In the weeks leading to what is considered the web hosting industry's largest event, the WHIR reported that iNET Interactive, a social media company that owns the popular web hosting community Web Hosting Talk among other web properties, rather unexpectedly announced that it had acquired the HostingCon conference and trade show from Interjuncture.

Although the "feel" of conference remained relatively unaltered this year there were several iNET folks running around the event to answer questions about the recent acquisition and to gather information on what they could keep the same next year and what they should consider changing.

We sat down with Troy Augustine, the CEO of iNET Interactive, to discuss some of the motivations behind the acquisition and what we can expect to see from next year's event.

Having an association to call all our own isn't a new idea in the hosting industry, especially since we've seen various attempts at achieving this uber challenging goal in the last few years, all of which have, rather quietly, disappeared.

The last time I remember hearing about an initiative like this was in June 2006 when a gentleman by the name of Tony Holloway became one of the driving forces behind what he hoped would be the first official industry-wide association (the tentative name for it at the time was the International Providers of Internet Technologies and Hosting Association).

There seemed to be some definite interest and discussion stirred up at the HostingCon that year (yes, this was the one in Las Vegas) but after all was said and done, from what I gather, there just wasn't enough overall support from ALL the different players that would have to be on board for such an organization to effectively work. And as Liam pointed out in his blog post "earlier efforts at forming hosting associations have also been determinedly and unmistakably small-potatoes." The association has to not only be there to serve the needs of the smaller players, but of the giants in our industry as well. Of course, this all goes without saying, though.

This brings me to the present HostingCon 2008 that just passed a few weeks ago. We took a moment to have a chat with Paul Hirsch about a new initiative he and a couple of others (specifically Dan Garon, who does marketing and PR work for hosting providers and Michael Yablonowitz, CEO of Uplinkearth) have been working on to help create, what could be, our very own industry-wide association. More specifically, the Association of Internet and Hosting Service Providers.

Earlier this year in May, one of the largest hosting providers in the world, 1&1 Internet, rather unexpectedly announced that its CEO and chairman of the board, Andreas Gauger, was stepping down after 13 years and was being succeeded by Oliver Mauss, a veteran in the telecom industry.

While we were at HostingCon 2008 we had the opportunity to sit down and chat to the new CEO and gain some insight into his new vision for the web hosting giant.

My apologies for taking some time to churn these out. I assure you the rest will be coming up much faster. It's just that THIS interview in particular was quite the challenge to edit (for obvious reasons once you watch it).

But, the wait is worth it my friends because you get to see Michael van Dijken, the lead marketing manager for hosted solutions at Microsoft, talk about the company's recent Hyper-V technology launch (Microsoft's hypervisor virtualization engine for Windows Server 2008 that officially became available a few weeks ago. Liam wrote a great post about this here.) and Microsoft's cloud computing strategy while simultaneously playing the drums in a game of Rockband! That is talent!

Needless to say, it may have been one of the most challenging interviews he's been in and I've conducted, on a "having to focus on two things at once and not mess up on EITHER task" kind of way :)

We'll be bringing you an interview with Oliver Mauss, the new CEO of 1&1 Internet later this week as well, so keep an eye out for that.

The WHIR's editor Liam, as well as some of our other contributing bloggers, have been doing a great job at bringing you a slew of interesting thoughts and discussions from this past HostingCon 2008. I can't even begin to link to all the posts they've done but definitely scroll through here and take a look at what's been said.

Over the three-day event I had the opportunity to chat to a lot of new and old faces and will be sharing these interviews with you in the coming weeks. To give you a small idea of some of the things you can look forward to we'll be bringing you our first conversation with Oliver Mauss, the new CEO of 1&1, and his new vision for the company, discussions with Paul Hirsch about formulating the first association dedicated to the hosting industry, an interview with Sedo regarding the secondary domain market, and a rather unique and unprecedented interview with Microsoft about its recent Hyper-V technology release and goals with cloud computing (you'll know what I mean by unique when you see it...think Xbox).

To begin, here's some feedback from the exhibitors and attendees from HostingCon 2008.