Meet Me at the Visual Mapping Conference

As many of you may know I am a visual person - I have kept journals ever since starting my architecture education.  My journals are a mix of drawing, sketching, collage, watercoloring, visual mapping, and photography.  I have started to post some of the journals online on my web site.  The visual mapping technique that I use is one that I first learned at a summer program when I was in grade school, SuperCamp and I have been using it ever since.  A few years ago I went on a safari to Tanzania and even used visual mapping there when listening to a naturalist, Janet Hanby (Mama Simba) explain predators in Africa.

Visual Map of Predators

Two years after that trip, I was ready to make a move up in my career and used that image and my software development experience to get a job at Mindjet which makes the popular MindManager software for visual mapping.  At Mindjet, I became an evangelist for MindManager as a solution platform, creating the Mindjet Labs site and many of the solution examples available there.  Since I've been at Microsoft, I have continued to use MindManager in personal planning around my customers, explaining Microsoft tools and technologies to my customers, and in meeting with my customers.  I guess that I'm still an evangelist for MindManager and the visual mapping technique.  In fact, one of the first demos that I created using the new Silverlight technology was a tool that transformed a MindManager .mmap file into a Silverlight application running on the web.

The IQ Visual Mapping Conference

So, with that background, I wasn't surprised when the organizers of the upcoming IQ Visual Mapping Conference asked me to be a speaker.  Since Microsoft has so many technologies that can be used to build applications that support visual mapping techniques, I thought that it would be appropriate to talk about that:

Creating Your Own Visual Mapping Tools

With so many excellent software tools on the market for Visual Mapping one might wonder why you would try to create your own tools.  Michael Scherotter, creator of the Mindjet Labs at Mindjet and now an evangelist at Microsoft will demonstrate and explain the technologies available today and in the near future for creating visual mapping tools that work across the gamut of connected devices, platforms, and communications mediums, like Silverlight, Windows Live Mesh, and Windows Mobile.  Prepare to be inspired!

So if that has sparked your interest, here are the logistics for the conference:

Location: College of St. Elizabeth, Morristown, NY
Dates: October 2-3, 2008
Info & Registration: https://visualmapper.org/blog/
Cost: $500

I hope to see you there!

Update

8/18/2008 - I just got an email from the organizer that the conference has been postponed.  A new date has not been set yet.