World Event 2007 Recap

Record Attendance, Programming Highlight Conference

By Rick Snider, PTC/USER

Tampa Convention Center, home of World Event 2007 [credit: Tampa Bay CVB]

This year's World Event in Tampa was a tremendous success. For the second year in a row, we broke our attendance records, reaching 2028 guests and pushing through the 2000 mark for the first time. The expanded training was extremely popular with attendees and it was difficult to keep up with demand. We also had two outstanding keynote speakers in Dean Kamen and Mike Hawley; they received the highest and third-highest attendee ratings in PTC/USER history.

If you don't attend the World Event, you are really missing out on a great deal of technical information, training and the opportunity to meet the leading users from world-class companies.

Be sure to mark your calendar for World Event 2008, to be held June 1-4 at the Long Beach Convention Center, the first West Coast event in seven years.

Pictures from World Event 2007

This year, we brought in professional photographer Jim Tkach to capture the amazing depth of activities at the World Event. In addition to the sampling of photos below, you can visit his website and view a large selection of images from the conference, and optionally purchase high-resolution versions of your favorites. You might even see yourself there!

[All photos © Copyright 2007 Jim Tkatch Photography]

Dan Glenn, President of PTC/USER, addresses general session.

General sessions were well attended every day of the conference.

The exhibit hall was packed throughout the conference.

Bryan Berg, Cardstacker extraordinaire, working intently on his creation. 

One of the FIRST teams, demonstrating the robot they designed and built. FIRST stands for "For Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology" and is a volunteer-based program dedicated to encouraging students to pursue math and science education and eventually, a career in engineering.

Another FIRST team.

Dean Kamen, riding into the general session for his keynote address.

Dean with John Stuart, Senior Vice President of Education and Community Services at PTC.

Mike Hawley of the MIT MediaLab receives a gift from Ted Bradshaw of PTC/USER.

Larry Pitts proudly showing off his Best Presenter Award, with Clay Martin and Dan Glenn. This is the second year in a row that Larry has been selected by his peers for this honor.

Mike, a Van Cliburn competition-winning pianist, wows the crowd with an Victor Borge-like performance sharing anecdotes along with several musical pieces.

More photos of the conference are available here.

Rick Snider is Conference Manager for PTC/USER.