It’s late, I’ll keep it brief. A great day – over 260 attendees and the presentation delivered by Andy Ports Porter and me was well-attended. No doubt about the two highlights of the day – the first being the glowing customer testimonials delivered by the Salvation Army (Mark Calleran) and Moore Stephens (Michael Bruce).

And then our guest speaker Barry Cryer… I expected him to be great entertainment, but he exceeded expectations. For the entire half an hour he weaved stories and rattled off jokes at a pace and with a delivery that would shame any professional comedian (most of the jokes I’d never heard before and all were hilarious).

He then went the extra mile – enthusiastically shaking the hand of everyone who wanted to meet him, he talked and joked with them all, and posed for photos. When my colleagues and I left for our four hour car journey, Mr Cryer was still delighting the delegates. He could have just done his spot and left with his cash, but that was obviously not the nature of the man. Even before he’d taken to the stage he’d spoken to people attending the event, made a note of their names and said hello to them in his routine. I’m certain he added to his fan-base today, and I’ll include myself. In an earlier post I described him as a comedy legend, and I was absolutely right.

I had a very interesting meeting on Thursday. Along with some colleagues, I went to see Mr Mark Calleran of The Salvation Army (who incidentally is speaking at Lotusphere Comes To You) to talk about a particular Lotus solution. But enough of that work-related stuff, because as the meeting drew near it’s conclusion Mark (who is avid consumer of interesting technology) got onto the subjects of Pokens. He’d mentioned this before, I think during lunch at Lotusphere in Orlando, and I did look up Pokens on the Interweb later that week.

In Mark’s words, in the business world you hand someone a business card – in effect, a token. In the world of Facebook you can ‘poke’ people (personally I never have). So put the two together and you have a Poken. Need more of an explanation? I thought so…

Your Poken is a small character which hides a USB input. Attaching the Poken to you computer allows you to access a web page where you enter your contact details and the social networking sites that you are a member of (like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Bebo, etc). Then you carry your Poken in your pocket and when you meet someone else with a Poken and want to swap details you press their palms together until they glow green (it’s called a high-four, look at the picture and you’ll understand why).

Back at the computer you re-attach your Poken and somehow (I haven’t actually done it yet) it manages the linking up of you and your new friends on the social networks you have in common.

Mark bestowed a wonderful gift upon me… a Poken Piggy. To me it looks like a baby because it’s sucking a dummy and wearing a nappy, but it is actually called a Piggy. You can also buy Fox, Panda, Geisha, Monkey, Bee, Alien and Voodoo, and searching the web also reveals designs for Ninja, Dracula, Elvis (Presley, not Costello), Frankenstein and Munch’s Scream.

If you’re at LCTY and interested in obtaining a Poken, have a word with Mark. If you already have a Poken, my Piggy is ready and waiting to high-four you.

Along with the speaker videos added earlier this week, the web marketing team have posted another treat to the UK Lotusphere Comes To You page. To put this latest addition into context, you need to know that this year’s events have been managed using the Activities module of IBM Lotus Connections.

Managing an event is a good example of an activity – it has an end date and an end goal, and will also require and produce a wide variety of ‘information artifacts’ – presentations, bookmarks, Notes links, documents, textual notes, comments, e-mails, contacts, tasks and even Sametime conversations.

An activity is a perfect place to gather all of these different types of information and share them with a team. No-one need ask where details of the latest registrations are – they’re in the activity. A link to the web page? In the activity. The agenda, a copy of the keynote presentation, templates, logistical information… all in the activity. Considering the amount of work and collaboration, there have been hardly any e-mails on the subject.

To illustrate this I put together a short narrated video and you can access this half-way down the page on the right-hand side (see ‘LCTY in the making’). Unfortunately you have to listen to my voice, but I hope you’ll find it an interesting insight into the delivery of the events using world-class collaboration technology.

If anyone desperately wants a copy of the original movie, please let me know.

As alluded to in an earlier post, a couple of weeks ago we recorded some videos at Lotus Park describing our Lotusphere Comes To You sessions. The videos are now on YouTube and will be posted onto the UK Lotusphere Comes To You page by the end of tomorrow.

Maybe I should have shaved the night before…

I’m also pleased to announce that Andy ‘Ports’ Porter and I finished preparing our content today (well, 90% done, just a few odd bits to do – just the 96 slides to finish off). Thanks also to Matt Newton and Chris Moore for their input. Yes, I was joking about the 96 slides… there’s only 87 really.

