MIX10 Wrap Up

Wow! What a week. The MIX10 event is over, and I hope that everyone made it home safely. It was great to meet everyone in-person, and I love that we referred to each other by our Twitter handles (I heard “Hi, Anyware” many times this week). I thought I’d provide some early data on the event that you might find interesting.

• The all-you-can-eat buffet of keynote and session video recordings were online for awhile, but the download demand was so high that our global CDN couldn’t cache the files. Unfortunately, we had to shut off the downloads to give the almost 70GB (!) of content time to make it to the edge of the network. When we re-enable downloads later today, the download experience should be much, much better. Sessions are provided as a high-quality WMV, a regular quality WMV, and as a MP4 file for mobile devices. For most of the sessions, the PowerPoint slides are also available.

  Here’s a graph that shows the spike in connections right up until we turned off the downloads. Realize that each of these connections was trying to grab 100s of megabytes of video data.
  

• There are many (I’m not kidding) download options for the keynote and session videos:
   

  • Right-click each link on the videos page and Save As. A bit tedious, but you can be selective.
  • Use any of the available download managers like Free Download Manager.
  • Use an RSS reader that supports the download of enclosures like Juice, and point it at our sessions RSS feed.
  • Use the updated cURL scripts from Sascha Sertel. The original cURL scripts are available at the top of the videos page. If you can’t find the right cURL download, try this Win32 version.
  • Use Frank La Vigne’s MIX10 Session Downloader tool.
  • Use Bizcoder's HttpClient and OData sample code (added on 3/20/2010) .
  • Use Jason Richard Taylor's MIX10 Video Downloader (added on 3/21/2010) .
  • Download everything via iTunes.
  • Download everything from the Zune Marketplace.
  • Write your own download client using the OData API we’ve exposed for MIX10. :-)
     

• We’re frequently asked, “why not just use BitTorrent?” Aside from the fact that it’s against corporate policy (or at least it has been), BitTorrent is throttled/filtered by many ISPs, flat-out blocked in many corporations, and prone to man-in-the-middle attacks. And, when our CDN has the files cached globally, the CDN is often faster than BitTorrent anyway. We will continue to reevaluate BitTorrent, but it’s not currently a solution that provides enough benefit.
   

• Browse more than 400 MIX10 photos on Flickr.
   

• Did you notice the paper evaluation forms that were sitting on the chairs in each session? You might wonder why we don’t just do everything online (and we’re often asked that question). It turns out that the response rate for paper evaluation forms far exceeds the response rate of online evaluations. It takes quite a bit longer to tabulate the responses, but the quality of the data is worth it.

  That said, here are the top 20 sessions ranked by “overall satisfaction” for MIX10:
   

  1. Advanced Web Debugging with Fiddler (Eric Lawrence)
  2. The Tale of JavaScript. I Mean ECMAScript. (Douglas Crockford)
  3. Reactive Extensions for JavaScript (Erik Meijer)
  4. Web Deployment Made Awesome: If You're Using XCopy, You're Doing It Wrong (Scott Hanselman)
  5. Search Engine Optimization for Microsoft Silverlight (Brad Abrams)
  6. Introducing the Silverlight Rough Cut Editor (Jason Suess)
  7. Accessing Data in a Microsoft .NET-Connected Web Application (Shyam Pather)
  8. The Laws of User Experience (Anthony Franco)
  9. Dynamic Layout and Transitions for Microsoft Silverlight 4 with Microsoft Expression Blend (Kenny Young)
  10. Microsoft Silverlight and Windows Azure: A Match Made for the Web (Matt Kerner)
  11. Implementing OData: How to Create a Feed for That (Mike Flasko)
  12. Modern Web Form Design (Luke Wroblewski)
  13. Designing and Delivering Scalable and Resilient Web Services (Ron Jacobs)
  14. Improving Software Quality for the Modern Web (Euan Garden)
  15. An Hour With Bill Buxton (Bill Buxton)
  16. The Elephant in the Room (Nishant Kothary)
  17. Do You Speak My Language? Microsoft Translator and the Power of Collaboration (Vikram Dendi and Neil Roodyn)
  18. Beyond File | New Company: From Cheesy Sample to Social Platform (Scott Hanselman)
  19. OData: There's a Feed for That (Pablo Castro)
  20. Microsost Silverlight 4 Business Applications (Scott Morrison)
       

• Did you know that we held on-site focus groups with some of our MIX10 attendees? We worked with ConStat to organize and run the focus groups to ensure that the process was fair and balanced, and we’ll use the data to improve our future events. For MIX10, we had six one-hour focus groups that involved 39 people. We take your feedback very seriously!
   

• During the day 1 keynotes, MIX10, Windows Phone 7, and Silverlight were all on Twitter’s top 10 trending topics list. To-date, we’ve tracked over 29,000 tweets related to MIX10.

  The top 5 tweeters were ReadyDesigns, smartyp, MojaveMedia, brian_henderson, and RicCastelhano.

  The top 5 topics/words mentioned were Phone, Windows, Microsoft, Silverlight, and WP7.

  Here’s a visual of the MIX10-related tweets (courtesy of The Archivist by MIX Online). The peak is during the day 1 keynotes.
  

• Last, here are some fun statistics about the event…
   

  • Over 46,000 viewers of the live day 1 keynote stream and 42,000 on day 2
  • 3.762 miles of network cable (the Las Vegas strip is approximately 3.8 miles long)
  • 3,300 feet of extension cords (over 9 football fields)
  • 1,770 gallons of coffee (this does not include Starbucks)
  • 96 liters of hand sanitizer
  • 159 attendees completed the “My name is and I’m at MIX to” cards on the bulletin boards
  • Most external speakers of any MIX (43%)
  • Around 4,000 unique users on wireless
  • Top three wireless users downloaded 5.0GB, 3.04GB, and 2.71GB
  • 1,000 loaves of regular bread
  • 7,200 rolls
  • 3,000 Artisan loaves of bread
  • 9,120 bottles of juice
  • 5,000 Red Bulls
  • 5 cases of foam melon soap

Thank you for attending MIX10, even if your “attendance” is online. Enjoy the keynote and session recordings, leave some feedback, or drop me an e-mail.

Until next time!