Today was a very big day at the University of Waterloo (UW) as Bill Gates came to talk to the staff and students for one hour. Gates is currently on a 6-University speaking tour around North America with UW being the only Canadian University on his plan. The school has been preparing for it for the past couple of weeks and many students applied to attend. Fortunately for me, they reserved 25 seats for my program (Software Engineering) and the guy who chose which SE people to attend has been in the same class as me for 5 years.
Security was very tight with absolutely no bags, purses, helmets, or anything allowed into the building. Cops were visible and made sure the rules were being followed and all of that. I got to sit pretty close to the stage, about 6-7 rows back near the middle, which gave me an excellent view.
The talk itself was very interesting as Gates talked about the future of technology and the role software would play in this vision. A lot of it sounded pretty grandiose but Gates had some cool demos to punctuate his message. The first demo was of some new picture management software in the same area as Picassa or iPhoto, nothing really new there. He then showed off the 360 and the standard demo of pictures off digicam + music off portable media player. He then played some PGR3, of which he was really bad at.
The last demo was of this crazy setup with this table and infrared camera. If anybody remembers those Sony demos with those glass tiles, it was a little something like that. He placed his cellphone on the table, and then a larger screen projected onto the table with a "log in" message. It used fingerprint identification so he just touched some pad and was logged in. He then placed a business card on the table and then a project of the card's contact information was projected onto the table, he then flipped the card over where he had written some notes, and those notes were added to the projected version. He then placed the card onto the area of the table, where the first screen was being projected and then waved towards his cell phone. A little animation played that intuitively indicated the contact information was now on his cell phone.
Some of the bad parts of the talk were these two lame videos they showed. At the beginning of the talk they showed a short video of UW alumni that are working at MS just talking up the company in a recruitment style ("it's GREAT HERE!"). The other video used Napolean Dynamite and had Gates and Napolean doing some stuff, which was pretty funny, but then the lame message of "Office increases productivity!" came out.
After his talk there was a pretty good Q&A session. One of the questions was about where MS gets their inspiration from, he mentioned how their competitors are a great source of inspiration. He mentioned how they didn't think about search at all, and then Google came along, and so they stepped back from it and looked at what Google was doing and said "They're not that good", this got quite the reaction from the crowd.
The coolest moment for me was being picked to ask a question. I got to say my new start up's company name 3 times right to him which was really really cool. Plus since I was sitting so close to the stage when he answered the question he was looking right at me.
Overall the talk was really good. Gates is a nerd in the truest sense of the word, and seems like a good guy. It's funny how a lot of Internet geeks bash MS, when I'm sure Gates is a bigger nerd than any of them. He definitely connected well with the audience there (mainly nerds) and wasn't afraid to talk in a bit more technical terms.
Security was very tight with absolutely no bags, purses, helmets, or anything allowed into the building. Cops were visible and made sure the rules were being followed and all of that. I got to sit pretty close to the stage, about 6-7 rows back near the middle, which gave me an excellent view.
The talk itself was very interesting as Gates talked about the future of technology and the role software would play in this vision. A lot of it sounded pretty grandiose but Gates had some cool demos to punctuate his message. The first demo was of some new picture management software in the same area as Picassa or iPhoto, nothing really new there. He then showed off the 360 and the standard demo of pictures off digicam + music off portable media player. He then played some PGR3, of which he was really bad at.
The last demo was of this crazy setup with this table and infrared camera. If anybody remembers those Sony demos with those glass tiles, it was a little something like that. He placed his cellphone on the table, and then a larger screen projected onto the table with a "log in" message. It used fingerprint identification so he just touched some pad and was logged in. He then placed a business card on the table and then a project of the card's contact information was projected onto the table, he then flipped the card over where he had written some notes, and those notes were added to the projected version. He then placed the card onto the area of the table, where the first screen was being projected and then waved towards his cell phone. A little animation played that intuitively indicated the contact information was now on his cell phone.
Some of the bad parts of the talk were these two lame videos they showed. At the beginning of the talk they showed a short video of UW alumni that are working at MS just talking up the company in a recruitment style ("it's GREAT HERE!"). The other video used Napolean Dynamite and had Gates and Napolean doing some stuff, which was pretty funny, but then the lame message of "Office increases productivity!" came out.
After his talk there was a pretty good Q&A session. One of the questions was about where MS gets their inspiration from, he mentioned how their competitors are a great source of inspiration. He mentioned how they didn't think about search at all, and then Google came along, and so they stepped back from it and looked at what Google was doing and said "They're not that good", this got quite the reaction from the crowd.
The coolest moment for me was being picked to ask a question. I got to say my new start up's company name 3 times right to him which was really really cool. Plus since I was sitting so close to the stage when he answered the question he was looking right at me.
Overall the talk was really good. Gates is a nerd in the truest sense of the word, and seems like a good guy. It's funny how a lot of Internet geeks bash MS, when I'm sure Gates is a bigger nerd than any of them. He definitely connected well with the audience there (mainly nerds) and wasn't afraid to talk in a bit more technical terms.
