MacWorld 2008

Visited MacWorld in San Francisco this week. Really enjoyed myself walking around seeing the new innovative companies connecting with several designers and video rockstars. One thing about the Apple computer it is the computer for the creative set. Passionate fans all over the place.

Highlights for me was seeing Nancy Duarte from Duarte Design speak. I was fortunate to interview her for Meetings Podcast a few months back and she gave a great little talk about her new book Slideology. I really love that book and it has already helped me several times with my own clients. I am no designer but Slideology gives some simple tools to really improve presentations.

Another person I saw speak was at the MDialog booth. Tim Street gave a presentation on weaving story into your video. Tim has worked for Disney, nickelodeon and currently produces a video series called FrenchMaidTV. FrenchMaidTV is a PG-13 show which shows French Maids selling products. He is a clever guy who was teaching the art of using emotions when storytelling. Check out Tims blog if you have any interest in visual storytelling and whats happening with viral videos. Also if you produce videos of any kind MDialog is a very cool service and even has a small application for the iphone which I really like and will be using.

One fun moment was running into Paul Cicerone of Delphi Productions who had built the Microsoft booth and lounge. He did a great job and the booth seemed to always be full of people learning about Microsoft Mac products. Paul and Delphi had also built a Lounge area in a separate booth where I met Guy Kawasaki of Mac fame who did a book signing of his new book Reality Check which I look forward to reading. Some pictures of Guy and MacWorld arehere.

It will be interesting to see what happens to MacWorld now that Apple INC. is pulling out of the event next year. But its par for the course for Events and meetings this year. But it is going to be a great year for companies to be creative and innovate and be ready when the economy gets better.

What are you doing to innovate? Maybe buy a Apple computer!