Top MUG Presenters of 2007 Include Apple, Prosoft Engineering and Tropical Software
The MUG Center’s Top User Group Presenters Awards winners for 2007 include some familiar faces and a hard-fought battle for second place.
Once again, Apple took the top slot with a total of 56 appearances, up significantly from last year’s 36. Apple Senior Systems Engineer Dave Marra led a small army of Apple presenters, making a total of 16 user group stops himself. Backing Dave up with multiple presentations were Dreux Ste. Marie, Don Peebles, Francis Sheppard, Bob Bowman, Aaron Davis and many others.
Coming in second with by only two user group visits were the team of Gordon and Jennifer Bell from Prosoft Engineering. They made 24 appearances to show off their excellent Mac utilities, but also introduced their new line of consumer-oriented software, JoeSoft.
Running a very close third was James Lee of Tropical Software. Jim placed in the top three for the third straight year with a total of 22 MUG presentations. Important to note is the fact that, while the top two involved teams of presenters, Jim is a solo act, making every single presentation himself.
The MacNotables panel, while not counted as a vendor, ran up a tally of 30 MUG appearances, led by Bob “Dr. Mac” LeVitus with 11 stops of his own, helped along by his annual Mid-Atlantic MUG Tour.
Farther down the count list were MacSpeech with 9, Adobe at 8, and Doug Troxell of iRemember with 7.
Perhaps the most telling things about this year’s calculations were the sheer number of companies working with Mac User Groups and the overall number of user group appearances. We tracked a total of 54 companies, Mac personalities and groups in 2007 who racked up a total of 233 entries on The MUG Event Calendar. Those numbers are all way up from last year, showing that the value of working with user groups is being understood by more and more companies.
The MUG Center’s Most Frequent Presenter Awards are based on our interaction with the Mac User Group community and extensive weekly surfing of MUG web sites to update The MUG Event Calendar. Our listings should be viewed as indicative of the interactions between the Mac User Group community and the Apple industry, but are not to be taken as comprehensive.
To have your meeting topics included in this year’s tally, or if you are a vendor and want to have your appearances publicized and documented, please email us with your information and we’ll include you.