Ashish Patel

After about 2 weeks of hardcore product design and 2 months of 12-14 hour days developing the product we’re ready to show off to the world!

There are about 40 American and exactly 2 Canadian Extreme Blue teams going to the Extreme Blue EXPO next week in Armonk, New York - aka IBM Worldwide Headquarters. The EXPO is going to be a blast, except for the fact that I have to catch the shuttle to the Toronto Airport at 5:30 am on Sun Aug 8. That will bite a little. So Sunday we get into New York at about 930 am then its about 1.5 hour to 2 hour drive into Armonk. There we will be having lunch with some IBM Executives and then hit the practice stage. From Noon to Midnight we will be practicing our product pitches in the auditorium. We’re schedule at around 2 pm - thank god its not later than that. I was talking to William Fang (aka the William Hung of IBM) and he said that the practices always go beyond midnight (his went till 3 am the next morning!). So after the practice we’ll be setting up our demo booths and then hitting dinner with the another executive.

The next day (Monday) will be the actual EXPO. The most intense day I’m guessing. We have to do our product pitch to a crowd between 500-800 people, mostly executives. The pitch is even timed to be 4 minutes, one second over they hit the bell and thats your queue to get off the stage. I imagine 2 seconds over and the security comes in! All of Monday will be talking and demo’ing our product to IBM executives and hiring managers. The cool thing is that people from even the hardware, sales, and consulting divisions of IBM will be there - good chance to spread my wings and pull that fluffy MBA bull out Tuesday will be the relaxing time of the trip. We just get to meet the other students and watch slide shows. We’re going to be packing up and heading out to downtown NY for Wednesday. We also get some time in downtown NY to tour and go shopping Tuesday night (after our stuff is shipped from Armonk into the 42-storey IBM building on Maddison Ave, NY) we’ll be setting up our booth then have some dinner with the 5 teams selected for the external press release. We were the only Canadian team selected, along with 4 other American teams for the press release. Its awesome since we just got ourselves an extra day in NY.

On Wednesday we get to do our product pitch to the press which includes top newspapers (such as USA Today and the Wall Street Journal). I imagine lots of technical online news papers will be there. I’m so thrilled to get this opportunity. We’ll get the chance of getting 1-on-1 interviews with them too. So far I’ve had interviews with IT World Canada, Computer World Magazine, Globe and Mail, Edmonton Journal, and the U of A. I would expect the last one (UOFA) after all the tution we pay!

In preparation, last week was kinda horrible. Got sick for 3 days and was outta commission - nonetheless we’re still on track with everything. We got to make an IBM commerical and star in it too Very cool! I got to do the voiceover for our product’s marketing advertising We’re gonna play that at our booth in Armonk.

Overall, I have to say that this has been the best coop workterm ever! I’m also proud to say that the COOP dept can never take credit for getting me this job since I applied online and they never knew about it until I got one of those emails saying “You have not found a job for the 2004 summer term please come talk to us!”

Speaking of COOP i should write my 904 report that was due on friday. Looks like i’ll have to do it later. I’ll be back in Edmonton on Aug 21st for 2 weeks - IBM is forcing me to take 2 weeks off before starting up again, so I’m not complaining Just took the tickets and ran.