Gods own developers usergroup successfully organised the first ever Adobe launch event in Kerala. It was the launch of Flex 4, Flash Builder, Cold Fusion Builder and Flash Catalyst. The event took place at Woods Manor Hotel Conference Hall on April 10 which included sessions for the full day with food and snacks.
Behind the scenes.
I had attended the IGDS event at Bengaluru for which Adobe was a sponsor. For the event i got a chance to spent some time with the Adobe team at their booth and met Harish Sivaramakrishnan, Hemant, Ramesh and others. Harish was really interested in conducting an event in Kerala and told me to go ahead with organising a launch event. It was Harish who was the mentor and support all along.
Back home I communicated with some of our active member and co manager Jerry Don and got great response from them. Musavir, Thazleem, Ajith Manmadhan and Jerry made themselves available for multiples meetings for planning and execution. Each one of them were busy with their work and yet were available online for collaborating live. A big thanks to google docs, gtalk, google groups and gmail without which this would have stayed a dream.
We were not sure if to conduct the event for students at an educational institution premises or for techies at a hotel conference hall. Ultimately we decided to try and push the event for techies. This was really a tough job as we needed to confirm atleast 50 attendees and we had only 10 days to confirm that. Also we needed a sponsor other than Adobe and get a good conference hall booked. Toobler helped a lot with the registration page designs and we used wordpress plugins by Binny VA for event registration. I am more than happy to say that we got 80 plus registrations within a short time. We had to restrict to 50 people as we had booked a conference hall which cost Rs 300 per person as food was planned.
Musavir for sponsorship from Bridge India at the nick of time and everything afterwards became so easy. Hugo Messer, Bridge CEO was really helpful and supportive of the venture. Bridge were also trying to promote their open coffee event which again was an event aiming for social gathering of techies.
We received Tshirts and some gift checks from Adobe before the event. I also ordered half yearly Adobe swag for the user group and we successfully distributed those on the event. Bridge also provided their sponsorship before the event and we were all set. We had a hard time getting the right venue as many of the available Hotels had their conference halls booked as it was year end time. Toobler helped out here too as they had their client visiting and we bought a combo package from Woods manor at a good price.
Musavir was the one incharge of getting the flex banners printed and he did so exceptionally well which again was extremely economical too. Also for the event we had Thazleem buy the gifts for the speakers and others helped pack those. We also had help fro one of our active members with taking photos of the event as well.
Harish himself came as the special guest from Adobe, even when he was extremely busy with all the events he had to attend. He took total control of the event and his presence itself gave a new level to the whole event. We hope he will be continuing his support for KADUG and we hope to make more events. Vipin Chandran, Flash/Flex expert from Impelsys came down to take special session. He told the audience how ActionScript 3 is an extremely powerful tool and how it can be used for just about anything. We cant thank him or Harish enough for what it meant for our UG.
Other sessions were handled by Me and Thazleem which actually covered Photoshop CS5, Flash CS5 sneakpeaks and ColdFusion Builder overview. Diana Kulke from Bridge enlightened the crowd on Open coffee event which many of the attendees attended a few days after wards.
All together it was a wonderful team effort culminating an very successful event with more than 55 people attending. Every one were happy even when they came from different walks of life and were professionally working in different techs. All had something to take home from the event and we hope we will continue this legacy.
Official report will follow in another posts
I also came across one of my seniors from college days representing TCS as they were one of the sponsors for the event.
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