I recently went to Lisbon for a week to attend the HP Labs University event. It was an all-expenses paid trip, courtesy of HP. This year was the 10th anniversary and they really looked after the 350 journalists and analysts they brought along. There were 10 talks to choose from over the week and we were told to choose 5. Some were very academic and a bit long. The talks I put myself down to attend were:
- Original HP ink cartridges vs. alternatives.
- Connections: The future of personal computing.
- The reviewers guide to printers.
- Future.
- Inside the HP camera.
I skipped the last one on the last day after hearing a lot of feedback from journalists saying it was mind-numblingly boring and far far too academic. Instead I went to the bar, surfed the net and wrote up my notes on the event. It was pointed out to be afterwards that I skipped the talk. I told them why. 🙂
Highlights:
- Actually liking a 3 hour talk on ink and cartridges. I guess it helped with the enthusiastic HP staff and the funny Germans who did some testing on reseller cartridges and released a survey on it. I’d like to do my own survey here to see how refiled cartridges do. From the tests done by the indepdendent German company, the pageload is way way less and the fade speed is rapid.
- The night out at the Casino, where we never got to gamble but did watch a show that was a bit like Cirque de Soliel.
- Meeting Haydn.
- Meeting Rusty and Simon and other UK journalists.
- Talking tech shite with Kerry Gaffney from Porter Novelli til about 5am on the last night. Kerry could easily give a technology journalist a run for their money with the breadth and depth of her tech knowledge. Very professional and good fun.
- Finding myself having immense fun at a big massive samba thingy in an ampitheatre. I made noise by shaking something. I rocked.
- The “Future” talk where HP demonstrated the MScape technology, Pluribus and other stuff that is still NDA’d. I’ll blog about these in other blog posts in the next while.
Flickr set from event.
Were I HP, next time I’d cut the talks down a bit more and do a little more practical stuff and less on the mathematics behind some stuff. I’d also include some “unconference” type talks where it basically is a group discussion. They have 350 technology journos captive, it would be good to get their collective intelligence to do more than write up the event. See what their thoughts on future trends are, for example. All in all it was worth going to and hopefully we’ll see more Irish journalists there next time.
