Incremental Blogger

Tablet/Blogger Gathering at CES

The CES Tablet Gathering was amazing. I can’t believe how many people showed up. Despite the fact that the gathering was organized at the last minute, there was a strong group of Tablet owners and influential bloggers. The best count we have is 47.

This is the third Tablet Gathering at CES and the first time that it wasn’t just a group of Tablet enthusiasts and industry people. That would have been nice, however, for a last minute event we realized that we’d be better off focusing on the community. There are lots of events at CES, but many of them are invite only. Few are open. We wanted the latter. That’s one reason we were glad when Robert Scoble wanted to merge the blogger gathering he was organizing with us Tableteers. It couldn’t have worked out better.

We figured that between 15 and 20 people would show up. I think about that many had emailed and said they would come. We expected a small, informal group so we were going to go with pay your own way meals at a hamburger joint at the Aladdin. We figured that with a relatively small crowd each person could keep a separate tab. We worked out the details with the restaurant ahead of time on Monday. We picked Friday at 4PM. Things were set. I wondered though, would anyone actually come?

Then Friday arrived. And things changed.

As I walked up to the restaurant a few minutes before four, Ken Collura was at the entrance. I thought, "Whew, someone showed up." After a few more minutes others started congregating around the restaurant entrance. The group was growing. I knew we’d hit 15. Then a waitress came up and ask if we were part of the Tablet Gathering because they were already inside. "Really?" I thought, "Oh, my."

We went inside the restaurant and started pulling tables together into a long row so everyone could sit near each other. Then more people came and we pulled some more tables together into an L. And then more people came so we constructed a J. Then a U. Then a---I have no idea. Because by the end of the evening we had a meandering, twisting, turning string of connected tables. It was hilarious.

About this time the wait staff was getting concerned about how the bill would be paid for. I was too. They wanted everything tallied under one bill now since there were so many people. I wondered if people would eat and go. It was announcement time.

I moved to the middle of the room and tried to gather my voice to get everyone’s attention. I couldn’t. My voice was shot from all the talking on the showroom floor. So I asked Rob Bushway if he could yell loud enough. He wasn’t too sure if he could either. We chuckled. But he managed to. The room got quiet. I thanked everyone for coming and such and reminded everyone that this was a pay-your-own-way party and asked everyone to keep tabs of what they’d ordered so we could combine the money into a single bill. There was grumbling. Everyone realized how difficult this would be. Hmm. What to do?

Just at that moment Robert Scoble quite literally came to the rescue. He volunteered—or should I say he volunteered the Microsoft .Net Evangelism team--to pay the first $400 of the bill. Whew. Everyone cheered. Then before the reality of the remaining part of the bill could resurface, Phil Burns from Provo Labs stood up and offered to cover the next $100. And in rapid-fire succession Chris Pirillo offered for Lockergnome/The Chris Pirillo Show to cover the next $200. And Fritz Switzer from abletFactory pitched in another $100. And finally, in a welcome surprise Adam from OQO offered to cover the remaining part of the bill—whatever it was. Unbelievable. Thanks to each of these companies for covering the costs of the Tablet/Blogger gathering. What a pleasant surprise!

It was time to eat and talk. We did.

I was exhausted from CES as most everyone was. It was actually good to just sit. In fact, I think it was the longest I’d seen Buzz Bruggeman from ActiveWords sit in one place at a party.

Who was at the Tablet Gathering? Lora has some details here. There were some familiar faces, such as Linda Epstein from TabletPC2, Chris De Herrera from TabletPCTalk, Rob Bushway, and Dennis Rice, however, there were lots of new people too.

Ajay Juneja from SpeakWithMe (http://www.speakwithme.com/) and Jeremy from SkyLook (which integrates Skype and Outlook), and folks from Flickr (Yes, Flickr!), and TechSmith and Monster Cable, as well as those I mentioned earlier and many others. I need to get a list together.

There were so many interesting people to talk with.

As it turned out, the gathering wasn’t just about food. TechSmith gave copies of SnagIt (and I think Camtasia too), Flickr was handing out buttons, OQO had t-shirts (and was showing off their new OQO running the Tablet PC OS!), Etymotic tossed out their new headset adapters for Skype users (which turned out to be a wildly sought after item), Buzz gave everyone ActiveWords, and to cap it off Monster Cable gave everyone passes to get into the Stevie Wonder concert later that night! Oh, and there were Tablet Guys and Channel 9 Guys too. But, this wasn’t all. I understand that there were some others privately giving things away too. I guess that’s the benefit of moving around and talking with different people. Trevor from StudentTabletPC said he got more swag from the Tablet/Blogger Gathering that from all of CES. Hehehe.

I’m not sure how long the gathering lasted. I think we left around 8PM. However, I know others were still there when I left. It seemed like people were having a good time chatting. I know I did. Personally, this was my favorite Tablet gathering. It was a blast.

Posted by Loren at January 8, 2006 10:17 AM