San Francisco Geek Dinner Recap

Thanks to Sean Alexander for hosting an enjoyable geek dinner at Henry Hunan’s earlier this evening. I enjoyed meeting many new people from Microsoft and others that shared a passion for digital media.

Then turn out was pretty impressive. We had 24 in attendance including: Tim Cutting (President of Niveus Media), Alexander Grundner (Editor of eHomeupgrade), Jeff Hadfield, Steve Rosewarne of Orb Networks, Howard Schilling of xhifi, Adam Stone and Matt Rubenstein of D-Tools, Joey Carcopo of Niveus Media, Brant Smith with Broadline Media, Richard Calosso, Ethan Batraski of Broadline Media and a whole bunch of Microsoft people (Keith Laepple, Shannon Vosseller, Omar Shahine, Aditya Bansod, Aaron DeYonker, Rich Hagemeyer, Andrew Adanyk, Rodger Benson, and of course Sean Alexander). I’m sorry to anyone who I neglected to put on this list or for misspelling your name if I did.

San Francisco Geek Dinner at Henry’s Hunan

The food at Henry’s as always was great but I enjoyed the conversation even more. It was great hearing from so many people in so many different areas inside of Microsoft that deal with digital media. Sean is very fired up about his new job with Longhorn as he should be. I’m personally really looking forward to what we end up finding in Longhorn for digital media. But it was also great hearing from folks in OEM development, marketing, third party apps, and even hotmail, just to name a few.

All in all I think people had a great time. Sean brought some schwag and Tim Cutting brought one of those really slick high end Niveus Denali units. As far as I know the Denali is the only OEM built Media Center PC that presently supports a HDTV tuner card (OTA only of course).

The conversations that immediately come to mind from this evening include everything from how to protect film makers in the digital media world (yes musicians can always tour and make money if they can’t from their recordings, but a filmaker can’t), the broadcast flag, HDTV, the generally poor UI interface and various problems with the current cable DVR offerings, the superior Microsoft Foundation television interface, the new MSN remote guide, the challenge of marketing to a new blog universe, video on demand, and oh did I mention HDTV?

All in all a very enjoyable dinner. Thanks to all who attended.