The problem with conference sponsors

Dustin Marx

One of the most significant stories leading up to last year's JavaOne was Google's withdrawing from participation. Although the conference turned out to be a huge success in terms of quantity and quality of technical content, this content would undoubtedly have been enhanced by the availability of Google-led presentations.

This is the first I have heard of this and obviously do not have any opinion about it; save that it illustrates one of the difficulties of working with sponsors.

Call for speakers and the day's Health IT news

The Healthcare IT Guy: Speakers needed for Business Intelligence & Analytics for Healthcare Conference & Exhibition (July 11-12 in San Diego)

Medgadget: Pathogen Covered Scrubs Bring Style to Your Clinic

EMR and HIPAA: Operating System of Healthcare IT

Healthcare Technology News: Direct Project Specifications Achieving Widespread Adoption: Could Positively Impact Care Coordination Soon for Millions of Americans

Via HITsphere

KM World: Call for Speakers

KM World 2011

November 1 - 3, 2011
Washington Marriott Wardman Park
Washington DC

By co-locating with Enterprise Search Summit Fall, Taxonomy Boot Camp and Sharepoint Symposium , KMWorld 2011 provides attendees with all the essential pieces of the information engine that powers today’s effective enterprise— including knowledge creation, publishing, sharing, finding, mining, reuse, and more. Well implemented and managed, these work together to enable business problem-solving, innovation, and achievement.

Mark Warner’s address to the Grow Smart Business Conference

Senator Warner began by saying “It is OK to leave your cell phones on, to me it sounds like money,” to appreciative laughter. Warner said his work at Nextel and Columbia Capital gave him some perspective on financial and business matters.

He began to describe where he thought the economy was at. Warner said we needed some financial re-regulation. He described himself as a new senator who “just got hired,” and that it had been a wild nine months. He characterized the recent actions of the federal government as extraordinary, and that few appreciated how close we came to a complete financial meltdown. Ugly and blunt instruments had halted a world wide recession. Warner said that never again should Americans hear too big to fail. While the stimulus was necessary, Warner said that it had been “mis-marketed.” On third of the stimulus is tax cuts, one third relief for the states and the remaining third is spending that offers a lot of opportunities, especially for small business.

Warner pointed out that while Virginia is one of the few remaining states with AAA bond rating; without the relief from the recent stimulus package Virginia’s finances would look like California. The economy is that bad.

Warner explained that the spending part of the stimulus consisted of grants and other incentives for smart grid, build out of broadband, high speed rail, and health care IT. He said that he was “disturbed” that the administration has not been faster in getting those dollars out.

Continuing to speak about the economy, Warner said that we had avoided complete disaster; but that we were not out of the woods. He repeated his earlier assertion that we need financial re-regulation; he did not appreciate how much excess and abuse there had been in the financial sector until the recent hearings before senate banking committee. While a fan of free market capitalism, Warner said that we need rules.

He said that small business faces tough times to get financing and that he would welcome ideas as to how to rebuild small business financing. He said that 89% job growth will come from small businesses if they can get financing.

Here, Warner began to talk about health care and said that both from a moral and economic view, “we have to get it done.” He predicted that without reform our health care system will collapse.

He jokingly described a town meeting in Fredericksburg, Virginia with “1800 of my closest friends.” He said that he had told the town meeting attendees, “You know Medicare if a government problem,” only to hear “NO it is not!” The senator lamented that you “can’t make progress with people like that.”

He said that we have to decrease out federal deficit; and that, “I hope that we can find a private market solution” to our health care problem. He expressed hope for a bipartisan solution but that he was a “little disappointed with colleagues on the other side” and that even in the absence of bipartisan support, “We still have to act.” .

The senator began to talk about health care IT, observing that technology has revolutionized every industry except health care. He said that the federal government needs to establish standards, going on the observe that federal standards had made the cell phone industry possible and that we needed federal standards for health care IT.

He reminded the audience of the obvious, that we need more transparency in health care. List prices have no real relation to what people are paying. Warner said that we need wellness and prevention programs. Some very large employers have wellness programs. The senator said that we should take the best practice models and make them more available. He suggested that large businesses should be able to open up their plans to their suppliers.

Warner said that tort reform should be part of the health care reform mix.

