For the first time ever, I actually felt like I was at a conference even though I wasn’t. I’m referring to the GigaOm produced event called Structure 2010. Having attended the first two events, exceptionally staged by pal Surj Patel with key moderation by Om Malik, one of my regrets for traveling to Europe this past Friday was that I would miss what I feel is a seminal event that defines where the future of IT services is heading. Unfortunately my “client work” comes first so while we have a few companies with their head in the cloud (Califlower, Thomas Howe’s Light & Electric, xConnect, Voxbone, Arcot Systems, IfByPhone, HiDef Conferencing by Citrix Online and others) which were not at this year’s event, that didn’t mean I didn’t want to know what was being said.
Between LiveStream’s streaming and the impeccable coverage on the web by the GigaOm team I really felt like I was there. Take a look at the LaunchPad event and get the feeling you’re there. While far away, the presentations are the same for me, as they are for the attendees. Maybe better.
But it’s not just the streaming based coverage that rocked. So does the session by session coverage that was being posted in almost real time. These summaries, like the one on the Future of Cloud Computing penned by Matthew Ingram, is a brilliant synopsis of the session that one can view via the LiveStream video coverage.
In a note to Om and Surj earlier this morning, their evening yesterday, I wrote:
Having just read through the GigaOm site this AM here in Spain, the coverage of the sessions looks great and clearly has set the new standard for how conferences and events staged by media companies should be covered.
Bravo!
Granted I’m biased. I serve on the advisory board of GigaOmni Media-to be totally transparent–but regardless I still would have felt the same way. What GigaOm did yesterday with Structure 2010 is brought to the industry a new and better way to communicate to the audience there and far, far away using a true multimedia approach to the coverage.
Well done folks…I almost felt like I was there.