I found this over on Jeff Atwood's blog today. Jeff was explaining issues around the Stack Exchange on Stack Overflow and spoke about what motivates employees. What is interesting is that money was not the top item on the list. Jeff was influenced by Dan Pink of the RSA org’s TED talk and other works. 

The notion that money motivates employees comes from classical economics study of the Industrial Revolution. Back then people did tasks and built widgets, the more tasks they did, the more widgets they built, the more profit the company made. Today most people work in a knowledge economy. Dan Pink makes the argument that once someone have to use their brain at work, money is less and less of a motivator. I am republishing Dan’s video from YouTube about the “Surprising truth about what motivates us.” Worth watching.

I’ll be speaking at TechEd North America in New Orleans next week and hope to have a front row seat to some Microsoft announcements. Microsoft practices CDD or “Conference Driven Development” where major announcements have been made only at large trade shows like PDC, MIX, and TechEd. Since there is no PDC this year, TechEd is an opportunity for Microsoft to make some BI, developer or IT pro announcements. There are two keynotes by “Microsoft executives” and I’ll be looking (hoping) for Microsoft to make the following announcements, in order of probability:

iPhone Development Kit

This one has been rumored for a while. While I am sure we may see some kind of minor Windows Phone 7 announcement at Teched, is there going to be an iPhone SDK for Silverlight and Visual Studio 2010?

Azure Pricing Changes

Windows Azure seems to have been accepted by the Tech community as something that is well architected and very stable, but the general consensus is that it is a tough sell to customers privacy/cloud wise and cost wise. While I don’t have a major problem with Azure pricing, it could have more competitive pricing plans in place in order to do a land grab on adoption.

Silverlight 5.0 Roadmap

It is too early for a beta, but it would be great to have some info on Silverlight 5.0, what it will support, what it will look like, etc. Microsoft has been so quick to ship new iterations of Silverlight that people expect the same out of Silverlight 5.0. For example, Silverlight 2.0 shipped in October 2008 and Silverlight 3.0 beta appeared in March 2009, only 5 months later. Silverlight 3.0 shipped in July 2009 and Silverlight 4.0 beta 1 shipped in November 2009, only 4 months later. Silverlight 4.0 shipped in April 2010, so June 2010 is a reasonable timeframe for Microsoft to talk about Silverlight 5.0 features and design goals, if not a beta timetable.

Windows 8 Sneak Peek

OK I admit it, I love Win7 and have zero complaints or don’t even have a wish list for Win8. But it is the geek inside of me that wants a sneak peek of Win8. I am pretty sure that this will not happen, but Vista shipped in January 2007 and we had an alpha in October 2008, so not unheard of. I don’t need an alpha, just a sneak peek.

SQL Server 2012 Info

Ok, if it too soon to talk about Silverlight and Windows, then why not SQL Server 2012? TechEd is more of an IT Pro conference and it is co-located with the BI Conference, so maybe, just maybe we will get some info on SQL.next.

Steve Ballmer’s Retirement

Don’t laugh. At TechEd in Boston in 2006 it was announced that Bill Gates was retiring. Steve has been in charge a long time, while I don’t expect a leadership transition at this point in time, you never know.

Free Windows 7 Phone

Hey, Google gave out new Android phones at I/O twice. Microsoft gave us all a tablet at the PDC. Why not a phone?

Looking forward to heading to New Orleans this weekend and doing an all day Agile pre-con on Sunday with Joel Semeniuk. There is still space to sign up, here is the info to look for:

PRC07 | The Agile Methodology Demystified: Implementing Agile in Your Organization

Track: Development Practices

Wednesday afternoon I will also be presenting a breakout session on OData:. Below is the official write-up, however, I will be showing first how to build an OData service (first via Astoria or *.Data Services, and then with other methods such as SQL Azure, etc) and then how to consume the service via several different technologies including ASP.NET, Silverlight, PowerPivot, and more. I’ll show some non-Microsoft technology along the way. I’m thinking no slides, just code for this talk.

DEV303 | Building RESTful Applications with the Open Data Protocol

Track: Developer Tools, Languages & Frameworks

Level: 300 - Advanced

Applications today are expected to expose their data and consume data-centric services via REST. In this session we discuss what REST is and have an overview of Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) Data Services and see how we can REST enable your data using the Open Data Protocol (OData). Then we cover how to leverage existing skills related to Microsoft Visual Studio, LINQ and data access to customize the behavior, control-flow, security model and experience of your data service. We then see how to enable data-binding to traditional ASP.NET controls as well as Microsoft Silverlight and Microsoft PowerPivot for Microsoft Excel 2010. We then turn to consuming SharePoint and other OData-based applications in Microsoft .NET as well as from a non-Microsoft client. This is a very demo intensive session.

I have some other MVP booth duties and some ask the experts hours, but when I am free, I will be at the Telerik booth. We’ll have a large staff at TechEd this year!

See you there.

Telerik has released Service Pack 1 of OpenAccess ORM, available now for download. There are a lot of new features (and of course bug fixes) but the three most important are:

• The new LINQ implementation works fully with Visual Studio 2010
• The Data Services Wizard is now fully integrated with the product, no separate install
• A beta of RIA Services support

I will be doing a blog post on each of these in the coming weeks (expect some delays with TechEd US in the way.) One more thing to mention is that the Data Services Wizard now generates a Silverlight client and will give you the ability to automatically style the application, a feature I previewed last week at the Sydney User Group.

Enjoy!

