Related link: http://ao2003.com

Just came back from the AlwaysOn Innovation Summit
organized by a team around Tony
Perkins of Red Herring fame. He set the tone in his opening remarks: "Consumers
and businesses have an insatiable need and drive to be always on." (One
commented that the real money will be made in 10 years, once the promise of
AlwaysOn is fulfilled via getting people off, giving them back anonymity :-)

Consistent with the always on theme they used an interesting mix of cutting edge
conference technology:

The whole event got webcasted and all sessions will be archived.
Kudos to AlwaysOn and their sponsors
for offering that service for free to the online world. (Registration required).

Wifi throughout the conference, which after a rocky start enabled the people
on the floor to have an eye on and participate in the webcast chat, as well as
being distracted by their inbox and the Internet. Once in a while the chat was
also projected to one of the big screen on the floor.

Online polls, where the goal is to bring in the opinion of the online users as well
as the audience via the Wifi connection. Not sure whether it was the questions,
but it felt a bit forced and wasn’t really enhancing the panels.

Conference Wiki, (What is a Wiki)
was a bit hidden in the webcast window. I personally love the possibility of
enhancing a conference by changing an area of its web page on the fly. I think
Wikis will blossom in the next years, as soon as more people understand and
then use them. Check the list of other conference bloggers, I discovered Tim
Oren’s Due Diligence there.

Maybe I was still jet lagged, having just returned from Germany, or other
things were on my mind, but after the webcast was in full swing I had problems
taking notes while following the panels, the chat and vote in the polls.

Everyone has to find his own comfort level of how many things can happen simultaneously
while they still get the most out of an event. You need the discipline
to shut certain things off that go beyond your threshold.

All that said, I wouldn’t want to live without any of these technologies at a
conference, only some fine tuning is needed.