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Chris Pirillo, of Lockergnome fame, talked about blogging, tagging and his new mega search engine, gada.be (http://gada.be). The evening closed with the 'Dip Contest with a Twist', which provided food, trivia, prizes and more.
The first full day started off with a breakfast sponsored by AMD, who talked about the latest trends in microprocessors. After breakfast, attendees could choose from five different workshops a.k.a. round tables in two time slots. The workshops covered a wide range of topics for user group management and training. Lunch was an opportunity for attendees to meet with their APCUG Regional Advisor and other attendees from their region.
During lunch, the newsletter and web site awards were announced and given out.
After lunch, the vendor forum was held, and attendees had the opportunity to discuss vendor user group involvement with the representatives from several vendors.
In a separate session, CompUSA gave a presentation on their involvement with and support of user groups. The APCUG Annual Meeting was held as well.
Roger Tesch, Peggy Ireland & Ken Bundy at Vendor Fair The day wrapped up with the Vendor Faire, sponsored by CompUSA, where attendees had the opportunity to meet with all of the vendor sponsors.
Wednesday was the next day. Adobe sponsored the morning breakfast, where they gave an overview of their Photoshop Elements and Premiere Elements software programs. After breakfast, Allen Wyatt gave a talk on being the reluctant office guru. Before and after lunch, more workshops were held. The C-Net sponsored lunch featured reporter Brian Cooley talking about the top ten products being released at CES.
The day ended with dinner sponsored by Linspire, who gave a presentation on their full featured Linux based desktop operating system.
| Click photo to enlarge | |
|---|---|
 Aurelia Negrerie from Linspire |
 Linspire CEO Kevin Carmony |
The final day of the conference started with Corel sponsoring breakfast. At the breakfast, they gave a preview of their newest CorelDraw and WordPerfect software programs.
After breakfast, Cheryl Webster gave a talk on using Bluetooth enabled hardware. The Jerry Awards were presented in a separate session. The day ended with lunch sponsored by Microsoft. At the lunch, Microsoft showed a preview of the Vista operating system and discussed their user group program.
The conference was the result of long hours by many people. First and foremost were our meeting planners, Caryl Hall and Peggy Ireland, who kept track of a never ending list of requests and arrangements with the Stardust Hotel. Then there was Ash Nallawalla, who organized the workshops with the assistance of Ira Wilsker, Roger Tesch, Cheryl Webster and Sherry Zorzi.
The Alliances Committee, headed by Peggy Ireland, recruited all of our fine sponsors. Bob Coppedge was our on-site Volunteer Coordinator and the Conference Answer Man. If you had a question, Bob was your man. Julie Coppedge organized this year's spouse program. Caryl Hall organized and edited the Proceedings Book. Ken Bundy and Rich Schinnell handled the web site.
If you go to: http://www.apcug .net/events/conference06/conf06files.htm you can see the presentation files from the various workshops, along with the award winners from the contests, and the Conference Proceeding book.
Planning is under way for the 2007 Annual Conference, which will be held at the
Riviera Hotel during the first weekend in January. We hope to see you there!