For the last four years I received a nice birthday gift from my employer. With 60 colleagues we hopped on a bus to Hannover, Germany to stroll the CeBIT halls for a weekend. Transportation, drinks, food and hotel all paid for.
CeBIT
CeBIT is an annual fair. It is the world's largest and most renowned trade fair for the world of IT and telecommunication. While I’ve only witnessed CeBIT in Hannover, the event is organized in many places throughout the year.
The annual CeBIT trip was an idea from a couple of us back in 2005. In order to convince our CEO, I told him the trip was in the weekend of my birthday. This convinced him along side the benefits of having up-to-date personnel, who can actively engage customers on IT’s hottest topics. I, however, never stopped seeing the annual trips to the CeBIT fair as my birthday gifts.
The CEO went on the trip with us, which resulted in one of the most embarrassing financial situation we ever found ourselves as a company: The limit on the credit card of our CEO wasn’t sufficient to pay for 300 liters of Löwenbräu beer. 🙂
This year however my birthday gift is something different!
MVP Summit
Microsoft is giving me an awesome (early) birthday present in the form of an invitation to the 2009 Microsoft Most Valuable Professional (MVP) Global Summit from March 1 to March 4 in Seattle and Redmond.
Of course I accepted!
On February 28 I will be flying to Seattle, together with Jorge. We’ll be enjoying the MVP Summit and will be back on March 6.