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FlashForum 2007 Germany, Cologne

Cologne is really warm for this time of year and makes a perfect setting for an autumn conference. This is the seventh time the conference is put on and the first time it's hosted in Cologne. All sessions, except one is in German so this is definitely a regional conference, but one with respectable size as well.

With around 450 attendees, this is not your average User Group conference. FlashForum is the largest Flash Community site in Germany, with more than 83.000 members and almost 30.000 unique daily visitors. Given such numbers, there's no problem filling a full 2-track conference with local talent.

The conference program reflects the german Flash community well, and as opposed to many other conferences this one offers great input even to skilled coders. Even though we're not exactly experts in German, we really wanted to go and check this conference out. This page contains our reports from Cologne 24-26 september 2007.

Day 0: “Rent an idea” workshop

My first session at the FlashForum conference is a workshop featuring a team of 3 German "actionscript all-stars", namely Joa Ebert, Andre Michelle, Mario Klingemann. Workshops often follow a very structured path and they usually target novice users. This workshop is different. It is one of the few workshops I've attended where I really felt that I learned something.

Day 1: FlashForum Konferenz 2007

The second day of the conference kicked off with a keynote by Martin Buchmann and Michael Mortl from Adobe Germany. We did not expect to see anything new in this keynote since Adobe usually saves up the really good stuff for the american MAX conference and this year is no exception. We did get a brief demo of the Flash Media Player, but that was it.

Day 2: FlashForum Konferenz 2007

I got in a little delayed for Jens Franke's Papervision3D presentation since we finished the party a little late yesterday. There was no sponsored party, but it was arranged that attendees could meet at the bar in the Komed conference center. No sponsored beer, giveaways or bands playing and despite everyone had to pay their own beer, more than 1/4th of the attendees were there.

Just after the conference, two of the sessions were published online:
Aral Balkan (Let's talk about SWX)
Uli Staiger (Vom Bildgedanken zum Bild)
If you missed any of the sessions or want to see them again, FlashForum are compiling a DVD that should be available soon.

Written by Jens C Brynildsen (September 24th 2007)