MAXUP is a new Adobe Conference that adopts the BarCamp style of short 15 minute presentations given by the conference attendees with the philosophy that there are no onlookers, just participants (everyone should be involved somehow).

This time around MAXUP is free, and held during (and almost within) the larger, paid for, Adobe MAX conference in Las Vegas, NV.

For the past 4 years I have attended MAX, this year I went to CFUNITED and that took up my conference budget for the year... but when the oportunity arose to present at MAXUP and I could attend for free and split a room with some buddies going to MAX I had to attend.

Day 1 was packed with good stuff. I am not able to attend MAX events like the General Session where Adobe showed off a lot of cool stuff (and entertained with the Blue Man Group), but no worries because I think the folks at Adobe, eBay, and Myspace all gave even more indepth demos of what they are working on at MAXUP.

As I said before, there were tons of topics packed into the day - about 19. The downside to it was that there were no breaks in the schedule. From 11AM - 5PM. Non-stop 15 minute sessions. Even lunch was booked with a Flex Drag Race course... luckily for me I am not into Flex so I was able to step away (I won't be so lucky on Day 2 with the ColdFusion Drag Race).

Most conferences have the problem with a session here and there that you aren't 100% into, or maybe you are 0% into, and you feel like you wasted 60 minutes of your day. But with 15 minute sessions its quite painless.

One major drawback has been the shotty Internet connection as the MAXUP area only had WiFi access for presenters, and they are sharing the same wireless as all the attendees, and at times the bandwidth crawled forcing some presentations to lack real demos, and in once case be cancelled altogether.

It is kinda difficult to be at MAX and then at the same time not be at MAX. But I am still able to "network" - I hooked up with Daryl and Patrick from webappr and talked about their great product SeeFusion and how we can use their consulting services to help with some server clustering issues at work. That right there I think made the trip worth it.

Oh yea... All MAXUP attendees present for the Myspace demo were invited to an invite only party at the Tao. Music provided by DJ Justin Hoffman.

Photos on Flickr. Enjoy.