Published on the 11/09/2014 | Written by Clare Coulson

This year Microsoft’s 19th TechEd NZ was kicked off, quite literally, with the martial-art practicing nanotechnologist Dr Michelle Dickinson (aka nanogirl) taking the stage for the first keynote. She is not your typical geek fest presenter, in fact she is the first woman to present the keynote at TechEd New Zealand and she told iStart that she was determined to do it her way. As a senior lecturer at the University of Auckland and director of the only nano-mechanical testing laboratory in New Zealand, Dickinson breaks things for a living so she naturally decided to dismantle one of Microsoft’s sleekest new products, the Surface Pro 3, on stage complete with succinct and delighted explanations of how it works – helped along by martial arts analogies. Pow – this set the scene for a new Microsoft. I think the audience was somewhat stunned but highly appreciative.

Steven Martin, GM for cloud and enterprise at Microsoft HQ in Redmond was next up with a lower key presentation on cloud computing in the next five years. He painted a picture of a world of lower prices, faster innovation, industry consolidation and standardisation where the real security battle is inside a business not out.

To close out the keynote sessions, Microsoft’s distinguished technical evangelist James Whittaker stormed the stage to talk about the data economy, describing data as the new oil. He’s looking forward to a future where his devices can plan around him. He’s already quite possibly the most connected man in the world and used his pimped-out fully sensorised hot tub (which can pretty much auto-maintain itself) as an example of how the data economy is evolving. He also got the most laughs.

With 2000 technologists in the room, Twitter was humming and the general consensus was that it was “the best keynote session ever” (and I’d have to agree). Dickinson and Whittaker continued to be the topic of the online conversation on Wednesday helping the #TENZ hashtag to maintain its number one trending topic on Twitter NZ.

It was also interesting to note that Microsoft brought back its innovation track for the conference sessions and added a new ‘make yourself more awesome’ track, perhaps reflecting its new found pizazz.

Among observations of emerging trends in IT, another was also clear at the opening ‘TechFest’ party: that there is an increasing diversity of people in the IT industry. I’m not just talking about racial and gender diversity. As technology becomes the backbone of our social and business existence, we need diversity of thinking and creativity from the people who are creating and configuring the software that underpins it. On the gender front, the balance is still woefully lop-sided, but it was great to hear that Microsoft’s Women in Technology dinner was so oversubscribed that they had to move it to a larger venue.