istartedsomething

Today was the second last day of the Microsoft TechEd Australia 2008 conference so a closing party was held at the Sydney Exhibition Center. It’s got nothing compared to the previous year’s party at Warner Brothers Movie World theme park but it was still a pretty fun event with some unusual entertainment following the “carnival” theme.

At the Microsoft TechEd Australia 2008 conference keynote this morning, Dr. Neil and Amit Mital teased a very quick preview of the Live Mesh application running on a Windows Mobile Palm Treo Pro which should be publically available in the coming months.

During the short demonstration, Dr. Neil took a photo of Amit on stage with his mobile phone which then wireless synced with the Live Mesh computer.

In the broader picture syncing of data is just one of three components to the Live Mesh platform. They envision unified device management to remotely manage health, status, location and capability of devices; unified application deployment with synced configurations and settings for those applications; and finally unified data management across any device.

Imagine putting a Zune on the Live Mesh and allowing it to sync with your unified music library that spans across different computers, different devices and even different platforms.

If the standard Microsoft Surface demo applications doesn’t cut it for you anymore then check out this custom application built by an Aussie Readify consultant Tatham Oddie in just two days who hadn’t seen a Surface until a day ago (sponsored by Amnesia actually).

Since all TechEd badges are RFID-enabled A special sticker was placed on the back of the TechEd badge, he took advantage of this to build a TechEd sessions scheduler that works by placing the badge on the Surface. He also mentioned that if you had two badges on the Surface at once you could even share sessions by dragging it from one badge to the other.

Video credit Edward Hooper.

Microsoft’s TechEd Australia 2008 kicked off today in Sydney’s Darling Harbour Convention Centre. From morning to afternoon there were two Student Day keynotes for high school and university students respectively. In the evening, the delegates were officially welcomed in an opening party with free booze and finger food that dissolves before it reaches your mouth. Here’s a couple photos.

Amongst all the presentations, Joe Wilson - the academic evangelist for Microsoft had the most interesting one technically. Instead of Powerpoint, Joe used a custom-built WPF application that mashed together pre-rendered video and live-rendered animations. The photos doesn’t do it justice. Joe also officially announced DreamSpark for Australian students.

If you’re from down under and want a Palm Treo Pro but aren’t the biggest fan of the dollar-thirsty telephone operator known as Telstra, then you don’t have to wait too long now before getting your hands on a vanilla Treo Pro in the shops. Speaking to some Palm representatives at TechEd Australia, they’ve told me that the Treo Pro will officially be available via electronic retailers as a vanilla unlocked phone on Sunday, 16th of November for AU$900.

At the same time I also asked about why hasn’t Palm developed or customized the Windows Mobile shell much for the device - the “bread and butter” of HTC. The representative said that this decision was on purpose and believes that fancy shells usually consume too much memory resources slowing down the user experience, whereas the Treo Pro idles at only around 30-40% memory usage compared to as high as 70% on a HTC Touch Diamond. Whether or not this tradeoff between fanciness and resource usage will pay off for Palm remains to be seen.