May 19th and 20th is the highly anticipated Parallels Summit 2008. The 2008 event will focus on SaaS, Hosting, Virtualization, Automation and Green Computing. theWHIR team along with WHIR TV will be present and we are pleased to be sponsoring the Networking Lounge. A spacious and inviting networking space complete with wireless internet access and refreshments.

It is our pleasure to help facilitate important connections in the WHIR Networking Lounge and we hope to create the perfect environment for such connections. Feel free to reach out to theWHIR team as you visit the lounge, we will have our May Green Issue of WHIR Magazine on hand.

You will also have a chance to win 1 of 2 8GB iPod Nano's that we will give away on each day of the event, in celebration of our 8th Year of Excellence. Stop by our table located in the WHIR Networking Lounge and leave your business card for a chance to win.

We look forward to seeing you bright and early Monday morning in Washington, DC. If you have not yet registered for the event you can do so here.

Have you been receiving emails from Eastern European women who want to sell you "enlargement" cream? Viagra? Perhaps someone has caught you naked on video lately? Or you've been contacted by Nigerian princes who want to give you millions of dollars if you just send them 50 grand?

As amusing as they can be at times (believe me, I get a good chuckle out of them once in a while), these are just a few of the messages you may be receiving by the hundreds, if not thousands, if your ISP or hosting provider isn't using the right precautions to filter out and block spam from reaching your server and, ultimately, your inbox on a daily basis.

In comes a company like Cloudmark.

Cloudmark says it currently protects over 600 million inboxes across the globe through its advanced message fingerprinting technology and global threat network and is the most widely-integrated messaging security solution on carrier infrastructures worldwide.

WHIRtv recently sat down with Jamie de Guerre, CTO of Cloudmark (and fellow Canuck!) and got the inside on how the technology works and how big of an "epidemic" spam really is today.

In Superman III Richard Pryor is a computer programmer; he wonders where all those ½ cents at the end of payroll checks go. He puts them to good use...his paycheck. 

Charles WU - head honcho at CW Labs made one of those luncheon presentations that was actually interesting. In the middle of it I thought...this guy looked at something boring...and saw billions. All of a sudden it became very interesting. 

Unbeknownst to us he noted the slow death of dial-up. But sees dollars in that slow bandwidth...forget 56k...he likes 28k. Forget something in the future that may not work like 500 HDTV channels over the Internet, R&D is always a *itch...lets make some money.

During the presentation Charles used the word trillion...his graphics showed a bunch of lines connecting each other, sort of like a half circle, with arrows going back and forth. His R&D staff has invented some stuff, they want to put the ISP in this graphic. Somewhere near the top left, second dot down. He called it the money spot.  

Charles WU wants to put the ISP in the credit card processing system. He wants you to be part of that trillion dollar economy, the part that takes a ½% here and ½% there. Swipe that card and a bunch of people takes a slice of that swipe…someone has to do it.

Talk to WU if you want to understand the technical part, not my area. However there is hardware, software, intellectual property, licensing and other stuff involved.

In the evening Wu kindly gave away food and drinks as we gambled at a charity event. Everyone was happy.

More about Tom:

New Commerce Communications

E-Mail Tom Direct

Today’s keynote speaker at ISPCON was Elliot Noss of Tucows.  His keynote addressed how Internet Infrastructure companies can compete with the likes of Google and Go daddy.  His answer:  more customization and real personalization.  He used McDonalds to represent Google and Go daddy, and Starbucks as an example of customization and personalization.  In his presentation Rackspace is the Starbucks of the Internet world.  In his opinion Rackspace succeeds not because it is the cheapest, but because it provides a much more stable experience than most infrastructure providers.  Examples of this include robust mail service with large storage space.

As a frequent conference attendee, I hear this keynote often.  In other conferences the keynote has been entitled, alternately, “How to compete with 1and1 and Microsoft,” “Withstanding the entry of the giants,” and so on, and so forth.  Depending on the audience, the theme always seems to be “specialization and customization”

I wonder, honestly, how specialized and customized companies can get and still make money.  Early on in my practice, one of my clients had the idea of creating different brands for different segments of the hosting market.  The CEO called this the “supermarket” strategy:  he wanted to own the most shelf space in the hosting market.  Consequently the company had over 10 brands, each with a different message, back end, support needs, etc.  Needless to say, this level of specialization became uneconomical over the long term, and we ended up folding all the brands into two major brands.

Similarly, another client sought to compete in various segments of the market.  So he targeted lawyers, doctors and chambers of commerce.  This specialization required an enormous amount of sales time, and very expensive marketing (getting a lawyer’s attention isn’t cheap).  This marketing effort worked, but the customer market was so specialized, and the product not scalable to other markets, it was eventually folded into a standard “unlimited bandwidth, storage, 10 GB e-mail” plan, with resulting churn.

What Elliot talked about, that strikes me as true, based on those of my clients who are successful, is that successful Internet businesses are high touch, and that people will pay to have their problems go away.  Examples of this, and hosting companies that are taking business from 1 and 1, etc., include those that focus on customer support, implementing complex outsourced solutions like exchange, and hold the hand of overburdened IT departments. 

In each of these examples the customization and specialization is applicable across the entire product line, and is not feature based.  So instead of creating an e-mail solution that meets the unique needs of lawyers, they have support that teaches the lawyers how to create the e-mail product they need. 

I see an analogy in my own business:  clients pay me to make problems go away.  They’re not interested in the most recent regulatory pronouncement about green marketing from the Federal Trade Commission, they just want to be able to market their new “green” data center.  Similarly, the nuanced thread that has run through all these keynotes, whatever their title, has been that customers will pay you to make problems go away.  Seems to me that’s a great way to succeed.