On Wednesday I presented an hour long talk on an introduction to Scrum, titled “To Scrum or not to Scrum” at the PMI’s Project Management Day in Bucharest, Romania.  It was a great event and I presented Scrum from a project manager’s point of view. About 15% of the audience is not from the IT field and I also tried to present Scrum in a way that is more generic. (You can download the seminar slides here, they are the same slides I have used all year.)

I asked the audience to turn off their cell phones, but asked them to stand up and take my photo while they did it, so I took their photo at the same time. This is about half the room, sorry to the other half. :)

After the event I hung out with some of the PMI guys and walked down to a local restaurant/beer hall Caru Cu Bere in the historic old town (there was even a statue of Dracula there!) On the walk down I saw a Romania Arc de Triumph.

Looking forward to my next visit!

Let’s face it, going to a technical conference is good for your career but it’s not a whole lot of fun. You need an outlet. You need to have fun.

Cheap beer and lousy pizza (with a New Orleans twist)

We are bringing back GeekFest! Join us at Pat O’Brien’s for a night of gumbo, beer and hurricanes. There are limited invitations available, so what are you waiting for? If you are attending the TechEd 2010 conference and you are a developer, you are invited. To register pick up your "duck" ticket (and wristband) in the TechEd Technical Learning Center (TLC) at the Developer Tools & Languages (DEV) information desk.

You must have wristband to get in.

Tuesday, June 8^th from 8pm – 11pm
Pat O’Brien’s New Orleans
624 Bourbon Street New Orleans, LA 70130

This weekend I was traveling to the World Expo in Shanghai and there is a maglev train connecting the airport to the metro system. The Shanghai Maglev Train was the world’s first commercial maglev train and also is the fastest.

Ok, ok, for those of you non-engineering geeks, a maglev train stands for: magnetic levitation. According to wikipedia:

Maglev, or magnetic levitation, is a system of transportation that suspends, guides and propels vehicles, predominantly trains, using magnetic levitation from a very large number of magnets for lift and propulsion. This method has the potential to be faster, quieter and smoother than wheeled mass transit systems. The power needed for levitation is usually not a particularly large percentage of the overall consumption; most of the power used is needed to overcome air drag, as with any other high speed train.

We got on the train at the airport and rode and accelerated to 431 kph and then lasted at that speed for about a minute. In total we covered 30km in 8 minutes. This is the fastest train in the world.

It was pretty cool, no real track! It was super quiet, the only thing we heard (besides all of the tourists like me taking photos) was the air outside zipping by. No sound of engines or wheels on a track.

Kathleen was not impressed. She kept saying “dude stop taking photos of the train.”

I gave her this to read in Wired about high speed rail in the US. They are coming soon.

I had a quick visit to Sydney this week, my first time back to Sydney in something like 18 years. Flying in from Hong Kong was only about 8 hours, and when Adam Cogan picked me up from the airport, he took me directly to Watson’s Bay where we went Stand-up Paddle Boarding. The weather was cold and a storm was brewing, making conditions, well a little crazy. TJ, Adam, and I risked hypothermia and had a blast!

On Wednesday morning, I did my now (in)famous Scrum Seminar. You can download the seminar slides here. I said that the most important things to success in implementing scrum are the engagement of the product owner (both with writing the user stories and in the daily scrum) and that it is ok to change scrum. We spent a lot of time on estimation and Team Velocity as well. We had some laughs at Adam’s expense as well as got off topic with a quote of mine that “Windows is nothing without Excel!”

That evening I spoke at the Sydney .NET User Group. I was doing a “Silverlight Line of Business” talk. It was basically about 2.5 hours and in the first half I did my WCF Walk through with some extra bells and whistles including building an Astoria service and consuming it. At the break I showed the Telerik Data Services Wizard and it was a huge hit, specifically the auto-generation of the SIlverlight Application. (I also showed a feature that will ship very soon that allows you to style your application via the wizard.)

After the break I talked about WCF RIA Services that shipped the other day. Just like before, I ripped off Brad Abrams blog here and showed items 1-5, plus #8 with a PowerPivot client. The PowerPivot client seemed very popular!

It was a great trip and I hope to be back soon.

When the Nexus One shipped, Google was changing the rules in the mobile phone market in the United States. Google made the Nexus One available only via its Web Site, with or without a plan. I bought my Nexus One on the web and use it with my existing AT&T plan when I am in the US and my existing Vodafone plan when I am home in Hong Kong. Never before in the United States could you just buy your phone from a manufacturer or a retail outlet unlocked and then walk into a carrier with your unlocked phone and buy a plan. (This is how it is done here in Hong Kong and most of Europe.) By making a hot new phone that lots of people want, Google was changing the rules and starting a revolution.

The revolution lasted only 5 months. The carriers fought back: Verizon and Sprint have decided not to support the Nexus One. On Friday Google announced that it is closing the Nexus One web store down. The Nexus One will be still be available but now you will have to buy it from a carrier with a plan. I don’t know if the phones will continue to be unlocked, however, even if they are unlocked, this is a step backwards. Google says that people want to play with the phone first and that is why they are closing down the web store. If that was true, Google would sell the phone in Best Buy and Walmart, the real reason is that the carriers balked.

Google is now in an all out war with Apple and the iPhone, so they need the carriers on their side. Google will soon release a competitor to the iPad on Verizon’s network, so my guess closing the web store was a concession to the carriers.

The carriers win this round. Now it is up to Microsoft and its Zune Phone to change the rules.

I had a nice chat with Abhishek Baxi and Manan on Microsoft Talk about: TechEd 2010 India, the Visual Studio 2010 Launch, Telerik, the MVP program, and Karaoke. I also spoke about my love for the IPL, Indian food, Punjabi music, rides in a tuk-tuk, hailstorms, and Bangalore traffic as well.

Listen here.