Registration Day

After an epic 16-hour flight from Dubai to San Francisco on the Airbus A380, a manic day exploring Silicon Valley and gallons of root beer later, the immedia team finally found themselves outside Moscone Centre this afternoon ready to register for Build 2015.

The advertising banners are multi-storey in height and drape Moscone and the facing Metreon building. Registration opened at 3pm, but we decided to skip the initial rush and arrive at 5:30, by which time the initial rush had died down. You can self sign-in but we opted for the human contact and two minutes later, we each had credentials, a T-Shirt and a copy of the jam packed Build 2015 programme.

After that, it was a quick walk around the corner for a visit to the Microsoft Store where we made a new friend, Billy, who told us legends of Builds past.

Last year Microsoft gave each attendee an Xbox One and a $500 Microsoft Store voucher. If you didn’t want the Xbox One, you got a $1 000 voucher. Needless to say a few thousand devs descended on the Microsoft Store to spend it, which had the staff scrambling to serve everyone.

In the end, they decided that US- and Canada-based devs would have to place their orders online so that those devs who had travelled around the word to get to Build could get a chance to lay their hands on some kit from the Store.

We checked out the Surface 3 and the consensus amongst the team was that we would not mind if Microsoft dished those out this year. They are amazing machines, especially when mated with the gorgeous Type Cover which has a full sized keyboard with keys that mash – essential for giving your code some “body english” as the pinball wizards would say.

We also laid eyes on the Dell XPS 13 with the edge to edge display at the Store and Jimi and Paul spent a good few minutes putting it through its paces (and resting those tired feet).

Billy asks each foreign visitor that pops into the Store which country they hail from. We were the first South Africans he had served and he spent a few minutes obliging us by good naturedly shooting some team pics for our scrapbook outside the entrance.

Then it was off to dinner and anticipating all the things we are going to learn tomorrow as Build kicks off in earnest.

immediaAtBuild was off to an exciting start.

– anice