Revolution at the U3 booth IFA 2006

First of all I need to say thank you. Thank you RunRev, that you gave me the opportunity to go to Berlin. Beautiful city. Great event! This was my first chance to meet so many interesting people in such cool surroundings. For those of you who don't know, the IFA is Germany's biggest show for consumer electronics (they claim to be the biggest world wide). There are hundreds of thousands of people rushing through the halls, in search of the newest technology. The U3 booth was nicely positioned, close to the big names. We had lots of people dropping by and I gave many demos of Rev as a development tool. It was funny to see some of the C++ and PHP coders faces while demonstrating chunk expressions or building applications for different operating systems. They couldn't believe how easy it was, after their experience of spending days in C++ just coding a button. But what impressed me most were the faces of people that hadn't heard of U3 before.

U3 is a technology that lets you carry applications on a USB sticks without leaving traces on the hosting machine. As soon as you plug in the stick a small icon appears in the task bar. If you click on that icon you see a thing called Launchpad come up, similar to the Windows Start menu, where you can see all the applications that are installed. You can also install applications right from the launchpad. Those applications are directly downloaded to the Flash drive and installed there. Right now applications like Firefox, Thunderbird and Open Office are ported to that platform. So what, you might ask. It is not too hard to deploy portable applications on any USB stick if you code well. However, I have seen people react on the U3 sticks at the IFA. They completely went bananas!

The typical reaction was:

Some Dude: "That is a USB stick. What is so exciting about those?"
Me: "Let me show you."
S.D. "Wow. That's cool. I can carry my apps with me? With all related data?"
Me: "Yes, if the program you want to use is available as a U3 executable."
S.D. "They are expensive, aren't they?"
Me: "No, actually they do not cost much more than a regular stick"
S.D. "Really? Is app. XYZ available?"
Me: "Let's check online. Not yet."
S.D. "When will it be? I really want this!"

This was the reaction of 100% of persons I talked to. There was no one who wasn't deeply impressed with the technology. But it is not only consumers that are hungry for U3 capable applications. It is also the hardware vendors. I have talked to representatives of well known vendors. They are all hungry for applications. So if you are searching for a new opportunity to market your Revolution software, stop by at http://www.u3.com and register as a developer. I think it is really worth it. I am coding like mad with Revolution at the moment to get some of my apps U3 compliant. I really do not want to miss the opportunity to get much exposure in the early days of the platform, and Revolution makes it so easy.

See you next time,

Malte