I attended the 3rd annual Internet Summit in Raleigh on November 17 and 18 2010 at the massive Raleigh Convention Center in North Carolina. The themes of this year's conference were much of what you would expect from a Internet trends and "future gazing" expo: Cloud, Mobile, Social Media, Video, Real-time, Analytics and eCommerce. There was also an expo floor and start-up competition. The IBM Emerging Technology jStart team had a booth and was a conference sponsor. The intrepid leader of the jStart team, IBM Fellow Rod Smith, was a speaker on the Future of the Internet keynote panel on day one. He gave a great Big Data talk discussing Hadoop and BigSheets (Google also spoke here). I found that this was one of the most interesting future technology talks of the entire conference. It was interesting to attend the CIO perspectives panel and sparks flew in the Future of Cloud Computing panel which did not have IBM representation but was balanced fairly well by the outspoken Salesforce.com CTA (Chief Technical Architect?) and the even keeled well-spoken CIO of RedHat. There were comments in the panel about the big vendors "not getting it" but this was contradicted later by assertions that vendor lock-in is not a concern due to emerging standards and open APIs. I was a speaker on the three part Privacy and Security talk, where I shared online privacy implications and considerations from the user perspective for using social networks and location-based services. This is a hot topic given the focus on balancing facebook privacy and social media for business use; and the new LBS trend with smart phones. This session also featured great segments about corporate policy and legal oversight. Another topic that is especially important given IBM's bottom-up social media strategy for employee engagement and our new digital eminence focus is Online Reputation management. I attended a Social Media series but much of it was a rehash of long established best practices; I believe it needed to focus more deeply on practical case studies and ROI instead of theory. I'll admit there are many novices that still need primer information but I think we've moved past the "should we do it?" and "what tools should I try?" discussions and are now dealing with making "social" work in all disciplines of the business organization. All in all, it was a great conference that is really coming into it's own. There were about 1400 people in attendance. 

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Note: I live-blogged these sessions on my personal blog and I have linked here to my live-blog entries for each of these topics. The links will open in a new window for reading.