Big Booth Shot

Back in July, Rogue Amoeba was recognized for our work on Audio Hijack Pro, with an O'Reilly Mac OS X Innovator Award. As part of this, we got invited out to the O'Reilly Mac OS X Conference in Santa Clara, California, or TenCon as it's come to be known. We were set up with a booth in the Exhibit Hall (check out that kickass banner, now hanging in my room), alongside such well-known companies as BareBones Software, and The Omni Group. As well, I got to participate in a panel of the winners of the various rounds of the Innovators Contest, answering questions from the audience and having some fun.

   Above, you can see pictures from the Exhibit Hall. It was pretty small, 18 booths I think, so we got a lot of exposure. O'Reilly had a system set up where if you visited each booth and got a stamp, you got a free book, so people were encouraged to come up and hear about our products. We got some good face time and showed off Nicecast, our newest product. We actually "released it from the conference", in a stunning PR move that meant nothing in the real world except that Quentin and I were working on the road, with him finalizing the code on a G5 in the computer lab Apple set up for the show, as seen below. You can also see me talking to a customer, with our friend and one-time co-worker Vinay in the background.

   In addition to the Exhibit Hall, there were Tutorial and Informational Sessions. We didn't have time to go to many of these, but I saw a couple of the Keynote speeches, including Tim O'Reilly's, seen below. Also in that picture is Rael Dornfest, author of Mac OS X Hacks, which just so happens to feature Audio Hijack, and visible behind the giant monitor, the very tall Derrick Story. The other two images are from the Innovators session on Wednesday night. From the left is Philippe Mougin, author of F-Script, Robb Beal, author of Spring, Alan C. Smith author of ACSLogo, Andrew Abernathy of The Omni Group, creators of OmniOutliner, Brent Simmons, of Ranchero Software, authors of NetNewsWire, Oliver Breidenbach, of Boinx Software authors of iStopMotion, Gus Mueller, of Flying Meat Software, author of VoodooPad, Sarat Kongara, author of iBlog, and me. In the picture on the far right, I appear to have said something funny, but hell if I can remember what. My Red Sox cap is there on the chair, in deference to any Athletics fans who might have been in attendance from nearby Oakland.

   That's the end of the trip. We didn't get to see much of California, except for the 1-2 mile stretch between our hotel and the Westin where the conference took place, and downtown San Jose with our business associate Tracy Lakin. However, I did take a couple snaps of things that made Quentin and I stop, laugh, and say "California...". This was my first trip west of Cleveland, and Quentin's as well, so that joke got a lot of play. Anyway, below you'll find instructions on how to eat a Piadine, the absurdly long mission statement of Tomatina restaurant, and an honest-to-god tumbleweed.