I'm attending
Gnomedex 7 (2007) at the very nice Bell Harbor Conference Center (BHCC) in downtown Seattle, Washington (right on the waterfront, where the big, beautiful cruise ships dock) today and tomorrow. My compliments to Ponzi and Chirs Pirillo for deciding to put Gnomedex into this very nice venue.
I decided to attend Gnomedex to learn more about the business of blogging, but I'm starting to conclude that Gnomedex is more about the ecosystem... community is actually a better word... of the blogosphere. "Not about the business of blogging..." isn't a bad thing because some of the presentations are mind-expanding, and starting to make me to think about the larger dimensions of what I write about - Broadband Wireless Internet Access.
One thing that's impressive is the number of attendees that have laptops; the percentage of Macs in the audience is easily North of 25%. Some rows it's 100% of the attendees are using laptops. The downside is that 90% of us attendees are using the BHCC Wi-Fi, and their Wi-Fi infrastructure is simply not up to the challenge of all these (often very demanding) users (some of whom were trying to stream video and other bandwidth-intensive applications). The other ten percent or so are using Wireless Telephony Broadband ... if I had one, I would be too. In this situation, email is problematic at best, and blog posting is completely hit or miss.
What's dissapointing is that BHCC is a high-end venue - I've read of very high-end International conferences are held here, and as such, the performance and reliability of BHCC's Wi-Fi should be much better. The technology and the expertise to do such planning, engineering, and deploying the infrastructure certainly exists - imagine the issues Microsoft (what... a mere ten miles East?) has (encountered, figured out, and solved) with their Wi-Fi network! What's even more disappointing is that the Gnomedex staff don't seem to recognize, or acknowledge, the issue. Given that almost every attendee is an active blogger, that attitude is puzzling.
Travel / Attending Conferences
August 10, 2007
February 20, 2007
Underway to WISPCON, New Orleans
As I type this, I'm on a layover in Chicago, using Boingo Hotspot access. I'm on my way to New Orleans, Louisiana and WISPCON 2007. (Press Release). I'm looking forward to checking back in with the WISP industry after a long absence. I'll be giving a keynote on Friday - an overview of the Broadband Wireless Internet Access industry, and the WISPs place in that larger industry. I'll have some hard things to say to the WISPs... as I always have.
WISPCON 2007 will be the official launch of Wireless Internet Service Provider News - WISPNews (where I'll be blogging about what I see and hear at WISPCON 2007) and the relaunch of Wireless Tech Radio - more about that a bit later.
By Steve Stroh
This article is Copyright © 2007 by Steve Stroh
About Steve Stroh In 1996, I was fascinated to discover that providing Internet Access via license-exempt wireless technologies was not only possible, but being done routinely by a small band of pioneering Internet Service Providers.By mid-1997, I was writing professionally about Broadband Wireless Internet Access (BWIA) as a monthly columnist in Boardwatch Magazine.
In 2000, I began writing about BWIA full time in my own blogs, for numerous other publications, and my own subscription newsletter.
From 2008 - 2015, I took a hiatus from writing about BWIA, but my interest in BWIA did not wane. From 2016 - 2020 I worked to resume writing full time.