He reminded the audience of his work for the Virginia Health Care Foundation. It is devoted to helping those who cannot afford insurance, but whose incomes are too high to qualify for any public assistance.

Warner said that it was “important to make system work”,
observing that too grand a package could be too expensive. He said that we needed to change financial incentives. Our present systems rewards hospitals with high readmission rate. He said that instead of fee for service we need to move to a health care system that rewards value.

Video of Warner’s remarks.

Chris Anderson's address to the Grow Smart Business Conference

Chris Anderson gave the keynote address, characterizing our time as the golden age of small business. He considers that the Internet has so changed the distribution system, that niche markets have a chance to develop in a way that was not previously possible. By way of example he talked about watching Gilligan’s Island as a youngster. The show was such a huge hit that it was difficult not to believe that this is what Americans really wanted to watch. But as Anderson pointed out, this was the twentieth century’s confusion with supply and demand. Broadcast TV’s distribution system limits choice. The Internet shows that we are more diverse.

Anderson pointed out that the Internet has infinite shelf pace. Everything is out there and small businesses have the opportunity to appeal to long tail niche audiences. Consumers are not satisfied with what is on the shelf at Walmart, they want more choices. Markets are global and your customer can be anywhere.

He said that most of us live in both the head and the tail. Appealing to niche audiences can make you more profitable. Anderson observed that the Italian economy has excelled in producing small boutique companies with global impact.

He said that companies exist to minimize transaction costs; they aggregate people, supplies, and distribution. He called the twentieth century the era of big companies. The Internet has lowered transaction costs.

Here, Anderson began to talk about his experience as an entrepreneur. He pointed out that the Internet offers us the opportunity to find the smartest people in the world. He offered his opinion that the passionate amateur was more valuable than the bored professional.

While working on his robotics company Anderson searched the Internet to discoverer everyone who was writing about robotics. He discovered that the ideal candidate for his company turned out to be a nineteen year old high school drop out, describing the young man’s expertise as a Google Ph.D.. He said this illustrated the “meritocracy of the Internet.”

Anderson allowed that big companies do some things magnificently. He said that small companies can move quickly; but have trouble scaling up.
The moment you go on the Internet, you are a global company. With Paypal you can accept business from anywhere, you can, as it were, box above your weight.

He said that the Web is a good place to do business with suppliers. Three guys with laptops can be a hardware company. He offered the sad tale of the man who invented intermittent windshield wipers as an example. He was in the middle of building his factory when he discovered that the Auto companies had stolen his idea from him. Nowadays you would simply use the Internet to locate a manufacturer and get your order for wipers before risking your capital.

At this point Anderson began to discuss the evolution of the free economy. He told the story of Jello, how the manufacturer had given away free cook books filled with recipes based on Jello and then took product to the local store and persuaded the local store owner to stock some Jello, based on the demand the cook books were sure to generate.

Anderson said that the “power of free” allows consumers to experience products for free. The minority pays for majority. Google takes profits from one product (advertising) to subsidize its free products.

He said that freemium is the inversion of old free sample give away. The freemium model gives out 90% of the product and charges for 10%. Freemium sells itself; the consumer experiences the product before they pay and is sure they want it. The challenge is to properly define the free/paid divide.

Microsoft enterprise software is free to small business and paid to big business. Clearly, the idea is that as the small business grows to a large business it will pay for Microsoft because it likes the product.

Microsoft got the idea from Chinese pirates. Microsoft realized that in a developing country like China, if software pirates were going to steal software, it is better that they steal your software. The music industry failed to understand this, and lost the opportunity to control their industry. The video game industry is moving to the freemium model, and here Anderson described his son's fascination with the Club Penguin. Anderson suggested that the freemium model could work well for health care IT. We could have information driven health care, only going to doctors for the big things.

Free: The Past and Future of a Radical Price by Chris Anderson

Network Solutions Grow Smart Business Conference

Congratulations to the entire Network Solutions team for putting on one of the best conferences ever. The conference was devoted to small business and it was full of practical tips. As befits an Internet company, much of the discussion surrounded the ways small businesses can use the Internet.

Clearly designed as a product launch, the conference introduced Network Solutions products and services for small business. Wisely, Network Solutions commissioned a survey of small businesses to discover their problems, and how successful companies were solving those problems. Network Solutions took that data and built a product based on their research. Having built their product, they designed a spectacular conference as a launch vehicle (this is the sort of thing big business can do well if they so choose).

