Over the last few days I’ve been watching a frustrated twitter stream from presenters and attendees at the Web 2.0 Expo in Berlin. Apparently there has been plenty of WiFi downtime. You would think an organization like O’Reilly, who actually own the web 2.0 brand when it comes to running conferences, would make sure that the twitter crowd (or tweeple) and the blogging fraternity were well served with access and bandwidth. Sadly this is the norm for almost every technology conference I’ve attended in the last year or more. Most recently at last week’s SAP TechEd 2008 in Berlin there were several periods where the WiFi service disappeared, frustrating the bloggers, analysts and press. There was good service with direct wire connections in the blogger and press rooms, but being able to connect from anywhere is essential, both for the people present, and for those of us watching vicariously. For example this morning I could see JP Rangaswami’s slides that had been loaded up in advance of his session “Web 2.0 vs. the Water Cooler: How Web 2.0 Has Changed the Way We Communicate at Work”. Although I wasn’t there, I was able to follow the #w2eb twitter stream while working in a café in Broadwick Street, Soho and get live commentary from people like @elsua, @elsuacon, @frogpond and @lisaharris. Thank heaven it was working today!
The only conference that has got it right that I’ve attended, spoken at or read about in the last 3 years is Ismael Ghalimi’s Office 2.0 Conference. Since the whole premise of the show is to live in the cloud for your office productivity and computing needs, it is logical that everyone attending would want to connect their laptop, netbook, BlackBerry or iPhone to record the event, so WiFi was top priority. In the main conference room there were WiFi repeater boxes on 5 foot stands at intervals down both sides of the room, and the same sort of set up covered all other presentation rooms and meeting areas. The conference was supplied with 40Mbs of bandwidth by laser connection from the conference hotel’s roof. The whole of this was organized, I understand, by Swiscom’s events division. The result - perfect WiFi that worked for everybody from everywhere throughout the event.
But that’s not all - how many conferences have you been to where the sharp guys and gals get in the room early and are connected in corners, or near walls to the few power points available? With Ismael’s conference there were power blocks wired at intervals along almost every row of the conference room. It was always easy to plug in and get power. (By the way, when is battery technology going to make the leaps and bounds that processor speed and memory has done over the last few decades? Maybe the subject of another post sometime!)
So a big shout for Ismael, and a big request for O’Reilly and other technology conference organizers to match up to his standard!
