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Why do we attend conferences should be a very easy question to answer and I was quite surprised when I was asked this question at this year’s cPanel Conference (though I think I will call it Bootcamp since that sounds far more fitting) in Houston. The logic follows that we have dozens of tools for instance communication to just about anywhere in the world. We have networking sites, voice and video phone, instant messenger, forums, micro blogging, hundreds of methods for delivering and receiving information of others so why for all that is wholesome and wondrous in the world, why oh why do we need conferences?

Okay so the question wasn’t asked quite like that, but work with me on this one.

There are three basic answers that you will get if you ask attendees this question. They are honestly fairly boring answers and can probably be rebutted with some piece of technology. They are  to learn, to network, to be a part of a community. Well here is an easy reply:

To Learn: Buy a book, get a DVD, watch a webinar. Chances are you will learn more from a book that provides you with say 40 hours worth of information then a conference session which gives less than an hour.

To Network: You want to be a part of a network why not use LinkedIn, use Facebook, bombard industry blogs and even try to get hired on as a blog writer. Then open dialogues using Skype or IM and have a blast.

For Community: Spam the forums, get a blog. Pay attention to others in your industry and help out where ever you can and you too will be a part of the community.

Technology’s answers to conferences, have fun, see you later….

But then again I don’t give easy replies. Let me be blunt, if you are not going to ask questions of a speaker during a session, if you are not going to try to get hands on one-on-one face time with experts; you are seriously wasting your time. If all you are going to do is passive learning during training sessions, buy yourself a book and save a few thousand.

However, there are things you can do at a conference you simply can’t do online. Sure you can pop on a few of the network sites, but how is the interaction? You can of course participate online at all sorts of community websites, but the opportunity for light conversation, the type of things you talk about over dinner or a beer, well you can just forget about.

One of the problems with online conferences is that you lose the small talk side of networking. And some people may consider that a waste but I beg to differ. It is small talk that builds the personal connection between you and someone else and forms the basis of all successful business networking opportunities.

Another thing people lose with online conference is the added energy you gain from being at a conference. Let’s face it conferences are located in tourist areas cause they are like mini-vacations. I find myself working a great deal at conferences, lots of writing, preparing, etc., but even for me the change of scenery does your mind good. I find some of my best ideas come during or not long after a conference. In fact, they leave me energized even though I am completely worn out and tired. There is a level of inspiration we can gain from conferences as well. I can’t even begin to count the amount of times I was getting a bite to eat with fellow attendees and we began discussing something mundane that ended up translating to technological practicality and before you know it the conversation becomes a full blown debate as to how automation will actually increase the amount of employment opportunities in the IT field.

Online conferences and networking opportunities often feel rather clinical to me because of the lack of, well that sense of connection. It is one of the reasons why I enjoy cPanel’s Bootcamp. cPanel gives you the sessions, all quite good if you want technical detail, but the networking events are extremely good.

So why do we attend conferences? There is an element of interactivity when it comes to learning, but the big reason why conferences work is because of the connection, the personal touch that can only be gained through face to face contact.

From Web Host Blog

I have read so many articles on how Ellison’s grab of former HP CEO Hurd and latest round of insults is a none too subtle jab at HP letting them know in the words of a famous cartoon duck, “This means war!”

Well golly gee commentators you think HP didn’t know this as soon as Oracle snatched up Hurd? Which brings me to a great article written by Rob Enderle at TechNewsWorld (”HP: Finally Some Heroics in a Corporate Boardroom“). He is pretty much saying what I have been thinking… which is kind of freaky. Let me explain. No, that will take too long. Let me sum up.

Oracle goes for blood, they always have, always will. Probably the only thing I actually like about them honestly, but perhaps another time on that. The second Oracle began making overtures towards Hurd, which was not long after Larry Ellison basically called HP idiots for firing Hurd, HP understood that there would be something ugly between them and Oracle.

