Make way for AdTech 2006 in San Francisco

If media, marketing and technology are your thing, then AdTech 2006 in San Francisco should have something good in store for you.

Their sales pitch announces quite a few buzzwords you may find enticing:

"Connecting Globally: Markets in Motion. Widen your circle of influence and expand your vision. Listen to speakers from around the world, view the latest marketing technology and delve into the details with global case studies and market research. Fuel your entry into foreign lands with multi-cultural marketing and onto new platforms with our hands-on demo sessions."

From April 26-28, 2006, Frisco’s Moscone Center will be visited by a mix of CEOs, CMOs, Marketing Executives, Brand Managers, Ad Executives, Media Directors, Buyers, Planners, Product Managers, Solutions Providers and last but not least, Creative Directors.

If you’re not able to join the West Coast crowd, perhaps another edition of AdTech might be best for you, such as Chicago, New York City, London, Shanghai or Syndney.

Visit the Czech Republic for XML Prague 2006

XML Prague is a regular conference on XML for developers, web designers, information managers and students, focusing this year on XML Native Databases and Querying XML.

It has been announced that a full day of experts speaking has now been extended with an additional day dedicated for participants to hold related BoF sessions and workshops.

Here’s the current list of sessions:

Conference Talks (Saturday 17th June)

• xq2xml: transformations on XQueries, David Carlisle
• Index-driven XQuery processing in the eXist XML database, Wolfgang Meier
• XML/RDF Query By Example, Eric van der Vlist
• Optimization in XSLT and XQuery, Michael Kay
• Text Processing through to XML, David Pawson
• XML Data – The Current State of Affairs, Kamil Toman, Irena Ml??nkov?°
• The road to an XSLT/XQuery IDE, George Cristian Bina

Workshops/BOFs (Sunday 18th June)

• First eXist Workshop, Wolfgang Meier
• DocBook BoF, Jirka Kosek

If you manage web sites and you like XML’s powerful and highly extendable capabilities, this is an event you should attend, especially if you’re based in Europe.

Clients suffer from NetSol’s outage

Yesterday, Wednesday April 5th, 2006, Reston, VA based Network Solutions suffered its second outage in just a few days.

This problem is said to have lasted 2 hours. It means thousands of clients couldn’t manage their web sites.

It seems the Sawis ISP might be to blame since this could all be related to the fact it was hit by a global outage. At this point, it’s hard to figure exactly how many Sawis customers were affected.

Sawis hasn’t commented on the problem while NetSol has stated that its service is now back running normally.

InfoWorld has more details on this outage. 

Domains about mobile applications are valuable

Mobile technologies are changing the lives of hundreds of millions of workers, around the world. As such, related domain names have significantly gained value.

Not too far back, last year to be precise, the “cellphones.com” domain name was sold for 4.2 million dollars by its original owner who initially got a hold of it for only 90$, in 1996.

Last month, the “buywireless.com” moniker raked in a healthy five figure compensation to its previous owner, according to Scott Goldman, previously CEO of the WAP Forum and also a consultant known to enjoy deeply rooted contacts in the wireless world.

Domain names have turned into the cornerstone of any well-thought project, online and off (with some exceptions). Corporate plans and marketing identities have a better feel when accompanied by strong domains.

This is even more critical for wireless-centric companies who have assited to a giant shift from “old media” marketing to the web based counterpart. The rise of wireless devices adds even more significance to quality domain names.

Scott Goldman is currently auctioning “gowireless.com” and expects to bank a record price for this obviously enviable domain name. The opening price is 50K$ and the auction is stated to end on April 13th, 2006.

The current owner has clearly stated the name’s high value reminding potential bidders that “It’s direct, precise, descriptive and memorable”.

Wow! Quite a sales pitch, indeed!

In your opinion, how much is “gowireless.com” worth?

Michael Palage quits from ICANN

Michael Palage was selected for the ICANN Board by the Generic Names Supporting Organisation.

His term was intended to end six months after the conclusion of ICANN’s annual meeting in 2007.

Claiming that he’d be able to do more from outside ICANN, he decided to quit.

Michael Palage was a member of ICANN since April 2003 and appeared unable to resolve internal conflicts with other board members to the point he went on to state: “I have been unable to actively participate. I had the ability to contribute, but have not been able to meaningfully do so”. That must’ve been frustrating, indeed.

This event comes at a time when ICANN is under considerable pressure from the rest of the world over its largely criticized US-centric approach to the internet.

Michael Palage doesn’t intend on fading away into oblivion. He want to continue advising big ticket ISP clients on their domain name decisions.

The Register has an excellent article on Michael Palage’s leave from ICANN, if you want more insight on this matter.