Excitement is building here at Ocarina as tomorrow is the big kickoff for Tech Field Day, and we’re a presenting sponsor of the event. As we speak, cables are being laid, demos are being run through, and a certain amount of nervous excitement is in the air.
In just two short days, a horde of smart, savvy bloggers will descend on the Ocarina offices on Airport Parkway in San Jose, bearing thumb drives packed with their toughest data sets–part of a challenge we laid down in order to show them how well we can compress and dedupe that data.
Sponsored by online IT pub Gestalt IT, the next two days are sure to be worth watching even if you’re not directly involved. Tech Field Day seems to me to represent a new kind of experimentation with social media in both its on- and offline form. The event brings together influential bloggers and others from around the world for two days of hands-on demos at storage and virtualization companies around Silicon Valley. As I mentioned on the VMWare Communities Roundtable today, this group of presenting sponsors represent Silicon Valley at its innovative best. And the fact that they were quickly able to recognize the value of such an event is a further testament to their forward thinking.
The chatter on blogs and Twitter in the weeks leading up to this event has been intense, which makes it even more exciting to be a part of. So, what the heck is this Tech Field Day that everyone’s talking about? It’s a fairly simple concept. Gather a group of the leading independent bloggers in IT, storage, virtualization and related fields and take them to companies around Silicon Valley for a deep dive on some cutting edge technology they may not yet know a whole lot about. No slick marketing presentations, no PR. Just plain, straightforward geeking out. Gestalt IT’s founder/publisher Stephen Foskett has said he plans future events as well, and they will encompass other areas of high tech.
Social media made this thing possible, and it’s making it easy to follow as well. Here are some of the ways to get in on the fun:
Twitter: Hashtag #TechFieldDay
Or, The Official Tech Field Day Scoreboard, which aggregates all of the posts *and* tweets about the event in real time.
See you there!
