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Nick Hodge is a Professional Geek for Microsoft Australia. More info lives underneath the About Box...

-33.831416, 151.222526

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1 Epping Road

North Ryde, NSW 2113

Australia

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FY07 in the Heart of Finance: AMP">End of FY07 in the Heart of Finance: AMP

By Nick Hodge | June 29, 2007

Every year, AMP has a small IT expo where their vendors get to dis­play the products and ser­vices they want to sell.

Microsoft, due to patern­ity leaves, vari­ous end-of-year / begin­ning of year shenanigans, it’s down to me. Single-handedly rep­res­ent­ing a multi-bazillion dol­lar com­pany to another multi-bazillion dol­lar company.

Today, I do my nor­mal day’s work with a crowd; blog­ging, social. Live blogging.

8:10am arrive. Sydney CBD is quiet, con­sid­er­ing this is Australia’s fin­an­cial hub and it is the last day of the 2006/7 fin­an­cial year. Bil­lions of dol­lars move through bank accounts today. Quick park next door to the event and I am away.

8:30am all the stuff is wired together. Many other vendors here show­ing off their fin­an­cial wares. As per Frank Arrigo’s post yes­ter­day on the AMP Thought Lead­er­ship Fest­ival, Microsoft Aus­tralia DPE is going “online” in a Web 2.0 fashion.

Off to grab coffee.

How I am wire­less: The expo has not sup­plied wire­less, so its a mat­ter of using Bluetooth to con­nect from Vista to my Treo 750. Dial­ling out via Tel­stra NextG (although I don’t think I have the super fast Next G speed on the Treo until Win­dows Mobile 6.0) Dear Rob in Microsoft Aus­tralia who man­ages our mobile phone bills. Mine might be lar­ger than normal.

Pic­ture: “Bridging the Digital Gen­er­a­tion Gap” with my spe­cial semi­otic mes­sage OfficeSpace t-shirt.

9:10am first ques­tion of the day. What is Web 2.0? I love this job.

9:25am Win­dows Live Writer rocks. How did I blog before this? The stand next to me is “web 2.0 for dum­mies”.  Where do I down­load that product?

9:33am a quick wander around the other stands. Someone has “Iron­Ruby” short­cut on their Win­dows desktop on a Portals stand. My future friend.

10:08am ques­tion: how do I start blog­ging.  1. Get a spaces.live.com account 2. Win­dows Live Writer

10:18am demon­strate a chat­bot. dis­cus­sion of Second Life with few logged in users vs. chat/IM/mobile.

10:36am Con­ver­sa­tion with mar­keter “reach out when people have a sig­ni­fic­ant change in their life”, this will not be in the MSM. Mobile, chat.

10:45am Fin­an­cial advice, online. Doing it inde­pend­ently, inter­act with a human, fin­an­cial info is not clear. Clearly com­pare things. Pro­fes­sional advice $200-$500. Trust.

11:08am Auto­play virus. Answer­ing a ques­tion from David

11:15am com­plied with the audit rules and stamped the card for the Vet­ting (read: Audit) department.

11:20am IBM show­ing some graph­ical busi­ness pro­cess draw­ing thing, and Second­Life where there are presently about 10 Aus­trali­ans logged in. Am resort­ing to Pop­fly with pretty pic­tures to get more questions.

11:25am people want free stuff. I am send­ing them to codeplex

11:50am selling lots of http://linkedin.com

12:00pm couple of HR people ask­ing about employ­ing digital natives

12:35pm Assist­ing par­ents with under­stand­ing MSN Live Mes­sen­ger, talk­ing about busi­ness con­tinu­ity with technology

12:45pm demys­ti­fy­ing Web 2.0. Attempt­ing to sep­ar­ate mar­ket­ing lingo from real­ity. Watch­ing IBM guys go white across the hall

12:50pm had a box sent from North Ryde to here, I hope it arrives and doesn’t get stolen by the secur­ity guards

1:00pm the “Bridging the Digital Gen­er­a­tion Divide” get­ting the mums in with teen­agers. Assist­ing with guid­ance to online safety and the power of social com­munity. Extend­ing the meme of ensur­ing you know where you kids are going online, and have tried these out yourself.

1:15pm box arrived, cus­tomer happy. phew.

1:20pm talk­ing about age gap of fin­an­cial plan­ners: younger plan­ners expect deeper inter­ac­tions with AMP, more instant, less paperwork.

1:30pm spend­ing DPE mobile phone budget on NextG Wire­less. This is about the size of Will Hughes’ salary for FY08

1:45pm Excel Pivot Tables!

2:00pm Unin­stalling Inter­net Explorer 6.0 from Win­dows XP question

2:05pm selling lots of http://twitter.com/NickHodge .  Flick­r­Vi­sion / Twit­ter­Vi­sion on big screen gets the oohs and ahhs. Altho’ its run­ning from a mere Mac

2:30pm get­ting a LOLZ from http://lolbots.com/

2:45pm Pop­fly, Sil­ver­light demo. Show­ing how to make your own block

3:00pm It could be over, not sure as there are still lots of people around

3:10pm Been sur­pris­ing people all day not by selling stuff dir­ectly, but ask­ing the ques­tion “what is AMP doing for the sub-25 year olds”. Mak­ing the age dis­tinc­tion (or being ageist) helps describe the digital nat­ives, no mat­ter the age. Pro­vok­ing thought is crit­ical for all us online cus­tom­ers of AMP. I’d prefer to deal with people via email. Believe it or not, its way more personal.

Topics: amp, ampitexpo07, microsoft, technology | 6 Comments »