider finding some slightly more filtered way to encourage people in your events to silence their mobile devices.
If you’re a professional human attending an event, learn how to set your devices (laptops, tablets, phones, pagers, Tamagotchi, etc) to silent mode. Set your devices to silent mode before the presentation, event, concert, or keynote begins. Identify the nearest exit to you in case you have to take a call. Don’t talk on the phone during a session/lecture (there were people doing this at Cisco Live, seriously). Gently encourage your friends, colleagues, and anyone else who might listen to you to do the same.
If you are at this event just to show off how loud and obnoxious your ringtones, IM notifications, email alerts, and iPad videography can be… well… there’s a Justin Bieber concert for you somewhere. And they’ll love your Cheetah Girls ringtone.
What suggestions do you have for fellow event attendees? Feel free to share in the comments.
The leading guesses for Cisco Live CAE band are:
Imagine Dragons
![winner-winner-chicken-dinner[1]](https://rsts11.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/01/winner-winner-chicken-dinner1.jpg?w=300&h=200)
rsts11 - Robert Novak on system administration 