The Realtime Conference 2012 Webcast

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For just two days, programmers and developers from all over the world gathered under one roof in Portland, Oregon for the 2012 Realtime Conference organized by web application and design team &yet, and sponsored by such companies as Google, DotCloud, Windows Azure, SEOMOZ, MojoLingo, and more. This was the second year this kind of an event had happened. Last year in November the same group put on the “Keeping It Realtime” conference. However, this year would be different in one crucial way: this year &yet hired e3 Webcasting to live stream the conference and the more narrowly focused RedisConf the day before (see previous article for details).

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Clik here to view.The conference was held at PureSpace, a venue in Portland’s Pearl district. The people at &yet had a big vision for making this conference the highlight of the year for their attendees: they did things with style. On the first morning, the attendees were shuttled to the conference from the hotel, but were dropped off a few blocks away where a marching band awaited them to escort the crowd of developers into the building with fanfare! That night, the conference set them home with a surprise performance by a children’s choir. Delicious food, lots of coffee, and an impressive line-up of speakers kept the conference rolling; but behind all this, there was a team of busy workers making it all happen. As the providers of the live streaming, e3 Webcasting was part of that crew.

Flexibility and problem solving are required whenever you are dealing with live events (which is the definition of webcasting). For instance, the night before the conference, as we were setting up our gear, we discovered that the projector, which was supposed to have an HDMI connection, only had a VGA connection. Thankfully, we were able to track down a converter / scaler that allowed us to use the projector feed in the live streams (for the presenters’ slides). But, in spite of technical speed bumps, the conference’s webcast turned out excellently.

The final night of RealtimeConf, &yet founder Adam Brault gave an inspiring call-to-action to his family of techies. He boldly challenged them to pursue the betterment of their work, and in the process, the betterment of the world. “To whom much has been given, much is required.” He called on his audience to become leaders in their respective spheres of influence. This stirring address put all the information that had been covered over the last two days into perspective. Thankfully, those who were unable to physically travel to Oregon did not have to miss out on this motivating presentation, thanks to live-streamed video. From the very first session of the conference to Adam’s closing talk, remote viewers were able to participate in the annual event. Webcasting the conference made it possible to spread the excitement and the inspiration of Realtime to a wider audience; incentivizing people who will want to be a part of it next year, and who knows where it will go from there.

photo credit: Watching @caseorganic talk at #realtimeconf, in real time, on BART! Aaron Parecki via a cc