Apparently there has been some musings on the value of TechEd, the low number of developers compared to IT pro's attending TechEd over on Frank and David's blog so this weeks opinion post is how to make TechEd better.

To be honest, I am really not sure. The dev community is pretty good in terms of information sharing and thats one of the reasons that many have said that TechEd has a low dev attendance. Its a typical geek answer I reckon. We love to grab information from all over the world, have it in our hands, and marvel at our collective knowledge and assumed wisdom. I think you can;t go past actually meeting people, networking, hands on labs, and having the group, or one-on-one discussions that TechEd facilitates, particularly with people like Scott Guthrie who for me, is a huge drawcard. But enough of that.... how to make it better....

1. Provide live video feeds that people can subscribe to during the event. Obviously this maybe at a reduced rate, but one would assume you would pay for it in some way.

2. Gadgets. At one of the previous TechEd event, everyone was given little laser lights to use. Now the actual event proved a little odd in that everyone kind of 'overused' the little lasers and pointed them at inappropriate spots on the body, but the fun of a little gadget, no matter how frivolous, cannot go understated.

3. Provide some personalised storage at the event. It gets a real pain to cart around bag loads of stuff. Provide me a storage area that I can return to at my lesure during the event where I can dump my stuff whenever I want, and have it secure.

4. At shopping malls they sometimes have those small shops or corner areas where people do free massages. Yeah I want one (or more) of those.... 

5. Special interest or novelty. I'd love to see something like some 3-D computer graphics company at the show, rendering movie effects in real time, maybe showing some special effects, putting geeks in suits to be digitized. Not much business value for anyone, but really interesting and fun nonetheless.

Thats about me done. Friday is a done deal. Have a good weekend all.