I figured I would post a picture before I started sweating profusely.I’m very pleased to announce that bdg has officially kicked off our very much irregular and irreverent Plumtree podcast!
Please download and listen to our first episode, which talks about the background of your host, yours truly, Chris Bucchere; gives a rundown of recent news in the Plumtree world including G6 features and an Odyssey recap; and ends with a trivia challenge.
See if you can be our first winner by answering the question at the end of the podcast. Enjoy!
With a resounding victory this morning in the Booth of Pain, bdg put the wraps on what will probably be the last Plumtree Odyssey.
We sent five people this year: me (President & CEO), Eric Bucchere (Account Manager) and Rich Weinhold (Plumtree Developer) representing the East Coast and Howie Bagley (VP Sales & Service) and Steve Markoff (Plumtree Architect) representing the West Coast. We had the opportunity to meet many of you at our booth – thank you for stopping by and introducing yourselves! In the upcoming weeks we’ll be raffling off the iPod Nano that was on display in our booth. If you asked us to follow up with you, expect to receive a follow up call or e-mail in the next 2-3 weeks.
Although the official feedback has not been tallied up yet, the talk we gave with Wind River was standing room only and I personally received lots of positive comments including one person who said that our session was the highlight of this year’s Odyssey. Another piece of feedback I got from Jack Jones of DTIC was that without our training (given in 2004), they would have gotten nowhere with their Plumtree project.
Winning the Booth of Pain competition was the icing on the cake. Despite the heat, the claustrophobic booth and numerous distractions from David Meyer (including scaling my booth, firing projectiles at me and scrawling the word “LOSER” across my booth with Silly String), I was able to compile and assemble the PTMingle application in about 25 or 30 minutes and then give a demo, which was very well received by the audience. In a humorous moment, I clicked on a del.icio.us hobby link related to “Romance Novels” and it displayed a half naked, hunky long haired dude with a cheesy smile (think Fabio). I quickly closed the window amid quite a bit of laughter from the audience.
PTMingle at this point is no more than a concept application/prototype, but expect to see the code used in the Booth of Pain competition up on the Code Share within the next few days. Plumtree data visualization in hyperbolic trees, profile integration with del.icio.us and Google maps integration are all hot topics right now and all areas of interest that bdg would like to pursue, so you should keep an eye out for more offerings from bdg that exhibit these features.
In closing, I wanted to send a resounding THANK YOU out to Yi Hong Xu of Wind River for her help with the presentation, to Mattias Cudich for plugging this blog during his Holland presentation (more on this later), to all of you who attended our presentation or the Booth of Pain, to all of you who stopped by our booth and last but certainly not least to the stellar team of bdg-ers who made this event a huge success for bdg.
On a personal note, this year’s Odyssey had a bittersweet feel for me. It was my sixth Odyssey, having attended four as a Plumtree employee, two as a bdg-er and missing just one (in 2003) and it will most likely be the last. We do, however, look forward to seeing all of you again next year at BEA World in San Francisco.
Look for more posts from me regarding the material presented at Odyssey, especially on Project Holland, which has exciting implications for future BEA/Plumtree offerings.
We’re going for a big splash this year at the final Odyssey+ADC while Plumtree is still, well, Plumtree.
Plumtree just released the onsite guide showing bdg in several places, so I figured it was time to announce our plans for this great user conference, which takes place Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday of next week.
For starters, we’re sponsoring at the bronze level, which includes a booth in the partner pavilion. At the booth, we’ll be handing out bdg mouse pads, marketing literature about PTSkinz and the PHP EDK, giving demos of PTSkinz and giving away an iPod Nano!
In addition to our booth presence, we’ll be co-presenting on Monday at 3:30 PM in the Regency 2 ballroom with Plumtree and bdg customer Wind River. The topic of our presentation is “Keeping it Simple: Best Practices in User Interface Design and Customization.”
Lastly, we’ll be competing in the Booth of Pain, a coding competition that will show attendees how to assemble a composite application in Plumtree from source code. That takes place at 10:15 AM on Wednesay in the Diplomat 3,4 & 5 ballrooms.
Please stop by our booth, pick up a free mouse pad, register to win an iPod Nano and join us for our presentation with Wind River and/or the Booth of Pain.
We look forward to seeing you at Odyssey!
I’m very pleased to announce that bdg has been selected by Plumtree as a co-sponsor of this year’s Odyssey+ADC, which is Plumtree’s User Conference and Advanced Developer Course.
For more information on Odyssey+ADC and to see the other sponsors, visit the Plumtree Odyssey+ADC partner page.
If you’re at all interested in Plumtree, I highly recommend that you attend Odyssey to get an understanding of the business and strategy side or the ADC to get the technical perspective.
Hopefully I’ll see you there!
I went to the final set of sessions at NVSS today which included a gem of a presentation by Eitan Suez, a Java programmer who also happens to be a CSS master. I had no idea you could you accomplish so much with CSS. For example, a lot of what I thought I had to do with Javascript and innerHTML() can be done with the CSS visibility attribute. Visit Eitan’s CSS Repertoire to find out more. Another site brought up during the talk was the CSS Zen Garden — a must see!
I’m at the Northern Virginia Software Symposium this weekend, and after hearing Ted Neward speak yesterday on “The Fallacies of Enterprise Systems (Architecture),” he is officially my new hero, right up there with Alan Cooper, Terry Winograd, Bo Peabody, Nils Nilsson and David Sandler, (yes, David Sandler, I have to sell too; I can’t just code all the time :-).