Presentation Camp Seattle

Saturday (04/04/2009) was by far the warmest and sunniest day so far this spring in Seattle. Given the wet, bleak gray we've had for months it was really tempting to be outside to enjoy the glorious weather. In spite of the temptation, I opted instead to attend Presentation Camp Seattle at the University of Washington in Seattle.

PresentationCamp is an ad-hoc gathering of passionate folks who want to share, interact and spread the love around the topic of presentation design and delivery. It's for anyone interested in public speaking, pitching and presenting. Presentation Camp is a BarCamp, the Open Source Version of a Conference. Special thanks to Twitter / kegill for getting this event organized and giving a great presentation.

It was a day well spent, recharging my batteries, seeing some great presenters (Scott Berkun and Kathy Gill among others), meeting other folks with the same passion for good presentation skills and the opportunity to share a few of my insights from years of presenting to other attendees in all the great conversations. I picked up a few new ideas and tips for my own use and even won a book (Making Things Happen - Mastering Project Management by Scott Berkun) in the closing session of the day.


There were just north of 100 attendees and the twitter traffic was bountiful. You can see all the tweets at http://search.twitter.com/search?q=%23pcampsea.

Many of the presentations are/or will be posted in the next few days on http://www.slideshare.com/.

For more information about the presentations, attendees and keeping an eye out for next year's event take a look at http://presentationcampseattle.wetpaint.com/?t=anon.

I also learned about an additional opportunity in Seattle to enhance your presentation skills. It's an event called Ignite, on April 29th at the King Cat Theater. Ignite Seattle is a geek event that combines on-site geekery, sharing, and innovation (and drinking). Brady Forrest, of O'Reilly Media is one of the organizers. He also presented at Presentation Camp Seattle.

I'll also be blogging about an idea I shared with others at the camp for using speech recognition technology to help in your preparation for a presentation on my professional blog at http://speechselfservice.blogspot.com/ in the next day or so.

I love my new Sony TM –BT8iP Stereo Bluetooth Transmitter

If you're like me you love your iPod but hate the headset or earbuds. I'm constantly snagging the headset cord on sometime and either destroying the cord, unplugging it from my iPod and occasionally pulling the entire iPod off of my belt and sending it crashing to the floor. What a pain! I especially hate this happening at the gym when the cord gets caught on some piece of exercise equipment.

I recently found a simple solution: Sony's TM –BT8iP Stereo Bluetooth Transmitter for the iPod.

It's a breeze to use, like good technology should be. You plug it into the bottom connector of your iPod and it has one button to turn it on / off / sync with a nearby headset.

I use the Motorola S9 Stereo Bluetooth 2.0 Headset which also works well with my Motorola Q9m mobile phone.

The BT8iP requires no battery charger as it draws it's power from the iPod.

The sync process is incredibly easy and the transmitter is smart enough to partner with my iPod and when my phone rings or I place a call it pauses what ever is playing on the iPod and swtiches to support my phone automaically. Really!

It's not often enough that I get a new piece of technology that solves a problem so well and is so easy to use.