Which defined their CEO choice. Despite of what you might have read in other articles, Leo Apotheker (former CEO of SAP for almost 20 years) is not a failure. Oracle has a history of killing companies such as PeopleSoft and they are highly effective at it. Despite that SAP still continues to do business. Sure they are not an absolute dynamo running Oracle under the ground, but I challenge any CEO to do a better job at handling the competition from Oracle like Apotheker did.

And now, after investing a large part of his life in SAP, he is jobless. He’s pissed and that anger is directed at Oracle. If my company was in a war against Oracle, I don’t think there is a better choice than Apotheker. But then again that’s just me.

From Web Host Blog

I am getting tired of all the crying over the court decision that said the FCC doesn’t have the authority to enforce net neutrality. Gee golly, I didn’t see this coming a mile away.

Heck think about this for one second. Congress couldn’t pass net neutrality through so the FCC figures what the hell let’s give it a shot. Does anyone see the fact that this was designed to circumvent actual elected officials and disenfranchise the citizens of the US (regardless if it is a good idea or not). The fact that what they did was unconstitutional should not come as a surprise. The FCC does not have legislative powers. They cannot create laws cause they feel like it. Nor can they enforce rules that they themselves come up with. The authority they have comes from what Congress gives them not from what they decide to give themselves. I am sure in hindsight people will breathe a sigh of relief.

I am also tired of hearing people say this is a setback. This whole thing was never a step forward for net neutrality so its failure is not a step back. If you want net neutrality petition Congress. Until that time however do what is your right to do, SUE! This isn’t a case of McDonalds making hot coffee and oops I dropped it on my lap cause I have the muscular control of an addled toddler (probably from eating too much fast food in the first place). No, instead it is the precise reason why litigation was created.

If your ISP is throttling your connection, or banning you from use either do what Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. did and boycott or instead file a class action lawsuit. We have ways for punishing moronic companies already in place. Both require you to act.

Now if you would rather sit around and cry about how some big bad company is screwing you over, by all means do so. If you do not wish to act and use the thousands of laws already in place to empower you over businesses, then by all means do so. But don’t expect me to listen or care.

I have a deep respect for Apple products in that their ease of use and design is exceptional. When I look at the iPad I see an idea, not yet fully formed, but it is that idea that will become a game changing device for business. The most exciting software programs these days are mainly cloud applications, hosted applications, remote applications, etc. in short, vendors are pushing mobile.

The other day  I talked about how mobile devices have not forced a change in business culture. This I think is where the iPad comes in. I saw this change happen a long time ago with CD-Roms and a game called Myst. CD-Roms required a vehicle to become accepted by the computer using crowd and they found it in games like Myst and 7th Guest. What’s funny to me is that it not the iPad per se that is catalyst.

Like the bubonic plague that ravaged Europe centuries ago, the problem was not the rats. The rats were merely the carriers of the fleas. What makes the iPad viral (see what I did there… yeah ok it was a bad segue) is not the iPad, but the fact that it carries the Apps Store. It is the Apps Store that will show mobile PC users exactly what they can do with their devices. For instance, PocketCloud. The ability for a person to access their computer from their iPad (or iPhone, if you have masochistic tendencies as far as operating a huge virtual desktop using a tiny little monitor) is incredible.

When you factor in some of the changes iPhone OS 4 will bring to the table, the impact iPad will have on the market will increase. Now I don’t think iPad will create a market as vast and powerful as the iPhone or the iPod have. I do however strongly believe that the iPad will showcase why we have mobile computers and what sort of applications were meant to run on them. And this is why iPad is a game changer. Not because of its feature list (or depending on who you talk to the lack thereof), but on its ability to define a market, which will only get more and more pronounced as the weeks go by.

I realize that there is a growing trend for mobilizing the work force, but no one has told me why this has become an all encompassing necessity for business. We have PDAs, smartphones, cellphones, UMPCs, Tablet PCs, laptops, netbooks, portable media players, PNDs, readers, and I imagine the iPad will open a new category of hybrids, looking at Microsoft’s Courier, this is already coming to pass. We have a huge amount of devices to service how much of the workforce? Where are the killer business apps that are mobile only? Which employees really need to be mobile?

