Those sessions would make it a busy four days, but also have about 35 meetings already scheduled. That means I am sold out, so I am sorry if any delegates weren’t able to get on my calendar. You can look for at the receptions (if the questions aren’t too hard) or set up a time to talk after the event if my slots were all taken.

This is the first time in three years that I am not looking at Symposium as the conference chair. I am looking forward to being “just” an analyst in one of my favourite cities in the world. Hope to see you there.

• It felt good, from the analyst perspective. 
  Events each have their own feel, their own level of buzz. This event certainly had lots of buzz, with a feeling of optimism underlying it. Judging by feedback from Twitter, people laughing at the right spots, and having lots of questions I felt like my sessions were well-received, even the one where I attack the wisdom of pursuing financial ROI for PCC projects. I was a bit nervous about that one.
• The venue was great.
  The conference location at LA Live was pleasant to be at. I like downtown venues where it’s possible to get out and see something, where there are people around that aren’t part of the conference. This venue had that.
• Technology is advancing, but the issues that many enterprises are facing don’t.
  The biggest challenges that enterprises face continue to be defining strategy, setting priorities and policies, and driving adoption. New capabilities come available, but these remain the issues that cause the biggest problems.
• IRL doesn’t necessarily mean face time.
  The opportunity to meet with other people facing similar issues. This remains a challenge though, as ever more powerful and portable devices provide distraction. I almost tweeted a scene I found funny, with six people sitting around a table in comfortable chairs, all of them engrossed in their phones and tablets, ignoring each other. Tweeting snarky comments about customers is probably a bad thing though, so I held back.

I hope that Customer 360 will be as good. I will be watching on Twitter.

These were some of the top questions people were asking about.

• Promoting Social Software in Conservative Organizations.
  The initial issue many organizations faced with social software was how to get control of the mavericks and pioneers who were dragging in innovative solutions from wherever they could find them. As adoption deepens, more organizations are finding that their internal or industry culture is stronger than the impulses of these dynamic individuals. In conservative organizations, people feel that using wacky new software like wikis or microblogging would be seen as a bad thing, even if there is no official statement or prohibition. These organizations are looking for ways to encourage innovation and responsible adoption.
• Developing a Collaboration Strategy
  A bit of an evergreen, but definitely still a hot topic. There are lots of initiatives, some benefits, and lots of attention. How do we channel that energy into a viable strategy?
• Involving Customers in Social Software Efforts
  The first several iterations of social software concentrated on collaboration among colleagues. After that, the marketing or customer service organization started Social CRM efforts. Now, it’s time to develop a long term view of how to involve customers in the developing conversations.

This year is different for me because it is most likely the last time I will serve as chair for the event as well as attending as an analyst. This was my third year organizing the agenda, which is personally stimulating as well as a pleasant challenge. I became familiar with areas of our research that I otherwise would not have seen. I loved the chance to think about how we present our ideas as well as what the ideas themselves should be. I have loved working with the events team, leading to a much greater appreciation of the professionalism, work, and skills needed behind the scenes to pull off an event like this one. If Symposium is a success, it is mostly due to the events people making it seem (mostly) seamless. I will miss that part of the event, when I go back to just worrying about finishing the slides for my own presentations.

To everyone who made Symposium possible: Events staff, analysts, consultants, management, sales people, and (most of all) clients and sponsors: An enormous thank you. 

I’m an analyst, so I love getting attention, but some kinds of attention are tricky. Clint Boulton, a journalist at eWeek.com, summarized and commented on what I had to say in a slideshow on eWeek.com entitled Cloud Computing: Microsoft’s Stealth Attack in Enterprise Social Software. I have been quoted by Clint before, and have a lot of respect for his insights. I generally agree with most of what he says in this analysis as well, except for some of the emphasis. Only one slide in the webinar concentrated on Microsoft, while the title of the article could make it look like I spent an hour talking about Microsoft. Given the hoopla Microsoft has been raising about SharePoint and its renewed social software features, I wouldn’t really characterize it as a “sneak attack” either.

To be clear: I am not complaining about being misquoted or misrepresented in this article. That has happened to me in the past, so I know what it is like. It’s disconcerting to see my words summarized in a way I don’t completely recognize though.

By the way, I will be talking about similar topics with updated content at Gartner’s PCC Conference in London next month and Cannes Symposium in November.

Actually, it is a bit more than that. Tapiola uses social media to design and sell insurance to students who have just left home called UNDO. I also talked about a speed dating-type event organized by Texas Health Resources to help patients find a doctor they are comfortable with, and a few other stories of big companies doing interesting things with social software.

