Where I’ll Be And When I’ll Be There

I’ve just told the whole world I’ll be in Viva Las Vegas from October 25-29 for the Information on Demand conference.

Actually, I’ve told all of you before in this blog.  But now, I’ve gone and told everybody on TripIt as well.

I’m still getting the hang of TripIt, but so far it’s pretty cool.

Honestly, I traveled so much earlier in the year I didn’t have an opportunity to stop by long enough to understand what it is or what it does.

I think it’ll grow on me.

Kind of like having Libyan President and Mohammar Qadafi growing into Donald Trump’s backyard at one of his properties in Bedford, N.Y.

Dude, are things so bad in Trumpland the Donald is having to rent out his backyard to the terriers?

This is a serious recession.

I didn’t realize “The Apprentice” had been hit so hard in the ratings.  Or was it the casinos?

In any case, I hope to play golf at one of the Donald’s courses someday. Hey, maybe he has one in Vegas!

As for getting back to the Information on Demand conference, Scott Laningham and I spoke recently with Anant Jhingran,who is the Chief Technology Officer of IBM’s Information Management group.

Anant debriefed us on all the cool cloud computing discussions that would be going on at the event, including the Cloud Unconference.

Only at an IBM event could it actually get cloudy in Vegas!

Me, I’m hoping for plenty of sunshine myself.

And remember, if I see you there in the Nevada desert, remember, what happens in Vegas stays in Vegas…that is, unless I write about it in this blog, in which case all bets are off…so to speak.

From Mean Green Eagles To Flying Elvi

American college football season has kicked into high gear and there are a lot of happy people across the country and around the world.

I follow a number of teams, but my faves have to be my alma mater, the University of North Texas “Mean Green” Eagles, and living here in Austin, the Texas Longhorns.

The Eagles are off to play Alabama tomorrow, God Bless ‘Em.  As I Tweeted earlier, at least North Texas is getting paid the princely sum of $750,000 in TV money to make the trip.

Tomorrow night, it will be Texas Tech Red Raiders paying a visit to Austin to take on the Longhorns.  We’ll just see how that hurry up spread offense works in the Texas Capitol.

We’ll also see how the new Google DoubleClick Ad Exchange works out, which Google is undergoing to take on Yahoo (among others) in display advertising.

This is one of the first long-anticipated outcomes of the Google DoubleClick deal, and though many would suggest Google’s playing catchup on this one, The New York Times writes this is Google “pushing for a second act.”

Yahoo won’t give up that ground easily, and since this space is all about filling excess inventory, I would suggest that targeting and context will become the rightful king of display.

Whoever can provide the best contextual display advertising, wins…good luck to the rare instance where Google plays David to somebody else’s Goliath.

Speaking of context, I’d like to provide you more on the coming Information on Demand conference previously mentioned in this blog, and which will be held at the Mandalay Bay in Las Vegas from October 25-29.

And so I’m going to refer you to our own Nancy Kreps, who recently previewed the conference with developerWorks’ Scott Laningham in this podcast.

Nancy is the conference education manager and does a brilliant job (in less than 6 minutes) of explaining what you can expect to find should you make the journey to Vegas.

As also previously mentioned, I will be making a visit to Vegas to blog the event, and am really looking forward to my return engagement at the Mandalay Bay.

I wasn’t able to make it last year, but blogged the event in 2006 and 2007, and can only say it’s a massive, and massively educational and informative, event.

It can even be quite entertaining (one year I remember SWG general manager, Steve Mills, taking the stage wearing some Elvis glasses, and that alone was the worth the price of admission!).

I will be joined this year by Scott Laningham with his roving camera and microphone, so we hope to cover the event from any number of angles (including in advance of the event…keep an eye on this blog for coming podcasts from a garden variety of Information Management experts!)

Information management and business analytics are ridiculously hot topics at the moment, so we’ll be sure to keep that in mind in order to keep our coverage market driven.

That said, we will also reserve the right to cover ridiculously frivolous and Vega-rati-like topics as well.

Hey, what’s a trip to Vegas without a sighting of the skydiving Flying Elvi??

Life After Lehman

It was a year ago today that Lehman went bust.

I was in London that Monday a year ago, parked at our Bedfont Lakes offices near Heathrow Airport.

That previous Friday, I had been in the Admiral’s Club at Austin Bergstrom, waiting on the plane that would take me to Chicago, and then on to London from there.

While I sat waiting, I remember distinctly a Lehman employee pointedly trying to reassure a client over the phone that Lehman would continue to be a going concern on Monday.

But on Monday we discovered his reassurances were ill-fated.

Me, while in London and other parts of Europe throughout the next ten days, I felt like a stranger in a strange land…I didn’t know quite what to make of it all.

The same weekend, Hurricane Ike had hit the Texas coast and decimated Galveston, and from the shores of the U.K., it seemed like the world was quickly coming to an end.

Continuous financial headlines over the course of the next week confirmed the discombobulation.

Here’s what I wrote in that Monday blog post:

I‘m working from London today, attending meetings at IBM’s Bedfont Lakes location just outside Heathrow airport.

I’m about five hours ahead of the opening of the New York markets, and considering the constant stream of seemingly bad news concerning numerous financial services and investment firms over the weekend, I had to laugh to myself when I read that the Wall Street Journal is expected to launch some new social networking and community features tomorrow.

I hope there’s still someone around in that industry to sign up for those new community features.

Last one out, turn off the Delicious tags!

In the case of the Journal, an Associated Press story indicates that with the new Journal site, community members will be able to comment on individual stories, create discussion groups, and ask one another for advice.

Actually, it’s very exciting to me to see the major media turn on such features.

As I traveled on the Heathrow Express from Paddington Station back to the airport this morning, I had a short 15 minutes to ponder what questions I might like to pose to the Journal’s community using these new features when they become available.

I eventually arrived at the following.

Is my money safer:

A) Stuffed deep into my Sleep Number mattress (sleep number of 35)

B) Filed away in an anonymous Swiss bank account

C) On the “Come” line of a Las Vegas casino craps table

D) Invested in South Florida condominiums

E) Sitting in my non-interest bearing PayPal account

F) None of the above

I haven’t gone back to determine where my money would have ultimately been the safest.  I suspect it may have been a toss-up between “C” and “E,” although I hear the South Florida condo market is on the rebound.

I eagerly await hearing what our president has to say about the tidings since the year of Lehman’s demise and the onslaught of the financial crisis.

Though I tend to think of myself as a financial conservative, I think a healthy amount of regulation is necessary to maintain a level playing field and to keep the bad actors in line.

Many have argued regulators failed us by not adequately enforcing the existing regulations, but in an environment where mortgage brokers were giving loans to people not qualified for them like candy to kids on Halloween, I also think the rules moving forward should provide more clarity and transparency to the risk the big financial firms are taking on.

16 to 1 leverage would have been enough to send me running with my money to the exits had I known about it at the time.

And I can get 35-1 odds if I roll boxcars (6-6) out in Vegas at the craps table!

More on that as I continue my drumbeat about the Information on Demand Conference taking place October 25-29 at the Mandalay Bay in Viva Las Vegas.