Spring Internet World 2001	Volume 5 Number 3 Apr. 30, 2001	RealAudio

by Scott Tilley

It was quieter this year. Less crowded. Less vendors. Less traffic on Pico. Nevertheless, Spring Internet World 2001 in Los Angeles was an interesting event. There was definitely more business flavor to the convention this year, with topics such as customer-relationship management, Web caching, and network monitoring emerging as central themes. Perhaps this is just a sign of the maturing of the Internet economy. But not everything at Internet World is mature. How can you take marketing ploys like getting out of a straight jacket, while riding on a six-foot unicycle, all the while doing a product pitch, seriously?

Last year, Spring Internet World was a very chaotic event. There were so many attendees that even the cavernous Los Angeles Convention Center seemed crowded. In contrast, the 2001 event was a more sedate affair. 

Smaller Scale

The lower turnout, both in terms of attendees and exhibitors, can no doubt be attributed (in part) to the dotcom meltdown. Fewer exhibitors were present because of the cost of staffing a booth for four days. Fewer people were there because of the difficulty in justifying the cost of traveling to LA for four days, given the current fiscal climate. Perhaps this was a reflection of the "recession" in high tech field, as many dotcom companies have recessed from the IPO market since January. 

For me, a sure sign of the smaller scale of Spring Internet World 2001 was logistical. It was easy to find a parking spot! Onsite registration was a breeze. The Press Room was half empty, with many of the exhibitors' press kits noticeably absent. Last year you could hardly step over the overflowing bins of material. Finally, when lunch time arrived, the only cafeteria in the LA Convention Center wasn't the complete chaos that is usually is. (The prices certainly haven't dropped though.)

But there may be another reason this year's Internet World was more of a low-key affair: the lack of any truly exciting new developments. To be sure, there were a few things of interest. But I didn't see anything of blockbuster category that will make revolutionary changes in the way people use personal computers and the Internet. The focus this year seemed more on the use of the Internet for business.

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Central Themes

Perhaps a sign that the Internet-driven economy is maturing is that many of the products on display were focused on more mundane but business-critical applications, such as customer-relationship management. There were many products and services demonstrated for managing client accounts, tracking users' personal preferences, and other marketing-oriented tasks. To be sure, these are essential activities of any successful business, online or otherwise. The new wrinkle is that most of these activities can now be done in a semi-automated fashion with Web-based software.

From a more technical point of view, Web caching and network monitoring were central themes. Speeding up access to Web content is the focus of companies such as Akamai, and they had a large presence at the convention. The solutions are a mix of hardware and software. Many companies are finding they need to improve the delivery of content to their customers, and caching the material is one solution. Although the Internet is global, and it's not supposed to matter if you are viewing a page that is physically located in California or Singapore, it does matter. The latency inherent in the network can make a different between a page loading right away or a page taking a long time to load (or perhaps not loading at all, due to an inability to reach the server).

More broadly, network monitoring issues are also becoming increasingly important. The ability to differentiate between different qualities of service for network traffic is seen as key to delivering broadband content. One can view live transmissions of events now using low-cost client applications, but the server-side issues and the intervening network connections are still lacking in the ability to provide universal television-like broadcasts. Given the interest from traditional media companies at Internet World, it seems this is a topic of great importance to them and will accelerate the penetration of the Internet into everyday life.

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Final Comments and Photos

This was the second Internet World conference that I have attended. The following photographs were taken with a Canon Powershot S100 Digital Elph and then converted to compressed JPEG files to reduce download time. The best picture may be the last one, and was perhaps the highlight of the convention: watching a guy get out of a straight jacket while sitting on a unicycle six feet in the air, all the while pitching a network quality-of-service product! (Click on the thumbnail image at left to view the full-size picture.) Amazing.

	Welcome to Spring Internet World 2001. (83KB)
	People will do anything for a free t-shirt! (107KB)
	Vendors will do anything to attract people! (74KB)
	I don't know what the point of this Backstreet Boys-like singing and dancing was, or what it had to do with Genuity's networking products, but the huge multimedia presentation drew a big crowd. This setup more closely resembling a ride at Universal Studies than a conference booth. Maybe that was the point. (91KB)
	There was some cultural events at the convention. But why harpist for a Web hosting company? Probably the same answer as before: to attract people to the booth. (99KB)
	The amazing unicycle man! (76KB)

Shihong Huang in Los Angeles contributed to this article.