Internet Seminar

17/02/2005 02:12 | Categories: General | 3 Comments 

Sometimes working for a big company has its advantages and today it was one of them. My company organized something that they called an "Internet Seminar" and invited people like Joi Ito (Technorati, Six Apart), Jimmy Wales (Wikipedia), or Rod Smith (IBM Vice President) amongst others.

I wasn't unfortunately able to attend the morning session which included Rod Smith's and Ilkka Raiskinen's conference because of some training. I would have very much liked to attend Mr. Smith's conference since he was going to cover some topics related to open source and open innovation and of course those are always interesting for somebody like me!

I joined the seminar after lunch and the first presentations came from SunRocket's COO, Robert Mainor about SunRocket's VoIP solution. It was interesting during the first half while he was describing how they are positioning themselves against traditional carriers and what technologies they are using. I was in fact very surprised to hear that they're using off-the-shelf solutions for most of their infrastructure and even some open source components, but then he went on to talk their pricing plans, how much better they are the competition, etc. I found that the second half was still interesting but not enlightening.

Then some VP from one of our business unit spoke about the VoIP market, how our company fits in there and what are our solutions. Also interesting but I didn't find it so exciting either.

After the coffee break, I had the chance to listen to Joi Ito. A funny coincidence is that when I arrived to the conference hall, everybody was already sitting and I ended up sitting next to some japanese-looking guy. Little did I know... It was Joi Ito himself I also noticed that he uses a Powerbook and that the lucky fellow has a PSP. I want one too!

His presentation was about the "creative youth" group of people, who belongs to this group and how some companies do not know how to market products for this market group. He's got quite an easy-going style plus he spiced up the presentation by showing a few funny ads related to the topic he was talking about. He also talked about blogs and how sometimes, word of mouth is a much better way of marketing than old-style TV or magazine ads. I really enjoyed his conference... This was the second or third time that he had been invited by my company to give a presentation/conference so I will make sure that I am there next time he comes!

After Joi Ito, Timo Soininen from Sulake spoke about how their company managed to create a successful brand and an online community for teenagers from the ground up. He played a couple of demo videos, but even though it looks cartoonish and it is mainly targeted at people between 10 and 18 years (that's the average age of their users), I need to give their Habbo Hotel a try! It looks cute Oh and for the record, this guy was also using a Powerbook

Next on the stage was Jimmy Wales from Wikipedia and the Wikimedia Foundation. I already knew pretty much everything that he talked about but it was nice to see the guy there trying to describe what a wiki is and how the Wikipedia (and related projects) work. Oh, and did I say that he also used a Powerbook? Do you still think that it is a coincidence?

And last but not least, Andrew Odlyzko from the Minnesota University and a former AT&T employee spoke about the future of internet. He basically said that the future of internet is voice and he actually had a couple of good points about it and basically dismissed everything related to real-time data streaming (video, for example) and the use of QoS for this kind of communication.

All in all, a very interesting day. I learnt lots of new things and I am here already hoping that my company will do something similar soon!

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