The lecture seemed well-received and several people sought me out to talk about some of the ideas, so I am glad I did it, and very happy that TED gave me the opportunity to try something new.

TED is all about ideas, and many of them were flying around today. From the personally inspiring (comic book superheros based on Muslim legends and the work of the Half The Sky Foundation) to those with more IT impact. I found two talks particularly intriguing.

Steven Berlin Johnson spoke about where good ideas come from. It seems to have a lot to do with coffee, but fundamentally, they don’t happen alone. His research shows that ideas don’t zap into someone’s head in a flash of inspiration or insight; they build up over time, and develop fastest when several people can work on them. Sounds like a good model for collaboration 

Ron Dembo  had a great discussion of ways to deal with deterministic or stochastic risk. Risk is deterministic when you know that something bad will happen. The appropriate reaction is to execute steps to counteract the risks. Stochastic risk is essentially random, with no certainty about when or if the negative event will occur. The appropriate reaction to stochastic risk is hedging; in other words, take some precautions to reduce the negative effects if the event should occur.

When considering risk in adopting social software, I find that many organizations operate as if it is a deterministic risk (i.e. inevitable that a negative event will occur) and put steps in place to restrict, control or even ban social networking activities, which in itself introduces its own deterministic risk: that of missing out on the insights and innovation that social networking can bring. Social networking does involve risk, but it is actually more of a stochastic risk; we don’t know when or how severely a negative incident will occur. In this case, a hedging response makes sense. make sure that you can react quickly to recover from an incident, for example. Or institute extra controls in particularly sensitive areas of the business.

Just a few of the things the TED talks today got me thinking about.

TED is special. Its tagline descriptor is “Ideas Worth Spreading.” I love that. It attracts speakers and participants doing fascinating things. So far, I have heard about a courageous Yemeni fighting cyber-censorship in his country; a high powered consulting exulting the benefits of doing nothing for six months; an entrepreneur developing the Internet of Things where every object in the world is wired. During the breaks, I spoke with the founder of Transparency International, that fights global corruption. and a former journalist with Al Jazeera English. Over the next couple days, i expect to hear from many more interesting and inspiring speakers.

Tomorrow morning I will do a six minute presentation as part of TED University, a kind of warmup for the full blown 20 minute TED Talks. I have spoken at and attended many conferences, and for the last couple years have been the chair for EMEA Symposium. I have delivered hundreds of presentations. But this upcoming six minutes has me more nervous than any other presentation I have ever done. I have been practicing it most of the day, something I rarely do. Sure, I prepare, but I rarely stand in front of a mirror and practice what I am going to say out loud. When I have an hour there is enough room to work in what I know I want to say. With six minutes, there is no such luxury.

The standard of presenting here is tremendously high. These people not only do great things, but know how to talk about them in compelling, entertaining, and inspiring ways. I am going to talk about big companies doing interesting things with social software. I collected about 9 stories from customers I and my colleagues have spoken with. I whittled that down to three for the final cut. I really hope that I am not awful. A well as knowing more about great things people are doing, I hope to get some ideas that I can use in my presentations.

Day 0 has already fulfilled my hopes.  I can’t wait for Day 1.

While the focus was supposed to be on the European tech scene, it often felt like a gathering transplanted tree and branch from San Francisco. The inside jokes, the focus on venture capital gossip, even the music felt very Californian. The smug, “we’re masters of the Tech universe” attitude was sometimes a bit hard to take.

Given Lemeur’s bi-continental focus (a Frenchman living in the Bay Area) and the influence that the US has on the tech industry worldwide that’s to be expected somewhat. However, I wasn’t sure why some of the companies presenting there, even in the startup competition were even there since they had no discernible European connection.

The main hall speakers were generally well chosen, even if some could probably develop a new story. I am not a habitué of these conferences, but I had heard several of these messages before. It was very clear that some of the speakers who had achieved great things had real ideas they were passionate about,which lead directly to their success. Others just seemed to have a reasonably good idea once, and were lucky enough to be where lightning hit, judging by what they had to say here.

Some speakers clearly understood what people were coming to the event for. Ryan Sarver from Twitter made several important announcements about new service offerings. Others, like Ethan Beard from Facebook  read from a prepared speech that told the audience basically what Facebook is and why it was so great, definitely not what anyone in the room needed to hear.

