gotoAndSki('switzerland');

We are almost there: 26th to 28th, January 2012, Thursday to Saturday, as last year. Tickets, including 3 nights at the hotel/chalet, and food for the 3 conference days, including breakfast, lunch snack to take to the slopes and dinner, ARE STILL AVAILABLE (not that many now).  To get your ticket on time, just use the ticket widget on the sidebar >>>

You can find any additional information you might need on the pages at the top of this page.

If you are new to this conference, be sure to read the wrap-up post from last year, with attendee and speaker reviews.

We are looking forward to see everyone in the alps again, as well as some new attendees for sure, after the success and buzz from last year. The venue is exactly where you can see a few chalets in the lower-right corner of the picture below. Just add lots of snow, computer geeks, skis, snowboards, sleds, beers, awesome sessions, hot chocolate, cheese overdose, cows, fondue, chocolate, more cheese, more beer, more geek stuff… and you’ll get gotoAndSki Switzerland. See you in the Swiss Alps!

View of the Lauterbrunnen valley [ AUTHOR ]

I am really glad to announce a great promo from our latest Gold Sponsor: BlackBerry.

There will be 5 PlayBook tablets to raffle amongst gotoAndSki attendees and one Full Pass for the BlackBerry DevCon in Amsterdam, February 7th and 8th. Any attendee that doesn’t win one of the PlayBooks or the full pass, will get a 50% discount for the DevCon conference (which will end up as €175). And EVERYONE going to BlackBerry DevCon (full or 50% pass) gets a free PlayBook! How cool is that?

3 of the PlayBooks will be raffled SOON amongst everyone who already has a gotoAndSki ticket: One TODAY 2oth at midnight, one tomorrow SATURDAY 21st and another on SUNDAY 22nd, so, the faster you get your ticket (if you didn’t yet), the best your chances are to get one of the tablets, as this is not a very big conference. The other 2 PlayBooks and the Full pass will be raffled on gotoAndSki’s last day.

So, get your gotoAndSki ticket (there’s only a few left) and fingers crossed!
Don’t forget that gotoAndSki tickets already include 3 nights in the hotel/chalet with breakfast, lunch snack for the slopes and dinner.
Good luck! See you in the Alps in ONE WEEK.

UPDATE: Cowbell raffle winners

1st PLAYBOOK: Evan Gifford

2nd PLAYBOOK: Jens Brynildsen

3rd PLAYBOOK: Frederico Felicidade

Congratulations everyone! Another 2 PlayBooks and one DevCon Amsterdam ticket (with PlayBook included) will be raffled at gotoAndSki amongst attendees.

BlackBerry DevCon Europe 2012 takes place on 7th and 8th February at the Amsterdam RAI Convention Centre.

The conference is your chance to learn about developing for the BlackBerry solution and about how you can reach over 75 million subscribers, in 115 countries around the world, downloading 4 million apps per day! And all attendees receive a FREE BlackBerry PlayBook tablet at the conference.

Come hear from industry experts like Peter-Paul Koch, Andrew Betts and Julian Dolce and Andrea Trento. View the Online Session Catalog for an up to date list of speakers and sessions.

You just need to come up with some crazy / funny / creative photo(s) that should involve snow, ski or snowboard gear, something alpine related, cheese, cows, whatever… Be creative: just show us you are ready for gotoAndSki… even if you are not coming :(

Just click this image to go to the official Facebook photo contest page to participate or vote:

You have until end of the conference to submit your photos.
You can submit as many as you want.
Anyone (including your friends) can vote once per day.
That’s it!

Most voted photos will receive:

1X Adobe CS 5.5 Design/Web Premium

3X IntelliJ IDEA 11 Personal licenses

1X Goalscape Desktop or 1 year Goalscape Connect

2X Goalscape Connect 6 months subscription

GOOD LUCK!

Thanks to a partnership with the Crocus Modeller team, we will be raffling away some licenses within the next few weeks. You just need to spread the word with a cool tweet that includes #CrocusModeller and #gotoAndSki tags, as well a link to the conference website (http://bit.ly/gotoandski). Just add some words (you have 92 chars left) and you’re done. You can also create a post on your blog about gotoAndSki and this promotion or a small message/banner in your sidebar (or both) and link to this post: any incoming link will also enter the draw. Every week a license will be raffled, the more you tweet or the more referrals come from your links, the higher your chances are!
Click here to have half of the work done, just add your own words on how cool this is!

As if that’s not cool enough, the Crocus team will also give away another 2 licenses to the craziest action shot in the snow for photos taken during gotoAndSki!

If by any chance you don’t know Crocus Modeller then just take a look at their website and be sure to watch the video. This is a great tool for AS3/Flex developers to auto-magically generate UML diagrams from code AND generate stub code from UML diagrams. Not joking here! Here’s a screenshot:

Good luck!

Here they are!

I remind that the gotoAndSki ticket includes access to the 3 days of the conference and 3 nights in the hotel chalet with breakfast buffet (tons of cheese, home-made yoghurt, out of the oven bread, alpine sausage and other delicacies, cereals, jam, coffee, milk, tea, etc), lunch snack to take to the slopes, and a three course dinner, served after the first session each night. Ticket prices are in Swiss Francs (CHF). Here’s the ticket availability:

SUPER-EARLY-COW tickets:
There’s only 15 of these, so hurry up!
370 CHF (about 299 EUR, 260 GBP, 411 USD) GONE!

EARLY-COW tickets:
Only until December 1st, or until 50 tickets sold!
420 CHF (about 340 EUR, 295 GBP, 465 USD) GONE!

REGULAR tickets:
When the above are sold out.
470 CHF (about 380 EUR, 331 GBP, 520 USD)

Hit the ticket widget on the top of the sidebar to get your ticket now!