Network Solutions’ small business package will be available at end of October. It will provide professional looking websites for a very competitive price. I predict they will do extremely well with it.

Roy Dunbar opens the conference.

VP Biden to announce 1.2 billion in grants for EHR

Biden to announce Thursday nearly $1.2 billion to promote electronic medical records system

WASHINGTON (AP) — Vice President Joe Biden plans to announce Thursday nearly $1.2 billion in grants to help hospitals transition to electronic medical records.

HHS expected to announce state health IT funding

The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act provided the Office of the National Coordinator $2 billion to promote the meaningful use of health IT. Up to $300 million was intended to help establish state HIEs; another share would fund regional training centers to help physicians and hospitals incorporate health IT into their practices.

There will be a conference next month on how to get the benefit of the stimulus to pay for your EHR program.

Coming next week, Alice Marshall, live, in concert!

I will be presenting at next week's Social Media for DoD and Government conference:

Workshop B: Make Your Friends Online Before You Need Them

New media offers more opportunities than ever to place stories. Your public is probably constantly talking about your office or service on email discussion lists, blogs, wikis, social tagging sites and the like. On the other hand, the online world can be a brutal place, and controversies can bubble up from nowhere. Rumor control can often depend on establishing credibility before a controversy erupts. Learn how your employees and partners can be your best ambassadors in these situations, how to develop guidelines, and how to turn blogging pitfalls or challenges to your advantage.

I am very nervous, the other speakers are top in their fields.

Call for Participation: XML-in-Practice 2009 Conference

IDEAlliance

IDEAlliance cordially invites you to participate at the world’s longest-running conference devoted to Markup and XML. XML-in-Practice 2009 offers an unparalleled opportunity to connect and apply the learning from leaders in government, publishing, business, healthcare, and technology.

This year's conference will provide two full days of program that will focus on XML in three key areas:

• XML in eGovernment
• XML In Publishing & eMedia
• XML Foundations, Applications, and Interoperability

XML in Practice will showcase real world applications and solutions that XML has enabled, enhanced and or made possible. In addition, and as is tradition with the IDEAlliance XML Conference, the foundations, applications and interoperability track will offer topics with sufficient technical depth to explore pressing issues beyond the fundamentals.

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Important Dates

• Abstracts due: May 8
• Notification: May 25
• Program Posted: June 1
• Presentations Due: September 15

• 
  

Call for papers: NSF Cyberinfrastructure Software Sustainability Workshop

Announcement

Venue: University Place Conference Center on the Indiana University Purdue University Indianapolis campus in Indianapolis, Indiana.

Workshop dates: 26-27 March 2009 (informal reception on evening of 25 March)

Paper submission deadline: 20 February 2009 (for invitation); 25 March (to contribute content)

Why “Balisage”? Because that’s the way we say “Markup” in Montréal!

Call for Participation
Balisage: The Markup Conference 2009

Balisage is a peer reviewed conference designed to meet the needs of markup theoreticians and practitioners who are pushing the boundaries of the field. It's all about the markup: how to create it; what it means; hierarchies and overlap; modeling; taxonomies; transformation; query, searching, and retrieval; presentation and accessibility; making systems that make markup dance (or dance faster to a different tune in a smaller space) — in short, changing the world and the web through the power of marked-up information.

When:

August 11 — 14, 2009
August 10, 2009 — International Symposium on Processing XML Efficiently

Where:

Montréal, Canada

To Participate

We welcome papers about topic maps, document modeling, markup of overlapping structures, ontologies, metadata, content management, and other markup-related topics at Balisage. If you want to talk, in detail, XML, XSL, SGML, LMNL, XSL-FO, XTM, RDF, XQuery, Topic Maps, SVG, MathML, OWL, UBL, XSD, TexMECS, RNG, or any other markup-related topic, we urge you to participate in Balisage.

How:

Submit full papers in XML to info@balisage.net
Guidelines, DTDs, schemas, and details at http://www.balisage.net/submissions.html

Apply to the Peer Review panel

Schedule:

15 March 2009 — Peer Review Applications Due
24 April 2009 — Paper Submissions Due
22 May 2009 — Speakers Notified
17 July 2009 — Revised Papers Due
10 August 2009 — Processing Symposium
11–14 August 2009 — Balisage: The Markup Conference

Please help us make Balisage: The Markup Conference exciting and lively. See you in Montréal!