First let’s get rid of the obvious, if your job means you are away from any sort of office type location (be it a corporate building or your own home office), then mobile of course is right for you. However, of those types of jobs that do require travel, how much travel has been reduced by things such as video conferencing, online collaboration software, and the like? Those who do face to face sales, how many require instant access to real time inventory data at the moment of sale as opposed to going into the meeting already knowing the information you need?

Customer support? No, customer support is best served at ground zero. No need for mobile tech there (unless of course you do onsite support). Engineers, technicians, mechanics? Maybe, but most engineers I’ve known will write out ideas on anything they can get their hands on or use the audio message recorder most cells have. Techs and mechanics, like customer support, do a better job with all their tools in front of them and the device that needs to be worked on is physically at hand.

I have been reading statistics on why every business needs to go mobile and the bulk of them center on the premise that the mobile market is huge, selling hundreds of thousands of units each month, which means your competitors are buying. And if they are buying you need  to buy too or get left behind! Oh really? I have some six or seven mobile devices I use (what can I say I love technology), but for day-to-day use I use only one of them. In fact, for the most part, even with all the travel I do, the amount of use I get out of the mobile devices is probably about 20 work days per year. This is of course where I absolutely need them and can’t use my desktop computer or my office computer. Now if I didn’t travel a lot, if I didn’t need to go to conferences and the like I wouldn’t need any mobile device to do my job. Sure, they are nice I could go outside and write if I liked (which I do on occasion), but I don’t need to go mobile.

The one area where I can see mobile devices consistently increasing productivity is by replacing the clipboard. In fact, any instance that requires a clipboard (inventory tallies for instance… which I seriously hope people are not still using paper for this but I know that hope is in vain) could do better with a mobile device.

A few weeks ago when I was making changes to this blog, I had to use my cell phone to do it. I did everything I would normally do from my desktop using my cell. It took a while since I can’t just type at super speed on the phone, but I was thankful for the device. That is when it hit me. Businesses like mobile cause it means they can make their salaried employees work during their off time. A while back, when you left the office, that was it, work was done. Even if you took some work home with you, you can work on it at a leisurely pace. Now with all the devices we have, we pretty much take the full offices with us. I was having lunch with a friend of mine and he got a call saying the servers are down, fix it. Although he was not working, he immediately used his cell to check the server and reboot it. Heck who needs to hire more employees when you can have all your current staff on call 24 hours a day 7 days a week? Just pay them an annual salary and you have an offices of slaves at your beck and call.

Will this stop me from buying mobile devices? Course not. But let’s be real here, the uses for mobile devices is far less than the hype. In order for a device to truly change the workplace two things must happen: 1) that device must have something nothing else has, it must have a killer app 2) that device must be able to force change on business culture. Mobile devices do neither of these.

You might have noticed a few problems over the last few weeks. The blog had some downtime. This was compounded on top of other problems like the RSS feed having moments were it would work and then stop working. Or posts that would go online and then would suddenly disappear. These problems began to escalate near the end of this month and so I made a decision to update the blog and switch providers.

The big push was for stability. So I moved the blog to WebHostMagazine’s servers. As you can see this site is hosted by Layered Tech. We run a number of sites from our servers here and we have never had any downtime, so that part is now covered. We updated to a newer version of WordPress. And of course with the new version I added a lot of new toys.

This site is using the Flexx theme layout, which is absolutely amazing. It is the type of control I have been waiting for, for a long time in a non-custom backend. And we have a few widgets I would like to give a plug to, Meta SEO Pack, I haven’t seen a better SEO plugin for WordPress. A lot of the things I had to do by hand are fully automated so hats off to the creator. You will notice we kept the AJAX calender plugin, it’s still my favorite blog calendar, and I have done a lot of looking in that department. Lastly we added the Configurable Tag Cloud, which is another best of. I have not seen a more customizable (and easily customizable) tag cloud around. So special thanks to all of the creators of the wonderful plugins as well as the theme.

So what’s next? Well there are a lot of blogs that did not get published in March, so I will be putting them online as well as newer blogs.  I think that’s about it. Oh yeah, there will be a few surprises I have for the new blog so stay tuned.

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