Didn’t get a chance to do a post yesterday. I was having too much fun in Melbourne and was too “tired” when I got back to my hotel room.

The seminars in Brisbane and Melbourne went extremely well. Both audiences were very lively and offered great feedback. It makes it so much easier to present when the audience feels pitty for you and laughs at your stupid jokes (keep that in mind, future audiences). ;-)

On Thursday Brian Chau (Macromedia SE) arranged a get-together with some local developers and user group members in the lobby of the Melbourne Westin (amazing hotel, by the way – highly recommend). I got to meet some of the guys from the Flash design shop, Nectarine. If you’re not familiar, they were responsible for the pre-keynote intro animations for the MXDU conference in Sydney.

Overall, this was a fantastic tour. Thanks to everyone in Sydney, Brisbane and Melbourne for coming down and listening to us “shout slogans at you” (Simpsons reference – Ranier Wolfcastle) for a few hours in the morning.

I’ll leave you with a pic of Melbourne that I shot from my trusty Treo 600 from the river walk.

Just arrived in Brisbane – my first time here. Wow, what a beautiful place. I’m now convinced that Australia is the greatest place on earth (even though I still don’t understand Cricket).

We’re staying at the Conrad Hotel which is, apparently, the old Treasury building. It’s a beautiful hotel.

(Taken from my Treo 600, which I intend to do a post about later)

The only strange thing I’ve encountered so far is the placement of the handle on the door to my room. It’s only two feet from the ground. I actually have to bend over to slide my electronic keycard in. I’ve never encountered this before. I have a few guesses that consider the age of the building, but I’m still not exactly sure why the handle is so low.

In any case, we’re about to head off to Daniel’s Steakhouse for what’s been described as a “fantastic dinner”. If it’s anywhere near as good as last night’s dinner in Sydney at Wildfire I may never leave this country. :)

G’day!

Well, actually, I’ve been here since Saturday. However, today was the first of our three seminars in Australia.

Brian, Leesa and I met at the Powerhouse Museum this morning around 8:15am and there were already dozens of people there waiting. By the time we started the seminar we had around 300 people filling the auditoreum.

Brian started with a fantastic 30min demo of Contribute 3. Leesa then gave a superb demo of Captivate and Breeze. I then spent 45mins talking about Flash video and a few comments about the Flash roadmap.

Summary of my presentation:
- For a long time, web video experiences have sucked
- Pressing “Play” should mean “Play”, damnit!
- Most media players are huge, confusing downloads
- My dad doesn’t know what “Select your media player and your connection speed” means
- There’s got to be a better way…
- There is a better way…
- www.cnet.com
- www.redbullcopilot.com
- www.vodafone.com/futurevision
- www.microsoft.com/mscorp/innovation/yourpotential/main.html
- Flash Player 6 is on over 95% of Internet-connected desktops worldwide
- Other media players are more than 30% less prevalent
- Three key advantages to Flash video:
1) Widest reach
2) Full creative control
3) Rich, interactive and contextual
- Three ways to deploy Flash video
1) Streaming Server (FlashCom or Flash Video Streaming Service)
2) Progressive download of external FLV
3) Embedded video
- Macromedia Video Kit overview
- How to encode FLV using the FLV Exporter that ships with Flash Pro, or Sorenson Squeeze
- A quick summary of some of the things that we’re working on for future versions of Flash

I’ll try to post my presentation in Breeze so you all can check it out.