After a couple of weeks of hesitation I took the plunge and I’m now the proud and happy owner of a 24-inch Apple iMac. Lotus Notes 8.5, Symphony and Firefox are loaded – there’s still plenty to install and copy over but here’s the first impressions:

1. The setup was incredibly easy. Power, mouse, keyboard… a few questions. The most difficult thing was finding the home WiFi WEP key, and it wasn’t Apple’s fault that I can’t remember 10 characters. Child’s play.
2. 45 seconds from hitting the power button to actually being logged in and able to click on a program icon. In 45 seconds Windows will still be thinking about showing me a login box, and it’ll then be a good 2 – 3 minutes before I’d even bother thinking about loading any application. Okay, this iMac is much better specced than any Windows-based computer I’ve ever used.
3. Install of Notes and Firefox was very simple. It’s different to Windows installs, but considering I’ve never used this operating system it was a breeze.
4. Set-up of user accounts was simpler than simple. And once I was done and cooking dinner, Lolli logged in and customised her workspace (including adding a photo of herself from the built-in webcam).

But let’s be balanced… here’s the bad points:

1. It cost an arm and a leg. Actually, an arm, a leg and some other valuable internal organ which I’ll probably have to sell to medical research.
2. On Windows I do [Shift-Ins] to paste – haven’t worked out a good key combo yet. Although the menu says it’s [Squiggle-V].
3. The USB slots aren’t easy to get to (they’re at the back of the screen). Minor irritation.
4. The wife thinks she’s going to use it.

I never really noticed this until I watched a video of myself presenting at last year’s Lotusphere Comes To You… I do say “errrr” quite a lot when I do presentations, usually to start a sentence or bridge the gap between two passages of speech. It seems to have become habitual. Maybe I don’t do it all the time, I don’t know, I’ve never really thought about it even though I know I do it. A rather detailed analysis of the cause and the remedy suggests that people resort to these linguistic ticks when they’re uncomfortable with the subject matter and when they’re in a situation where they’re more fearful of the judgement.

There are presentations that I do often – right now I could do the Notes / Domino 8.5 overview in my sleep, and without even needing to see the slides. Typically the Lotusphere Comes To You content is something fairly new, in format if not in content, and overall less familiar. The size of the audience doesn’t concern me – I would usually say that speaking to four hundred people is easier than speaking to four. But having said that, with a large and varied audience you have to be mindful of the level you’re pitching at and you can’t solicit feedback as you go about whether they’re understanding what you’re saying.

When LCTY comes round at the end of April, I don’t want to focus on eliminating the errrs and ummms too much – the content is more important. But at the same time I’d like to break what has obviously become a bad habit.

Just a quick one to say that the Lotusphere Comes To You event in Edinburgh (28th May 2009 at the Caledonian Hotel, Princes Street) is now open for registration. Thanks to Davinia who also posted a comment to that effect. See you there.

Very soon, there’ll be some videos added to the LCTY page – watch out for those. But while I was looking at the page I saw a link to some videos from last year – I’m featured – but I had no idea (until now) that these had been recorded and posted. I really must stop saying “errr” and “errrm” so much.

This week we launched a collaboration-focused channel on YouTube.  It shows a series of short vignettes of our clients and Business Partners talking about how IBM Lotus collaboration solutions have enabled them to work smarter together.

Flying the flag for the UK are Andrew Frayling from Cardiff University and John Gallagher from City University. Customers such as Colgate-Palmolive are featured, and there’s also videos from our good friends Rob Novak of Snapps and Carl Tyler of Epilio.

Check out all of the videos here.

Our dynamic and lovely Marketing duo, Sue and Chrissie, have given me permission to go public on the announcement of Lotusphere Comes To You in Edinburgh. The event will be held on Thursday 28th May at the Caledonian Hotel in Edinburgh. The plan is to have the same agenda as the London and Manchester events. More details will be available soon… in the meantime my fellow Scotsmen (well, I am a bit*), mark it in your diary and I’ll see you there.

* Quarter or half, depending on which version of my dad’s ancestry is true. He was born in Glasgow and raised in Ardrossan, but his biological father may have been Swedish. Or Norwegian.