Wireless Field Day 2: Thoughts from the Airport

I'm sitting at the Denver Airport waiting for my connecting flight back home from Wireless Field Day 2 and the Wi-Fi Mobility Symposium held in San Jose. What can I say? This was probably the coolest AND most mind-blowing technical event I've ever attended!

Over the next few weeks, or months, I'll be creating detailed write-ups of my thoughts, impressions, and hopes coming out of this event (which I believe I heard Tom Hollingsworth describe as an information fire hose to the brain). In the meantime, I thought I'd give a few thoughts on the overall themes I noticed during the entire 3 days. 

1. User Experience - Every single vendor stressed the importance of end-user experience. I was very happy to hear this since I have always been 'all about the UX'. This will be especially important as organizations attempt to deal with BYOD.
2. User Interface Simplicity - As administrative interfaces advance from 1.0 to 2.0, and beyond, the tendency is for them to become cluttered and disorganized. Several vendors made a point of demonstrating how they were taking steps to clean up their interfaces and make their solutions more intuitive for administrators. As someone who has the word 'simply' in my website and twitter name, I think this is very important.
3. Video - The crew at Prime Image Media rock! While it has nothing to do with Wi-Fi, they definitely deserve a shout out. Take a look at a few of the videos produced by these guys.

I'm going to save all of the technical details for my future posts but I will say that there are some amazing new tools and features in the works. I really can't wait to get back to my lab to start geeking out with demo gear that was provided (with no expectation of positive reviews) by the vendors. 

To the vendors: Thanks for opening your doors to us and letting us engage with your technical staff, and founders, directly. I came away with an increased respect and understanding of what makes each of your solutions unique.

To the other delegates: It was amazing to meet all of you. Getting to hang with all of you for a few days was amazing and it showed me just how much more I still need to learn about Wi-Fi. I am humbled by your wi-geekosity! (This includes @hipsterap)

To the Gestalt IT crew: Thank you Stephen Foskett and Matt Simmons for making this amazing event happen. I can't say enough positive things about how professionally and smoothly this event went off. Thank you so much for the opportunity to participate!

Daniel