The Road to MIX

The MIX Conference – billed by Microsoft as its web conference (and now with phone!) and me as “Microsoft’s most right-brained major conference” – takes place in Las Vegas next week! It’s the conference where developers, designers, UX/UI pros and businesspeople get together to talk about “consumer”-focused applications and sites for the web and phone.

A little aside: I put “consumer” in quotes because I hate the term but don’t have a reasonable substitute for it. My problem with the term “consumer” is the same one that Jerry Michalski has: it makes us sound like “living gullets whose only purpose is to gulp down products and crap out cash.“ If you can think of a better word for “consumer”, please share it with me!

There will be a fair number of announcements made at MIX, so we’re doing a couple of things to make sure you get the news as soon as possible:

• We’re sending a few members of the Evangelism team to cover the event, including myself, John Bristowe (who’ll be presenting at MIX), Frederic Harper and Paul Laberge.
• We’re bringing along a few friends to help cover the event, including Mathieu Chartier, Richard Campbell, Colin Melia, Andrew Louis and Mark Arteaga.
• And finally, videos of the sessions will be posted online very soon after they’ve concluded.

You can view the MIX11 schedule to see what’s going on during the conference, or you can check out the pared-down schedule I’ve posted below, featuring those sessions that focus on the web and the phone. You might notice that a lot of the scheduled phone sessions have no name and (TBA) beside them: I leave it to your imagination and deductive powers to figure out what they might be about!

This article also appears in Canadian Mobile Developer and Canadian Developer Connection.