By Robert Evatt World Staff Writer
Tulsa World
Section: E-1
10/20/2007

Labor needs, new products among topics at conference.

Tulsa's technology sector appears to be rebounding strongly, judging from attendance Friday at an industry event.

Tulsa TechFest, a conference providing IT professionals with continuing education and networking opportunities, drew an estimated 800 registrants on its first day.

David Walker, director of TechFest, said companies are growing and the local labor marker is getting tight -- both big improvements after a collapse earlier this decade.

"The tech side has really been recovering over the last 14 months," he said. "We're having to look outside of Tulsa to fill tech jobs."

TechFest, established last year and expanded to two days for 2007, will continue through Saturday at Oklahoma State University's Tulsa campus.

The event was organized around 16 continuing education tracks, from digital security and project management to programming for specific platforms such as Windows, Ajax and PHP.

AAdditionally, representatives from tech companies gave presentations and set up booths. Idera, a Houston company that makes tools for managing SQL databases, attended for the second time, said Janet Deyhle, director of marketing.

"Last year was a big success for us, and we wound up meeting a lot of people," she said.

Friday's morning keynote speakers were Jason Zander, general program manager for .Net, and Sean Alexander, director of Silverlight, both offered by Microsoft.

The two discussed Silverlight, a new media plug-in that can manipulate high-definition video on Internet sites.

"Consumers now want a higher level of interactivity with music and video on sites," Zander said. "When we moved to Silverlight (on Microsoft's home page), we were getting two to four times the number of people clicking through."

During the presentation, Zander used Silverlight to place nine picture-in-picture videos over a tenth, and transformed a video into a jigsaw with dozens of pieces.

Other scheduled speakers include Luke Sontag, co-founder of Tulsa-based Vidoop, and James McGovern of The Hartford Financial Services Group Inc.