Next stop: Fabulous Las Vegas for MIX09

10 a.m.-ish Texas time, 4 coffees later, Betsynote:  I had intended to finish this post after breakfast, but it looks like Community Server had other plans while I was eating. :) 

Saturday and Sunday of SxSW were quite full for me – I caught snippets of two sessions before booth duty in the morning, where I got to talk to a lot of interesting folks about Live Search – video search, cashback, the deep links in the home page of live.com and our amazing product reviews aggregation.  We gave away over 1,000 slices of pizza to future customers and homless folk alike in the name of Live Search this weekend. The Windows Mobile TechSet Blogger Lounge continued to have successful tweetups with standing room only.

Sunday I was lucky enough to see Clay Shirky at his book signing, attend the Gnomedex/Blogher/Seesmic party (one of the few where you could actually hear the folks you were talking with), and stand outside the Blogger party (too hot and successful for its own good) and chat with folks I hadn’t seen in a long time.

Stefan and Aya are stll going to be workin’ it at the booth last few days of SxSW, and you can follow their antics (and sometimes they indeed are antics) at http://www.twitter.com/live_search. Now, on to the Vegas portion of our program….

Image of Las Vegas welcome sign 

Later this week, Live Search will be rockin’ it Vegas style at MIX09, Microsoft’s annual conference for web designers and developers. The show kicks off at the Venetian (check out the cool aerial view below courtesy of Virtual Earth) on Wednesday, March 18th with a keynote from Microsoft’s own developer guru Scott Guthrie along with Bill Buxton, esteemed author and principle researcher at Microsoft Research.

For those attending the show, be sure to drop in on the Search sessions (info at VisitMIX.com) to hear about the latest and greatest updates to the Live Search API (Thursday at 1 p.m. in Delfino 4001) and Virtual Earth (Friday 12:30 p.m. in Lando 4201). If you can’t make the trip to Vegas, don’t worry. We’ll keep you posted with updates here, and I’ll also be twittering. Follow me at twitter.com/baoki.

Click to see bird's-eye view of Las Vegas Venetian Resort Hotel Casino on Live Search Maps

Hope I get to see some of you at MIXtify at TAO on Wednesday night!

Betsy Aoki, Program Manager, Live Search