Video Interviews on Geneva, on the book and belated “sneak peek” on PDC identity sessions

In the last few months I ended up on the wrong side of a camera a few number of times, but I was far too busy with the other deliverables to track when and where the results were going to be published. Now the videos are probably a bit out of context, but for completeness I’ll list them anyway. In reverse chronological order:

• The last day of TechEd EMEA I manned the Geneva booth. At mid-morning I was approached by a couple of nice students: after few minutest of small talk they extracted a camera, mentioned that they were on a mission for Channel8, and shot a 5 mins interview on Geneva, LiveID, OpenID & Identity@Microsoft in general in the noisy booth floor. Months later one of my nephews comes to me during lunch and yells “Uncle, you’re on the internet… again!” and shows me the video of this interview, which thanks to the jetlag I promptly forgot. It is not very discoverable, he found it just because he searched for my name: in any case, the video is here. Note to self: stop saying “basically”!
• Few weeks before PDC the guys at Addison Wesley came to campus for shooting some episodes of their OnMicrosoft series, and they asked to Caleb and me if we were available for chatting about our book “Understanding Windows CardSpace”. Our schedule pre-PDC was absolutely crazy, but we still managed to do the interview by picking a slot before the break of dawn: in fact I was literally falling asleep, but the bright lights and the nice back & forth with Caleb kept me going. As usual we don’t really speak much about the book, but we rather take the occasion for analyzing the importance of Geneva Framework & Server (which we couldn’t name at the time) for the user centric identity ecosystem. Page here, direct link to the video here
• In the same session, we were asked to discuss the identity sessions at PDC. That as extremely awkward, because we were planning a number of big announcements and we really could not spill the beans: at the same time the session names explicitly mentioned the new names of the products (Geneva, .NET Services…) and it would have been just impossible to comment on those names (beyond silly jokes) without revealing too much. And yet, this PDC had an unprecedented coverage for identity and we wanted to make sure that this fact would come across to the audience. The solution we devised was just to show what anybody could have done for getting more info: browsing to the PDC site, search for identity related sessions and comment on speakers. It is a bit awkward to watch it now, also remember that the video was being shot awfully early in the morning, but as always it has been fun. Page here, direct link to the video here