Category: Conference

Heading to EnergyCamp and Interop

EnergyCamp and Interop and on in Las Vegas at the end of the month.

Via James Governor, David Berlind very generously extended an invitation to me to come along to these conferences.

EnergyCamp should be very interesting as it will be the first unconference around Green IT issues as far as I am aware.

Interop also has a Green IT track which has a session on Green data centres. Given the work we have done on this in CIX, I’m really looking forward to this.

Le Web3 2007 – a big hit!

After last year’s Le Web3 experience, my expectations for this year’s Le Web3 were very low!

However, Loic, the conference’s organiser obviously took all of the criticisms of last year’s conference on board and delivered a fantastic conference this time out.

The talks were great, the venue was perfect, the food was delicious, and the networking opportunities were tremendous. I had conversations with Michael Arrington, Robert Scoble, Marc Canter, Stephanie Booth, Hans Rosling, Loic, Lee Wilkins, JP Rangaswami, Doc Searls, Laura Fitton, Dave Sifry, Jeff Clavier, Martin Varsavsky, Dave Weinberger, Om Malik, Rodrigo Sepulveda and many more too numerous to mention.

There were one or two minor issues, the wifi was poor but as Loic had contracted and paid Swisscom to make that work the fault for that is squarely on their shoulders.

From a speakers’ perspective I was surprised that the organisation charged with the AV only had a single wireless mic. This delayed my getting onstage as I had to wait while Janus Friis came offstage and had his mic removed before I could mic up and go on. Even more incredibly though, the AV crowd didn’t have a wireless ‘clicker’ to move the slides forward! This meant that I had to stand at the podium pressing the right-arrow key on my laptop to move the slides on! I like to walk around when I am giving a talk so this really interfered with my ability to be natural onstage.

Other than those minor issues, the conference was a roaring success. I didn’t hear any delegates say that they were disappointed that they had attended.

Kudos to Loic, Geraldine, Cathy Burke and their team.

Off to Le Web3

I’m heading to the Le Web3 conference this week to deliver a talk on using technology (energy demand management) to reduce carbon footprints.

This comes from our work in CIX on delivering a hyper energy-efficient data centre and my working with Synergy Module (an energy management startup).

If you are going to the Le Web3 conference, I’d love to meet up. Drop me a mail (tom@tomrafteryit.net) or send me a text (+353-86-384 0828).

Conferences can be fun!

I am back in Cork after the Eventoblog conference in Seville over the weekend.

Now I am helping with last-minute preparations for the it@cork conference. It is on this coming Wednesday and it is going to be a real ‘wow!’ event. Apart from the incredible speakers that are lined up, the delegate list is like a who’s who of the techosphere in Ireland. The networking opportunities are going to be superb.

If you plan on going and you haven’t registered yet, do it asap in case you unwittingly miss out!

The Eventoblog conference was great. I didn’t understand most of the talks (my excuse is that they were in Spanish!!!) but I had a fantastic time meeting the Spanish blogging community and the social events which were laid on were excellent.

I’m slightly less terrified about moving to Spain now!

[Disclosure – I’m the Chair of the it@cork conference organising committee]

In Seville for EBE 07

I arrived in Seville early this morning for the Eventoblog España 07 (EBE) conference.

My old friend Shel Israel is here with with his (much) better half Paula! Shel is presenting at the conference. I’m really looking forward to catching up with them socially as well as professionally.

This next few days will also be very useful for house hunting and networking for when we move here permanently next year.

Posting will be light for the rest of the week I suspect!

Heading to Eventoblog España

I’m headed to Eventoblog España (EBE07) in Seville on November 23rd-25th.

I’m really looking forward to it, though it will be a bit daunting as most of the program is in Spanish!

This is the second year this event has been run. I spotted it last year when Matt Mullenweg mentioned that he was going to be speaking at it. I didn’t go then because of my lack of Spanish but I did help secure Microsoft’s sponsorship of last year’s conference.

Considering we are moving to Seville next year, this is an important one for me to attend.

As of last Saturday 866 people had signed up to go so it looks like it will be a great event.

If you are going too, why not leave a comment here and we can arrange to meet up.

Java Conference

I have just seen the line-up for IrishDev’s Java Conference and it is extremely impressive.

The conference is on in Dublin on November 7th and has speakers from Apache, Sun, Iona, JBoss, Oracle, and Microsoft amongst others.

Kudos to Fergal and the guys in IrishDev for organising what looks like will be a phenomenal day out for anyone with any interest in Java.

Phew!

These next few weeks and months are manic busy.

I think I need to clone me!