Coming attractions: XML-In-Practice 2008

Next week's GHQ for XML affectionados, Marriott Crystal Gateway, Arlington, VA




I am pleased to report that XML-In-Practice 2008 has given me press credentials. Bob DuCharme has written an excellent preview. I plan to cover the presentation of the use of XML by the Associated Press and US News & World Report's presentation on PRISM for Metadata.

Here are the schedules for Tuesday and Wednesday (scroll down). If readers have any views on what they would like to read about, please leave word in the comments.

Call for Papers: 2009 multi-conference

PromoteResearch.org

The 2009 multi-conference (MULTICONF-09) in computer science, information technology, computer engineering, computational science, control and automation technology will be held during July 13-16, 2009 in Orlando, FL, USA. The venue details will be announced later on.

Click on the following links for more information about MULTICONF-09:

International Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Pattern Recognition (AIPR-09)

International Conference on Automation, Robotics and Control Systems (ARCS-09)

International Conference on Bioinformatics, Computational Biology, Genomics and Chemoinformatics (BCBGC-09)

International Conference on Enterprise Information Systems and Web Technologies (EISWT-09)

International Conference on High Performance Computing, Networking and Communication Systems (HPCNCS-09)

International Conference on Information Security and Privacy (ISP-09)

International Conference on Recent Advances in Information Technology and Applications (RAITA-09)

International Conference on Software Engineering Theory and Practice (SETP-09)

International Conference on Theory and Applications of Computational Science (TACS-09)

International Conference on Theoretical and Mathematical Foundations of Computer Science (TMFCS-09)

Call for Papers: DC BSDCon 2009

TaoSecurity

I was pleased to hear from Jason Dixon, who told me that he is organizing DC BSDCon 2009 on 4 and 5 February 2009 at the Washington Marriott Wardman Park. This is right before ShmooCon 2009 and has been coordinated with that group.

DC BSDCon has a call for papers open until 1 December, with selections announced on 15 December. I will probably submit a presentation.

Call for Speakers: Enterprise Search Summit 2009

Deadline November 10, 2008

We are now accepting proposals to speak at Enterprise Search Summit 2009, which will be held May 12-13 in New York. (Pre-conference sessions May 11). Click here to submit a proposal. The deadline for submitting proposals is November 10, 2008.

New Media for Small Business video conference

Small business video conference from Network Solutions

Network Solutions is producing the Solutions Stars Video Conference on October 29 at 1 p.m. This free video conference aims to provide insights and online marketing tips to small businesses. It will be of great service to small businesses, particularly now that the economy has gotten tough, and it’s not as easy to attend a conference in person.

They have a great line up, check it out.

Malware Challenge

Technical OSINT innovation contest: the 2008 Malware Challenge

While the worlds of most OSINT analysts do not typically overlap with those working in the more rarified fields of digital network intelligence, forensic analysis, and network warfare, there are a highly specialized subset that may be interested in testing their skills as part of a challenge of their own. While clearly not as high profile as the recent DNI OSINT contest, the 2008 Malware Challenge promises interesting responses of its own.

Malware Challenge

The 2008 Information Security Summit

FOSE 2009 Open for Registration

FOSE 2009 is Open for Registration. Are you planning to exhibit? If so, NOW is the time to plan your FOSE publicity effort. Reporters appointment books fill up months in advance.

MySQL Conference Opens its Call for Papers

MySQL Conference & Expo

Sun and O'Reilly Media are looking for great presenters for the 2009 MySQL Conference & Expo, scheduled for April 20-23, in Santa Clara, California.

Deadline runs through midnight October 22, 2008.

Cloud Computing Expo 2009, call for Papers

SYS-CON's Cloud Computing Expo 2009 East in NYC: Call for Papers Now Open

SYS-CON Events, producer of Cloud Computing Expo 2009 East, to be held March 22-24, 2009, in New York City, announces that its Call for Papers is now open. Topics include all aspects of providing or using massively scalable IT-related capabilities as a service using Internet technologies...

Call for Papers Deadline - October 15, 2008