Microsoft conference (and marketing blunder) called MIX06 is giving away 3 free trips to what, in essence, is the Professional Developers Conference (PDC) with a different name. The contest is called Remix MIX and is essentially CSS Zen Garden-like contest, where your objective is to use pure CSS to skin a designated page. The conference itself is looking like a must attend event for anyone that is interested in future Web and Windows UI technologies (IE7, AJAX (aka Atlas), WPF (aka Avalon)). In a previous post, a couple people mentioned that MIX is basically a PDC, without the name, and may alternate years with the PDC. Info like this should be considered important, and the marketing of MIX, seems to have missed this aspect. Actually, overall, the marketing of MIX seemed to be all hype-oriented, babbling about RSS and blogs and Web 2.0 (at least that was my take on it). But, it looks like they finally got the real message out, it is all about the User Experience, and the ReMix contest is a great way to promote this new found message.
Since I had already planned on going to TechEd in Boston this year, I wasn’t planning on attending MIX. But, Microsoft announced that the next MVP Summit will wait until 2007, so I’m down one conference for this year. So, I may have sometime to go to this thing. But, it would be even better to go for free. So, I’m going to try my hand at a little design work, and submit an entry (or 2).
Update
I talked to Erik Porter, and he cleared things up a bit. MIX is only a PDC-like event in the sense that it is focused on future technology. Instead of a massive event like the PDC, MIX is supposed to be a low key almost unplugged-like conference, with lots of access to the presenters. Cool! Thanks for the update.