There’s mostly shared twin rooms in the chalets, but some triple and four bed rooms. Placement will be distributed by the order tickets are sold: first tickets will get the double rooms and then people will be distributed to the bigger rooms.

NOTE: Only bank transfer accepted as payment method. After receiving the email with your ticket ID (to use on the memo/reference for the wire), please proceed as soon as possible with the transfer. If you take longer than a week between ticket issue and payment, you might lose your ticket position and savings.

Greetings from Switzerland. Just started again to update the info on this blog and I’m quite excited with another incoming gotoAndSki Switzerland. The Speakers section will be updated within the next days, as I have to start deciding amongst the sent session proposals. This is the hardest of all tasks for organizing the conference, with all the great proposals, but I guess I got it right last year, which was the first one, as it went really well.

I would also like to present myself as the conference host, since there was some confusion between the two versions of the event. gotoAndSki has two events under the same format (Snow sports, fun and networking during the day, sessions after the slopes close in a cozy chalet):

The Winter event, in the Swiss Alps, is organized by myself, Fernando Colaço (@fcolaco) with the help of David Almeida (@almeidavid_). The picture above was taken at the event venue, which is my “office” sometimes. Actually I am moving from Geneva to a chalet in Stechelberg, from November to end of January, pushing my “creative-hideout” to a full-time office for a while. I hope everyone falls in love with this region as much as it happened to me 6 years ago.

The Summer event, in Norway is organized by Jens Brynildsen (@jenschr) and Thomas Nesse (@thomasnesse), whom I am sure I will also see in Switzerland again :) Both of them are from the FUGN.

We are all designers/developers using the Flash platform for most of our work, while also using other web/mobile technologies. gotoAndSki is a conference with a twist, giving an extra focus to the networking part of it, which is very strong in this Flash community.

gotoAndSki Switzerland 2011 is over! I am sadly back to Geneva and not in the alps anymore, but outrageously inspired to start working (already) in the next edition. Thanks everyone for all the feedback, tweets, Facebook sharing of videos and photos. And probably a few blog posts to come soon listed below: 

Conference review by FlashMagazine (Norway), by Dennis Ippel (UK), by Trine Falbe (Denmark), by Michel Wacker (Germany), by Hugo Fernandes (Portugal), by Johan Lopes (Sweden), by Tiago Dias (Switzerland) and by Dave Keen (UK). Thanks a lot everyone!

[ Post photo by kanjiroushi ]

There’s also the gotoAndSki Flickr group where I ask everyone to add their photos to the pool. Once you have finished your game of partypoker or scrabble, simply log on to our Flickr site and post away. You can also post a link to your videos in the video topic in that group.

Thanks to every attendee and speaker for making it to the alps and for helping to create the unique atmosphere in the chalet, as well as in the slopes during these last 4 days… actually some attendees decided to stay a little longer an extra 2 or 3 days :) Also, many thanks to David (@almeidavid_) for all his help on organizing this event. Thanks as well to the venue owners Marianne and Otto, to the always happy “breakfast Ruth” and to all the staff, for their ability to deal with all these geeks during 4 days!

And these were the speakers for 2011:

		MIHAI CORLAN ( @mcorlan) Building mobile apps with Adobe AIR, Flash Builder & Flex Hero
		MIHAI CORLAN ( @mcorlan) Optimizing your Flash/AIR application
		PETER MASEIDE ( @petermaseide) Making Flash Games: Case studies, tips & tricks
		MICHEL WACKER ( @starnut) Hot wireless data fudge
		SANDRO DUCCESCHI ( @_sandro) Advanced Flash Accessibility
		RICARDO CASTELHANO ( @riccastelhano) Flash+Arduino: a connection with feelings
		DENNIS IPPEL ( @masdennis) Messing with Actionscript and the Kinect
		TIAGO DIAS ( @funkysoul) Developing for TV with AIR
		TRINE FALBE ( @trinefalbe) Taking a step back: Cognitive Psychology in Interaction Desig

You can also watch some of their sessions full videos in HD.

See you in the Swiss Alps next year! Thank you!

gotoAndSki Switzerland takes place every winter in the Jungfrau region, heart of the Swiss Alps. From the venue, in Stechelberg, you have really easy access to the Mürren-Schilthorn resort, one of the resorts in this area. You can open the map below for an overview and to have an idea of how huge is this group of winter sports resorts.

CLICK FOR THE BIG VERSION

You can purchase a Ski-pass for the main region near the venue (Mürren-Schillthorn) or the entire area (Jungfrau). The price difference is not that big and you get access to the bus and railway with the full-area one.

Yup, there’s going to be another gotoAndSki.

This time it will take place in the Swiss Alps. After the success in Norway, this conference had to be repeated. Set aside January every year in your calendar because you’ll be in the Alps in the coolest Flash/Flex/Mobile conference ever.

The original format will be the same: Ski, Snowboard, Airboard, Sled, or just relaxing in a terrace during the day, followed by sessions and possible workshop after the slopes close. Having fun and networking during the day and keeping the technical and creative content to the cozy atmosphere in the chalet conference room (with a break for dinner) worked really well at Stechelberg and Galdhøpiggen, just ask anyone who was there. To maintain this atmosphere, the tickets will be capped to 100 attendees.

The venue is secured and the chalets are ready. The cosy chalets are just next to the Venue, so you can take it all out in the slopes. Tickets include the stay in these chalets with buffet breakfast, snack to take for the slopes and 3 course dinner at the venue’s restaurant.

Watch this blog in the days to come for posts detailing how to get there, the speakers and sessions, ski pass and equipment rental pricing (special deal negotiation in progress), what you should bring and everything else you should know.