Monday, October 19, 2009

Surviving Finals and >Play Conference

I literally just hit submit on my last final paper of Fall A!!! I'm so excited to be done with 1/8 of my entire b-school experience! Just insane. It has been a great quarter. I think I've done a good job of settling into school again and getting to know all of the great people in my class and cohort. Go Axe!

Unfortunately, we didn't get too much of a break between finals and classes starting again, especially because the Digital Media and Entertainment Club's student-led conference >Play was this past Saturday. I was very impressed with our abilities to get some really great speakers. We opened the morning with a quick intro from Dean Rich Lyons and then heard from John Lilly, the CEO of Mozilla. He had some really great insights into how he sees the web-browser evolving and how that will transition into the mobile space. Then I headed off to a panel on creativity, which wasn't as captivating as I thought it was going to be. Next, I enjoyed a really interesting panel on the future of the mobile ecosystem. The panelists were a great mix of people who focused on applications and browsers. After a great lunch, I saw the founder of Guitar Hero and the President of EA Sports to discuss the future of video game distribution. They believe that distribution for video games will eventually become digital, but believe that this will take a while for people to become open to the lack of a physical game DVD. Finally, we closed out the day with playing in the expo and a talk from the VP of Product Management at Google. I have to say that I was kind of disappointed by his talk because he just reviewed Google's current products instead of discussing where he saw the future of Google's products. All in all, it was a great day!