The days of Internet are over…

Well, as you might have guessed I’m talking about the Swedish conference named Internetdagarna or “The internet days” in English and not the life span of the Internet itself. That would ruin my career quite effectively (thinking in an ego selfish kind of way).

The conference covered three days with the last one being more of a workshop (or at least intended to be). To view the entire schedule you need to visit internetdagarna.se as I’m only gonna cover the highlights in this post.

To start the whole event of .SE (the organiser) had invited quite the span of different people going from flown in professors to a marketing guy from Tre (a Swedish ISP/telco). The latter had a different approach to talking about “mobile internet access” effectively turning his talk into a giant commercial for the earlier named company (the twitter feed went mad with booo!).

Sadly that was also the only part of the first keynote session I had time to see due to a meeting with the Swedish PTS (post & tele communication board) as a part of my engagement in the board of registrars.se. The meeting was however immensely more productive than the talk about cheap 3G access.

The next session I attended was hosted by PhD student Daniel Westman (a colleague of mine from PRG) and the topic was “Copyright – a conversation with James Boyle“. The session was overall very good and I enjoyed the stand up way of presenting. I think that including a good joke or two makes the audience more awake and attentive.

Next up was a session called “Challenges on the web hosting market” where four companies got their chance to foresee the future. Well, in my opinion they could have gone with one company (either of the ones that where there) as they all said the same thing.

“Cloud, Cloud, Cloud, Cloud”

After about 15 minutes of their fame I just had to text my dear friend Daniel who is head of IT-operations at Loopia to tell him the amount of times the word cloud had been used in the session (100). As expected I got a “LOL” back. It’s not really that we don’t share their opinion but more that the use of buzzwords rule the Swedish hosting business.

If we strip the real meaning of the word down to it’s core then it’s more like glorified shared hosting with some actual quota limits (that most of us have had for ages) as long as you use shared storage and some common sense. Well, to make my own prediction I think that we will see this kind of packaging of shared hosting but the name wont be cloud, it will be web hosting or maybe just hosting.

To move on to next session here would be heartbreaking as the nightly events of the first conference day was awesome! As the lights of the venue’s free-beer-and-food event started blinking (someone told me that it was the signal to leave) we headed out to the belgobar in Stockholm where many of my dns/domain/market friends where already waiting to spend the rest of the evening.

No one mentioned, no one forgotten!

The next morning felt a few hours to early when I headed down to the lobby for some breakfast but I guess that’s the price you have to pay for some fun around a conference! However, the second day was actually packed with meetings more then sessions and went by very fast. It ended at 19:30 when I told myself that I was going to rest some before dinner and ended up waking at 07:30 the morning after.

The fact that the third and last day was my time to show off my pretty face (confidence? hell yea!) gave me the feeling that the extra hours of sleep was actually very much in place. I started of at the DNSSEC track where we listened to vendors such as Secure64, Xelerance and Infoblox. A quick coffee break and it was time for me to moderate the next session featuring open source projects  such as OpenDNSSEC and BIND.

Due to the lack of questions we actually finished early and I got to eat dinner with my good friend Shane Kerr, the head of development for BIND10 (the most anticipated open source software of 2010 if you ask me). During the afternoon my second chance to shine came along as I presented under the topic “Deploying DNSSEC, from a registrars perspective”. If you are interested in what was actually said then grab the slides!

With the DNSSEC track being done and dealt with the only thing left was getting on the train and heading home. Tomorrow I leave for another visit to Germany (my second in less then a month) and after that I’m looking forward to spending the entire week at the office (my gosh, it it really true?).

Regards,

LG