David Falck is one of our newest software developers at Autodesk Labs. He has worked on technologies like the Project Draw. David filed this report.
I attended AU 2007 earlier in the month. This was my first AU and subsequently, I asked a lot of colleagues and customers the same question. “So, how does this compare with past AU’s?”
The answers were similar and all used adjectives like “bigger” and “better” and “amazing.” Some of the folks I spoke with at the Project Draw and Project Freewheel booth had been to 8, 12, even 15 AU’s…talk about amazing! One gentleman was upset that he had missed one and only one AU due to illness and is still bitter about his tarnished record.
Getting feedback and encouragement for Labs’ projects from these folks was especially gratifying. Even after all these years as loyal Autodesk customers, they were visibly excited to talk about the future directions of our products and services. This was the most striking aspect of attending AU for me, a new guy – the context and history of Autodesk came to life through conversations at the booths.
I’ll have to admit, being a new Autodesk employee, it made me quite proud to play a very small part – assembling, manning, and disassembling booths, demoing applications in the Autodesk Labs area for the press, playing with (and packing up) the Boom Chameleon, as well as answering Project Draw and Project Freewheel questions.
I wasn’t the only one with questions. The most common query about Project Draw was: “So what do I have to download?” At first, I thought I hadn’t mentioned the “zero-client, no-download, no-plug-in" nature of Project Draw. After the first few times my colleagues and I got this question, we started to take it as a compliment. The fact that Project Draw made people believe that what we’re doing in the browser “just couldn’t be possible without a download” is a great thing. I hope to be asked that question a lot more in the future as we continue to add functionality and features.
Thanks David. Appreciating the history and pageantry of Autodesk University and what it means to customers is alive in the lab.