Day 2 of SolidWorks World 2008 is coming to a close.  The general session featured presentations by Dr. Don Norman and Dr. Bob Ballard.  As an admitted Discovery channel geek, I particularly enjoyed Dr. Ballard’s presentation.  Dr. Ballard spoke of how advancements in technology have changed deep sea exploration.  Gone are the days where all of the exploration monitoring equipment has to be at the dive site.  While the support ship and robot divers remain at the site, the scientific data collected by the remote subs is analyzed real-time in a lab on shore.

At the end of the general session, SolidWorks announced a new website featuring SolidWorks Videos for your iPod.  In an effort to get the site going, SolidWorks announced that EVERY ATTENDEE at this year’s conference will receive a FREE 4GB iPod Nano!  This is by far one of the coolest giveaways I have seen at ANY conference.  All of the iPod Nanos come preloaded with SolidWorks photos and videos.  Once the session ended, people were literally sprinting from the door towards the registration area where the units were being handed out.  I got my iPod a little later on in the day.  I am VERY impressed with this device.  I can see now why Apple has sold so many of them.  The video display is absolutely amazing!

Next up for me was the Stump the Chump session.  If you haven’t heard about this session yet, a panel of SolidWorks power users were placed in front of the crowd (firing squad) to answer questions related to SolidWorks products.  The panel consisted of Jeff Mirisola, Matt Lombard, Ben Eadie, Josh Mings, Lenny Kikstra, Lou Gallo, and yours truly!  Overall, I think the session was a success.  It did get rather hectic at times where we were working to answer questions while trying to take new ones.  The crowd did a great job in coming up with questions.  We learned quite a bit and will certainly be applying it to another session next year.  Two 3DConnexion products were given away along with some igetit training passes.  Click here to see Mike Puckett’s post on this session which includes some pictures.  Speaking of Mike, he interviewed Autodesk Technical Evangelist Lynn Allen today.  Lynn was here with a few other Autodesk employees checking out SolidWorks World.

In the afternoon all of the SolidWorks User Group Leaders got together for a meeting.  This is always a great session to share ideas amongst the many group leaders from around the globe.

Tonight there was a block party in the historic Gaslamp District which is just a few blocks away from the Convention Center.  There was food and beverages (of all kind) EVERYWHERE.  A good time was certainly had by all!  (We still have an APB out on Matt Lombard.)

Tomorrow marks the final day of the conference.  The morning general session will feature a sneak peek of SolidWorks 2009.  It’s like Christmas all over again!

Stay tuned…..more to come!

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