Well its Tuesday already and it seems like the conference has flown past. Today was full of surprises, go figure. SolidWorks continued to amaze all of the event attendees.

This morning once again started with the general session which was held from 8:30 AM to 10:00 AM. Today the event started with Bertrand Sicot (E.V.P. of Worldwide Sales) giving the opening comments of the session. Quite soon after the opening remarks Bertrand was joined on stage by Tom Salomone from Hewlett Packard. After Tom made a few remarks and exited the stage Jeremy Luchini was summoned to the stage by Bertrand. Jeremy, who is the Certification Program Manager for SolidWorks, gave a brief breakdown of what was happening this year with certifications. 1 out of 5 attendees of this years SolidWorks World is a CSWP, needless to say that is amazing. Some may ask why should you get certified, well that is easy, it is a fantastic way to prove yourself to potential employers. Jeremy told a story of a guy that he met at the CSWP event that was in the running for a job against 5,000 other potential employees. Well this guy took it upon himself to take the CSWP exam and in his portfolio he included designs that he had completed before he got certified, his certification certificate and his designs from after he got certified. Well to make a long story semi short, he got the job. Jeremy also announced during his speech that Jeff Ray, CEO of SolidWorks (stay tuned for an one on one interview I have scheduled with him) took the test and received his CSWA certification. Jeremy at the end of his time on stage showed off the surf board that is signed by all of the CSWP’s in attendance and this will be on display at SolidWorks Corporate Headquarters. Dr. Don Norman followed Bertrand and Jeremy on stage. Dr. Norman gave an awesome presentation that was based around 4 Rules To Design By, the rules are Think People, Make It Usable, No Signs and Make It Beautiful. Dr. Normans presentation was filled with insight and comic relief. What a riot this guy seems to be. Dr. Norman was followed by Dr. Robert Ballard. Dr. Ballard is known for his underwater exploration, especially known for his exploration of the Titanic. This guy was awesome and very informative. After Dr. Ballard was done with his presentation he invited 5 members of the Long Beach City College ROV team to join his on stage and give the attendees an idea of what they were doing with SolidWorks. After these students left the stage SolidWorks dropped its bombshell on all of its attendees. SolidWorks launched a new program, you can check it out here: SolidWorks iPod. Well SolidWorks never leaves (well not normally) its customers hanging so they handed out iPod nano’s to all of this years SolidWorks World attendees. That is amazing!

After the general session I attended a portion of one of the most anticipated sessions for this years event, Stump the Chump. You can get a detail by detail breakdown of this event from some of the other bloggers. Need I say this session was full of comic relief and tremendous insight. I have heard a lot positive comments about this from a wide group of attendees.

The next time slot was the ever amazing lunch break which the SolidWorks Blog Squad got to have a personal meeting with Jeff Ray. It was great that Jeff could take a moment from his busy schedule and meet with us, it was greatly appreciated by all the members of the blog squad. I do have to say there was an awkward situation between Mike Puckett and Jeff when the subject of Mike’s blog post from yesterday came up, way to go Mike.

After this meeting I headed off to my next breakout session which was Methodologies for Assembly of Tool Design Automation which was presented by C.H. Lai. Mr. Lai is employed by 3D Quick Tools. It was an interesting session but was at times hard to follow, but it did provide an interesting view on certain things.

The next session that I attended was Drag, Drop, Snap, Smile presented by Matthew Cummins. This was again an outstanding presentation on a great subject. I heard from a SWW attendee after this session that it was the best presentation that he had seen thus far at the conference. It goes back to what I said yesterday, if you get the chance to attend a session by Matthew, DO IT!

Well, its time to go to the offsite event. Stay tuned tomorrow for more insight on the events from San Diego.