My introduction to this Fall ISPCON's program, and one of the sessions in the 9:00 a.m. opening slot, was a presentation delivered by Tom Millitzer – M&A expert, president of New Commerce Communications, WHIR blogger and all-around entertaining gentleman.

I have my suspicions as to the freshness of the material, which seemed like it may have included parts of previous presentations – not because it was dated, but because it was a very sort of general-purpose primer to buying and selling ISPs. Also, Tom said parts of it were from his presentation at FISPA last week.

But I've never seen Tom present at an event like this before, so the freshness of the material is really beside the point

The presentation, "Positioning Your Internet Company for Sale - and Making More Money," was, unsurprisingly, a discussion of the ins and outs of selling an Internet company. And Tom, who makes his living helping companies with this sort of transaction, makes it sound simple enough.

Rule number one, for instance, is "be honest." There's a process a buyer goes through, which he describes in a series of categories labeled: identify, qualify, value, negotiate, structure, validate, close, integrate.

Never having personally bought or sold a company, I am nevertheless able to make sense of those categories intuitively. As a seller (which we'll assume you are for the sake of this blog post), you'll want to make yourself apparent to the buyer as early in that process as possible – around the "identify" or "qualify" stage. That makes a lot of sense too.

In fact, the process of selling a company ends up sounding awfully similar to the process of selling a product. That is, you have to identify your buyer. You have to figure out exactly what it is they want. You have to work to position yourself in that light. And you have to put the product in front of that buyer in a way they're going to appreciate.

Interestingly, Tom says the "big secret" about this sort of acquisition (and I feel I should stress here that he made an awfully big deal about the secret) is that "greed tanks more deals than anything."

Tom says he's seen more deals fall apart as a result of either the buyer or the seller getting greedy (and it goes both ways, he says), than for any other reason.

In the seller's case, they may decide after negotiating a deal almost to its conclusion that they want to raise the price. Or they may assume too soon that they've concluded a deal that isn't quite done. 

For the buyer it's much the same. Greed, as he sees it, can mean becoming so enamored of the idea of being somebody who makes deals that they start pushing the price down just to see if they can do it.

The WHIR is here at ISPCON Fall 2007, and while things are just getting started around here, I thought I'd take the opportunity to offer a bit of an intro to our blog coverage of the event. Fall ISPCON is usually, in my experience anyway, held in Santa Clara. But this year's event is going on in San Jose itself. So far, I haven't felt the effect much more than in the form of a considerably shorter cab ride from airport to hotel. Score one for San Jose, I suppose. 

The venue - the San Jose McEnery Convention Center - seems a little more confined than last year's venue - the Santa Clara Convention Center. Whether that's good, bad or totally irrelevant remains to be seen. The exhibit hall is definitely smaller.

After a first pass through the session schedule, there are a few sessions I definitely intend to check out.

Tuesday I hope to be in attendance at (WHIR Blogger) Tom Millitzer's "Positioning Your Internet Company for Sale - and Making More Money," "Strategies for Growing your Hosting Business" with groupSPARK's Ravi Agarwal and EasyStreet's Rich Bader and the keynote "Neutrality's Linchpin, is Bandwidth a Commodity?" with Cogent's Dave Schaeffer. 

Actually, Tom's presentation has already happened, and I'll post more about it later.

On Wednesay, I hope to stop by the "Negotiating the SaaS Minefield" session with (WHIR blogger) David Snead at 8:45, the keynote "Beyond Hosting: Unlocking Profits with On Demand IT" with The Planet's Douglas Erwin, "Virtualization: The Need for Green Data Centers" with Acronis's Bob Thaler and "Guerilla Marketing for Service Providers" with Larry Loebig of the Guerilla Marketing Association. That's the plan as it stands right now, anyway, after that first pass. By all means, let me know if you think there's something can't-miss on the schedule. 

More to come from ISPCON, and if you're here at the show, hopefully we'll get a chance to meet you.

The big event, HostingCon 2007, started off today at Navy Pier in Chicago. It’s just a few hours into the show, but I thought I’d offer a heads up on what to watch for from theWHIR’s coverage of the event.

Mixed in with our regular daily news, we’ll be providing exclusive news from the event on our marketwatch page - including coverage of announcements made at HostingCon and our own mini-features on the event.

We’ll be updating our Flickr page all week with photos from the event - which ought to be interesting, because event organizers have built some cool Flickr and Twitter functions into the “HostingCon Information Network.” A set of monitors feeding information to various spots around the event will include a feed of Flickr photos tagged “HostingCon 2007.”

In fact, we’ve already begun posting photos:

Here’s a shot of booths being set up in preparation for the exhibit hall’s opening Tuesday. There appears to be a bit of an impromptu “biggest booth” contest going down between Microsoft and FastServers. I’ll be sure to post a better view once it’s a little less likely that something heavy will fall on me.

Registration was packed first thing this morning, but things seem to have thinned out a bit. It looks like HostingCon organizer George Roberts is blocked out of the shot by a post here. Probably not my finest composition.

You can keep track of our Flickr set here. We’ll try to keep updating as the event progresses.

Anastasia Tubanos will be updating the WHIRtv blog with video footage from the event, and I’ll be posting ideas here from conference sessions and conversations with industry executives.

If you’re at the event, there’s a pretty significant team from theWHIR in attendance. And we’re out to meet just about anybody we can. We’ll be around. And we’ll be sponsoring a networking lounge in the exhibition hall. Booth number 821. It’s quite huge and difficult to miss. So please stop by and say hi.