Magento Imagine 2013 Diary - Day 2

Today kicked off the keynotes. In the bright Nevada sunshine hundreds of people crammed into the auditorium for the first of the day at 9am (some with bleary eyes from last night) with bated breath as Magento Imagine normally means some big announcements as to where the community is heading in the next year.

Starting off the day was Roy Rubin - COO of Magento - who talked about the incredible growth of Magento over the past year. For those of you who didn't know, Magento is now an eBay company and next up was John Donahoe who introduced the four key themes for this years conference (and the ecommerce community as a whole) - mobile, local, global and data and how by focusing on these areas Magento are helping their merchants succeed. What was particularly pleasing for the team at MageTraining was this focus on merchants this year. Magento has one of the most passionate and highly skilled developer communities I've ever came across, but at the end of the day, merchants succeeding is the name of the game.

We chose to go mainly down the Strategic Marketing Track - first up was 'Going Beyond Search Engines' moderated by Josh Kaplan of True Action and featuring Kyle Faino (Super Supplements), Corey Frons (Bulb America), Ross Kramer (Listrak) and Tomer Tagrin (Yotpo).

This was followed by a session' Responsive Design: Where, Why, and How'
Tonya Browning & Erin Tozour of Magento moderated presentations by David Barr (Lyons Consulting Group), Brendan Falkowski (Gravity Department) and Bob Meyer (Gorrilla Group). If you didn't know already responsive is the hot topic of 2013. It's importance to user experience, search engine optimisation and sales conversions are more than significant: Deryck be writing a separate blog post about his findings in this area soon.

So after a lovely lunch in the sun with Mosses Akizian and the Magento Community leaders it was on to the afternoon sessions. Breakouts were on the future of SEO and SEM and with "The Conversion Surgeon" Chris Goward. Again, these are important areas and so we'll be writing separate blogs on these subjects in the very near future.

It was then back to the main hall for the main afternoon session where amongst other things we were taught how to become an adventurer by Jamie Clarke. What a great, funny and inspirational speaker he was. If you ever get a chance to hear him talk about how he first decided to become an adventurer (after being refused to become a hockey player by his mum) you must do so - it's a great story from a great story teller.

The 'legendary' Magento Imagine party was an Arabian Nights theme this year, with henna tatoo stations, belly dancers and even a snake draped over a dancers shoulders. First stop for the MageTraining team was the Hookah Pipe stations (okay @stevedeckert, you were right, they're not called hubbly bubbly pipes...) where @futurederyck indulged. There was an amazing set from an electric string orchestra - the highlight for me being a version of Coldplay's 'Rule the World' - and the DJ then got the young, free and slightly inebriated dancing.

After fighting for space around a space heater, I gracefully gave in to the windy dessert temperatures and retired indoors to see lots of orange lanyards surrounding the craps tables. A surreal end to a great day.

Tomorrow: the closing keynotes and the big competition to win a trip to Hawaii (fingers crossed).