I’M BACK!

So I took last week off to go to the 2nd annual Internet Technology Summit held this year in Downtown Orlando. Full-disclosure: I participated in a contest and won a free along with a free hotel stay for this event, but that in no way influenced my opinion – it was AWESOME!

Last year’s ITS was a half-day event with about 12 speakers held in Tampa. This year’s event was significantly larger with 25 speakers / panelists presenting over 2-days. The audience was a nice mix of business strategists, recruiters and web designers/developers. I was expecting the presentations to be oriented more towards business execs, but I was pleasantly surprised to find quite a bit content geared towards the techie crowd.

It was sponsored by David Glass from the Florida Technology Journal who did an incredible job at getting all of the great speakers together, and moderated by Michelle Malott, CEO of HDYI: How Do You Innovate? who did an amazing job of making sure things went smoothly. She made a ridiculously complicated job look easy!

ITS had way too much content to cover in this blog, but here are a few of my favorite segments.

One of my overwhelmingly favorite topics was Social Media. Being big into the social media scene, it was very interesting to hear about how businesses are not only implementing social media strategies to engage customers, but also how they handle the challenge of personal usage by their employees.  It was great to hear that more companies are not only being receptive to their employees blogging and using Facebook/Twitter, but that some of them actively encourage it (within reason of course).

There was also a large emphasis on mobile development. iPhone and Android (though surprisingly not Microsoft’s Phone OS 7) app strategies were talked about by several of the speakers, and Carol Cox from Orlando’s own Full Sail University gave a great talk about various ways to monetize an application besides a direct sale. It was very obvious that businesses are focusing quite heavy on this area for growth in the foreseeable future, so of you haven’t jumped on the bandwagon yet, it’s not too late!

One of my favorite talks came from Greg Wilson from Adobe who gave us the skinny on what Adobe has in the works for HTML 5. For those that don’t know, Adobe are members of the World Wide Web Consortium which is the collaborative effort to standardize HTML5 (and other web-related specifications). Despite what most people think, Adobe has done quite a bit with their CS5 applications and recently released an HTML5 Pack of extensions that allow users to leverage the new functionality available with HTML5. Greg even made surprisingly convincing argument for why Flash isn’t going anywhere anytime soon (it does a lot more than just stream videos).

Last but certainly not least, I would be remiss if I neglected to mention the antics of one Ted Murphy from IZEA (of WeReward fame). He took audience participation to another level: actively going into the crowd, making us engage and cooperate with each other to solve problems. By the end of his presentation, we had effectively come up with several dozen concepts for new iPhone apps. I personally think he took the best ideas with him back to IZEA for further research. (I’m watching you guys!)

Suffice it to say the content was incredible and extremely interesting not only for businesses but for any enthusiast who wants to learn how technology strategies are being implemented in the workplace today. Additionally, the opportunity to network with local businesses and potential colleagues (or competitors!) was absolutely invaluable. I will definitely be keeping an eye out for next year’s event!

Here are some links where you can find out more about this past event as well as a list of all the speakers:
Internet Technology Summit 2010
ITS Speaker List
ITS Facebook Page

Check back every so often – I will update this post with links to the speakers’ presentations as I get them.

Update: Here’s a link to all of the presentations from this year’s ITS:
TechSummit Presentations, Blogs and Slideshows