UDEN celebrated its 1st year anniversary in March 2016. UDEN's 9th membership meeting was held on March 9th at Adobe's incredible campus in Lehi, UT. About 120 people attended.
Adobe's Jeff Allen spoke a few words about the work they do in Lehi, including the Adobe Marketing Cloud and their new suite of analytics tools.
Our food sponsor for the evening was Utah Valley University's Culinary Arts Institute and all of the delicious food provided had been prepared for us by students of their award-winning programs. Michele Brixius of UvU spoke a few words about the Culinary Arts Institute and the fine work they do, and invited everyone to their Gala on April 20th where even more delicious treats would be available to sample as they raise money for scholarships and other programs at the Culinary Arts Institute
Michael Savoie, Dean of the Technology College at UvU added a few words; he congratulated UDEN on its 1 year anniversary and talked of the work UvU is undertaking in digital entertainment including at the Park City Film Studio.
I talked a little about UDEN's mission, what we had achieved in our first year and some thoughts about our second year. In particular I wanted to let everyone know this is a volunteer organization, and would only continue if we had support from the community. As such, getting special thanks for their hard work over the first year was the UDEN committee, especially Jeff Peters who organizes our membership meetings, as well as Chad Mustard, Clark Stacey, Laura Mustard, Bryan Kessinger, Craig Bott, Justin Bott, Craig Caldwell and Corrine Lewis.
The main event for the evening was the YouTube panel, which was due to be moderated by John Gausdiosi, but unfortunately he had to cancel at the last minute for personal reasons. Taking his place as moderator was Chad Mustard of Bluehelm social media. He introduced the panel of YouTube experts, including Scott Winn (ScottDW), Jared Shores (Studio C), Landon Sperry (Dark Pixel) and Derral Eves. An fascinating discussion ensued, which included stories of how these guys started out, how things are different now (you need multiple channels such as Facebook to gain traction), the importance of analytics (use Adobe's tools!) and lots more!
Ricky Flores of the Utah Film Commission congratulated UDEN on its 1 year anniversary and talked about the upcoming panel at the Governor's Economic Development Summit on April 15th.
The evening then moved, as usual, into networking, including the opportunity to chat to the presenters and mix with other attendees.
Our thanks to Adobe, UvU Culinary Arts Institute, to our distinguished panel and, of course, to everyone that has supported us over our first year!