All About - AdNerd on the go

First of all: I am not the only one writing about this topic these days (hehe - funny, didn’t type this intentionally - Steven from These Days is - amongst 8 other Belgian colleagues - here as well and also writing about MIX07). Mix07 is the Microsoft convention being held as I speak in Las Vegas.

Things I have learned so far:

• Coming to America by plain (how else?) means queuing up lots of times due to safety controls (the 78 euros for my ID definitely payed of, that’s for sure ;))
• Las Vegas is very un-real. I am staying in ‘The Venetian’ which is the second best hotel in Las Vegas and it has some 4.000 rooms for the moment and they are building (since a year) an additional tower with yet another 4000 rooms (making them as big as the MGM). My room is bigger than where I live in Belgium (not that it is that small, rooms here are rather big :d). I wonder if I get the bigger room because my ING Card is black (and you know what a black card means in the US, right? No? It means: that guy has plenty of money ;-)). Another nice thing about the hotel: they built a mini-version of Venetia inside their casino. Watch my flickr posts for a picture of that.
• Air conditioning is a so fucking irritating (and must cost Las Vegas a lot!)
• Microsoft conventions are filled with people using Macintosh products ;)
• The (Belgian) Microsoft crew is spoiling us a lot. I have been here for three days now and all I payed for until now was one meal. Steaks, cabs, drinks, … everything is on their account. Thanks for that, Geert ;-).
• Microsoft keynotes are comparable to the last one I saw about the iPhone introduction: look how cool, woohoow ;-)
• Silverlight and the Expression Studio is something that might just change the way we are working nowadays. The possibilities this offers (creatively) and the way of working (the designer and the developer both use the same underlying language - XAML) are just astonishing. I think some colleagues at Atmosphere will have to dig into this a lot deeper now ;)
• The Windows Live products and the API’s of Live contacts, Virtual Earth will be used in the near future for bringing our advertising to the consumer. Imagine a multiplayer game (the Monkey Cab we did last year for Pepsi) with the possibility of inviting your friends using the Live Contacts service.

More to come…