Multi-mania 2008 is a free multimedia event hosted in the expo halls in Kortrijk, Belgium on the 23rd of May.

The event took of with Adobe’s opening keynote. After showing some new updates for the new flash 10 player , Scene7 (high resolution rendering for web) and Pacifica (voip with flash). They also showed a sneak preview of Flash CS4.

Slightly overlapping with David Ottina’s talk on meta-data was a new feature for Adobe premiere pro, where a new “speech to text” feature added some sort of automated meta-data to the clips. One way for the computer to understand what the clip is about. Otinna mentioned the esp-game on the gwap site.

An effort to give meaningfull meta-data to images.

Clo Willaerts talked about the baby-platform: zappybaby.be and the reasons for changing the format from a forum to a social network. That the switch wasn’t an allround success was seen in the drop in visitors (from 24000 to 10000), but according to Willaerts the advertising was more targeted, the content more relevant and findable, and the overall revenue went up.

There were some more practical sessions aswell. One about the Appearance-palet in Illustrator. A small niche in the Illustrator software, and one on standards solutions by Stephanie Sullivan. A css-tutorial on using css in Dreamweaver. After watching it I was more convinced that writing css is so much better and faster then filling in all those fields in Dreamweaver. Nevertheless the techniques in using the em-units to define backgrounds that grow when the font-size in the browser is adjusted were interesting. She has a resource page online with everything explained.

All in all an interesting day, well organised and with good speakers.

Tags: event-design