The Spring 2007 edition of ISPCON,
the Internet industry’s largest conference and exhibition,
kicked off today, trading in its previous location of Baltimore for the
more tropical setting of Orlando, Florida.
This also marked the first ISPCON event held since Jupitermedia acquired The Golden Group and its events. And judging by this year's luxurious Rosen Centre Hotel venue, the new organizers have boosted the event with a significantly larger budget.
But despite all this, the attendance for day one's sessions and exhibit hall seemed to pale in comparison to ISPCON Spring 2006's. This, however, could all change in the remaining two days of the conference as the first day is typically the least attended day of the three.
This year, ISPCON focused more heavily on Internet services, with the day featuring a number of intriguing sessions spanning topics such as managed services, software as a service, messaging/collaboration, voice over Internet protocal and municipal wireless technology.
The day's highlights included Webmail.us'
presentation, "Creating a Successful Email Archiving Service with the Amazon S3 Storage Grid". Speaker Bill Boebel, CTO and co-founder of email hosting provider Webmail.us (www.webmail.us), discussed the emergence of utility-based services, such as Amazon’s recent grid storage technology.
Boebel discussed his company's personal experiences in leveraging the Amazon S3 Storage Grid technology to develop its own hosted email infrastructure solutions, outlining some of the many advantages it offers in building a scalable and efficient hosting storage solution for an affordable cost.
Next up was the first of ISPCON's two keynote presentations. Jupitermedia's GM of events, Jon Price, introduced the session speaker, Advanced Internet
Technologies CEO and president Clarence Briggs. And although the presentation's title, "Grids Gone Bad", led many to believe that the session would address grid computing technology and hosting, it was, in fact, the issue of click fraud that dominated most of the agenda.
Briggs opened the presentation by posing to the audience, "what happens when you combine the two paradigms of grid computing and Internet search?" He then went on to highlight the humble beginnings of AIT as a 'fly by night' operation, based out of the garage of his home, offering
a handful of colorful, albeit at times tiresome, anecdotes.
He then brought up the recent class action lawsuit against Fayetteville Publishing Company, which AIT is acting as lead plantiff for. In the suite, AIT and several other ISPs allege the company committed several click fraud violations, and Briggs discussed how this is just one of
the many examples of click fraud hurting the industry today.
Briggs then surprised many by prematurely announcing that he would eventually be retiring this year from the fields of ISP and hosting, concentrating his efforts instead on his new Internet search company, href="http://www.tybit.com">tyBit, which he announced will launch a beta release by the end of the week. The day ended with Hostopia's vendor-sponsored session, "Three Hot Applications (You Probably Don’t Have)", delivered by Hostopia EVP and CMO Paul Engels. The informative discussion singled-out three major applications: Web building tools EasySiteWizard Professional and Website Expertsm as well as email hosting provider SyncJe. These applications, says Engels, are imperative tools for a small Web host in achieving success, providing value add-on features for hosting customers Tune in tomorrow for coverage of day two from ISPCON Spring 2007, which features sessions on topics spanning open source, hosting and data centers, business issues, hot vertical markets and wireless services. By Justin Lee
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