My favorite booth on the floor happened to be oDesk, their website oDesk.com is the best designed and most well engineered contractor website.  I’ve looked at dozens of work-for-hire websites such as Guru.com, eLance.com, Sologig.com, GetACoder.com and many others, but by far I would recommend oDesk over the others.   Two reasons primarily, first they have a guaranteed payment for work policy, backed by a computer monitoring program that makes sure you’re not goofing off, if you are, you scrub the goof off time and you get paid fairly for work you’ve accomplished.   Secondly,  they have buyers payment information, so they act as the escrow service to make sure you’re paid as the contractor.  Lastly I really like that they make providers take tests in their competency areas, that prevents anyone from saying they can do web or application development.

eBay demonstrated their Selling Manager Applications API, I thought it was a cool demonstration and they did a good job of trying to evangelize their platform.  One thing, though, I was having a hard time with was coming up with something new on the eBay platform, seems like eBay has a lot covered already.

Microsoft showed off many things at their booth, I was surprised they didn’t focus more on Silverlight at their booth, they had Silverlight there, but the Microsoft Surface centerpiece kind of overshadowed everything else at their booth.   I think Silverlight is an extremely impressive set of technologies, I like what Microsoft has done, although I’m a bit upset they removed PowerPC support in their 2.0 release.   The list of available controls and the user-interfaces that were demonstrated with this shows that it’s a solid competitor to the Flash platform.  I also like the fact that the Linux community is on top of porting the platform via the Mono’s Moonlight project.

Adobe was pushing the Flex framework and Flash platform at their booth.  They also demonstrated at one of the sessions the new Catalyst development tool which I think competes directly with Microsoft’s Expression Blend.  This IDE lets Flex developers build rich user-interfaces from resources imported directly from Adobe Photoshop and Adobe Illustrator.  Supposedly giving more control of the UI design to the designers while allowing developers to code the application together.  I’m not sure how it compares yet to Expression Blend, but I have a feeling Expression Blend still has the leg up on Adobe as it was built from the start as a user-interface design tool, where Catalyst merely imports UI elements from existing Adobe applications.

There was a lot to see but this years conference was definitly scaled-back, I later learned that many of the exhibitors from the prior years show ended up at the MySQL Conference held just shortly after this one.   I think due to the economy many companies also didn’t bother having a booth,  such as Etelos, which had a giant booth last year, then some companies simply vanished, one of my favorites from last year was Coghead.  That about sums up my floor experience of the expo, I hope in future posts to go into more depth about the various work-for-hire sites out there such as oDesk!