Raising Awareness for Vista Media Center Down Under
To some extent - Windows Media Center (all flavours) has been the forgotten child down here (AU/NZ) over the past few years - and commercial interest has been somewhat limited to OEM’s and System Builders – with not a lot of attention paid to the software/platform development opportunities.
However – partially thanks to the awesome new dev models (namely MCPL and WPF) being offered up with Vista Media Center – and it’s inclusion in Vista Home Premium/Ultimate – it’s starting to raise a quite few more eyebrows.
What’s been the most exciting though – has been the awareness being raised by a number of the dedicated Microsoft DPE’s in Australia and New Zealand over past few months – who have been showing off it’s capabilities and evangelizing the opportunities to developers and IT decision makers in the various Vista + VS2005 related roadshows.
Some of these shows/people include :
Charles Sterling (Brisbane Based DPE) – has been regularly promoting Media Center related development at various seminars, roadshows and User Groups accross Queensland (and interstate). If you live in Brisbane – you can catch Charles (Chuck) at an upcoming event – New Opportunities on the Windows Vista development Platform (hosted by New Horizons) – on 17th April.
Nigel Parker (Auckland/NZ DPE) – who has also been actively promoting Media Center (and WPF) for the past few months.
Andew Coates (Sydney based DPE) – incorporated Media Center examples into his ISV Innovation Days presentation in Melbourne (and other places). I was lucky enough to catch up with Andrew that day for coffee (who’s a great bloke) – and it’s indeed refreshing to see this much enthusiasm.
Shane Morris (Melbourne based DPE – specializing in UX) – has also been showing off Media Center in the "Age of User Experience" roadshow. This roadshow started in Canberra on 28th February and is hitting Melbourne mid April.
I should probably also mention that these guys have been demonstrating+plugging my own "Big Screen" products as part of these abovementioned presentations – so I’m even more (shamelessly) happy about this – and hope it brings in lots of new commercial opportunities both for my company and for other Media Center developers in Australia (and I’m definitely not the only one)..
So a big thanks from me (and on behalf of the Aussie/Kiwi MCE community) to the DPE’s mentioned above!
Also – with a bit of hope – some of this attention will trickle on to the various content aggregators in Australia – and lead to some decent new Australian + NZ Vista Online Spotlight content.
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