Ben Forta

I went to bed at about 1:00 am local time, slept on and off for a few hours, then got bored and got up at about 5:00 am. I’m going to need lots of caffeine today.
I just finished my keynote segments in the opening session of MAX here in Taipei. Kenneth Lau, Greater China Country Manager, made opening comments (in Chinese). Gary Grossman, Flash Architect, presented the Macromedia vision and RIA message (similar to what Kevin Lynch presented in New Orleans last week). Mike Downey, Flash Technical Product Manager, gave his Maelstrom demo (and received the first spontaneous applause of the day). I introduced Flex 1.5. Silke Fleischer, Captivate Product Manager, demoed Macromedia Captivate. And then I spent 20 minutes on Blackstone (similar demos to the ones that Tim Buntel and I presented last week), spontaneous applause for and SMS application support.
Someone from the CTO’s office at BEA is now talking about “service oriented architecture”, pitching Flex on top of WebLogic on Linux running on Intel architecture. He’s quickly losing the audience, shame.
MAX Awards are next. I get to be “Vanna”, and will help to hand out the awards.
There must be at least 600 attendees in this room, and about half are listening via simultaneous translation. Pretty impressive for the first MAX in Greater China, and the organizers are already talking about next year’s event.