I tried to talk to or hear as many startups as I could, either on the show floor or in the competition. There seemed to be four main themes among the new companies’ products.

• Helping people organize their web experience and online resources (Mendeley, Symbaloo, Wikio, Allmyapps)
• Cloud support services (Superfeedr, Joilcloud, Cloudsplit
• Using the social grid in different ways (Kukunu, Friendbinder, Stribe the competition winner)
• Ecommerce (Shutl, Storific, Sokoz)

The star of the event was Queen Rania of Jordan, who gave an impassioned and clued in speech on how the Web can be used to improve how people live and calling on the entrepreneurs to support her main charity programme.

The .paris proposal is part of a larger project to add regional and city domains led by Paris, Berlin, New York (.nyc) and the Catalan region of Spain. I am all in favour of encouraging international entrepreneurship and promoting Internet activities that aren’t necessarily in Silicon Valley, but I can’t see how this will help. At best, it would be pointless and at worst confusing and even damaging.

These domains could be pointless because ever fewer people go to web sites by typing in the URL in the address field of the browser. They use search engines, RSS feeds, bookmarks, and recommendations from others. Even when people know the URL they often plug it into a browser. Terms like “facebook” “myspace”, “nytimes” and even “google” are among the most popular search spots on Google.com.

It will be confusing for many reasons. How will users know when to go to a more generic domain or to a city-related one? Since many companies will feel obliged to maintain both, these domains will be damaging since it adds complexity and work. How far will it go? If we have .paris will we also soon need .septiemearrondissement or .marais? Will Brooklyn want their own domain to differentiate from .nyc?

City domains could aggravate the sometimes tense relationships between cities and nearby cities and suburbs. A .amsterdam domain might seem natural, but will that force adding .amstelveen, .haarlem and .diemen as well? How will that help people looking for info or providers? 

What about the cities that have different spellings? Will it be .geneva .geneve .ginevra .ginebra or .genf as the city is called in English, French, Italian, Spanish and German?

Specific top level domains can focus efforts and make it clear what the site intend to provide. Domains like .mobi .travel and .name make new services possible and help people find what they are looking for. City domains will do neither.

I decided earlier this year that this would be an interesting venue to explore. It is a European technology conference which focuses on startups. Bigger players like Google, BT, Orange, Facebook and Microsoft are here too, but to emphasize their connections with new technology. Most of my Gartner customers are bigger, more conservative enterprises that are interested in startups, but hesitate to go too far with them. I spend a lot of time taking about SharePoint and other mainstream products, but will be looking for ideas out of the mainstream and for what comes next.

I am especially interested in what is coming out of Europe, where I live. It’s easy to find startups in the Bay Area, but I know that there is great stuff coming from the rest of the world.

Anyone here who has ideas about what is coming next from Europe can DM me at @jeffmann on Twitter. I will be writing later about the things I see.

That isolated word comes to a screeching halt when the last session ends. Physically, the world inside the conference room disappears in a few hours. Workers start tearing down the show floor and some of the conference area even while the last presentations are being delivered. By early afternoon, the site doesn’t look the world we’ve come to know so well for the last four days. From having every minute planned and parceled out, having two hours with nothing specific to do before my train leaves is an odd experience. That’s when I take the chance to stare off into space for a bit. The view from the Croisette is really quite nice, it turns out.

Aside from the normal questions about vendors and best practices, I was surprised by the number of organizations looking to take advantage of new vendor dynamics to shake up the hold that they perceive that Microsoft and to a lesser extent IBM has over their collaboration strategies. They welcome the advantages of integrated offerings and upgrades with more functionality, but dislike the idea that they have no choice but to stay with their incumbent vendors. I think the traditional titans could be in for a surprise when they see the number of organizations seriously looking at Cloud computing as a way to shake up existing relationships, and taking steps to understand which parts of their collaboration lineup can be commoditized and federated.

As conference chair again this year, it was gratifying to see that some of the changes we made this year went well. We continue to see more senior executive attendees, which is reflected in the CIO track. We dramatically increased the number of workshops and roundtables, most of which were well-attended. Several analysts and about 20 attendees were actively tweeting, with about 200 messages per day. Scheduling the analyst keynote on Monday afternoon to give attendees the option of arriving on Monday morning seemed to go over well. The stormy weather on Monday morning was not very welcome, but there’s not a lot we can do about that.

Right now, several analysts are on their way to Tokyo for the Japanese Symposium. I have started the trip to Australia for the event there to be held next week. I expect these to be just as intense.