Here’s a video recap by NovusTV of the F5 Expo held April 7th, 2010 in Vancouver, Canada.

(Left to Right) Michael Tippet of NowPublic, Justin Young of Radar DDB, and myself discuss cost effective video marketing at the F5 Expo on April 7th in Vancouver, Canada.

Photos courtesy of www.jeremylim.ca

The F5 Expo held Wednesday, April 7th was a tremendous event. Rich content, well-attended and a powerful keynote from best-selling author of Blink, Tipping Point, and Outliers Malcolm Gladwell. His challenge to people using and developing on the Internet is to use it to create strong ties rather than just weak ties, of which the Internet is already very good at. Revolutionary change can only happen through strong ties Malcolm argued, as he cited several examples throughout history to prove his point. His feeling, and I agree, is that the world needs more social revolution, and if revolution can only occur through strong ties, then we must find ways to use the Internet to foster it. The question is, are we up for it?

Malcolm Gladwell argues that the Internet has only been good at generating weak ties quickly amongst crowds of people. Social revolution can only happen through strong ties.

I had signed up to moderate two panels, the first being Cloud Computing and the other Search Engine Marketing. Thank you to my panelists for a job well done. I got some very positive feedback on these topics from attendees. I was also a last second replacement on the Cost Effective Video Marketing panel and had the privilege of sharing the stage with Justin Young of Radar DDB Vancouver and Michael Tippet of NowPublic. All-in-all, I thought it was a great event… minus the registration snafu! Well done Linz!

Malcolm Gladwell takes live questions through Mingleverse at F5 Expo Launch Party.

I was in attendance at the F5 Expo Launch Party yesterday, January 26th. What a great turnout! The place was packed with over 200 people – and all eyeballs were fixated on the many screens around the V Lounge as Malcolm Gladwell appeared within the Mingleverse online universe (think Second Life) to take questions from the live audience. If this party was any indication of what we can expect of the main event on April 7th, the Vancouver business and tech scene is in for a special treat. F5 Expo is all about online business, marketing, and technology. Hot topics like Search Engine Optimization, social media, video blogging, and cloud computing will be tackled in interactive sessions and panel discussions. I’ve just been added as a moderator on the SEO panel. Should be fun!

If you haven’t registered yet, take advantage of my personal promo code that gives you 30% off the ticket price until Jan 31st.

REGISTER NOW

ENTER PROMO CODE: P1F510

Host of Tech Talk Expert on Global TV News and show organizer, Lindsay Smith asked me to join her advisory board this year to help with the latest edition of the Massive Tech Show to be held in April 2010. The event has lost some steam over the past couple of years and is looking to refocus. We had our first group advisory meeting earlier this month and the overwhelming consensus was the event needed a heavy makeover to make it relevant again for people doing business today. Some of the core decisions included a re-branding, focusing on social media (Twitter and Facebook) and online marketing (SEO and SEM), and placing a greater emphasis on quality content and big personalities. To that end, Lindsay announced yesterday she has signed on Malcolm Gladwell, best-selling author of Tipping Point, Blink, and Outliers as the event’s keynote speaker! Wow. If you haven’t read any of his books, please do yourself a favor and visit Amazon or your local Chapters or Barnes & Nobles and pick up one. A tremendous author with incredible insight on the world as we know it, Malcolm will be quite the draw at F5 Expo (ah yes, the new brand, cleverly named after the “F5″ function button on your keyboard, typically used to refresh your screen).

As the event starts taking shape, I’ll post some more details on it, but expect it to be an entirely different show than past iterations – in a very good way. Congrats Lindz on getting Malcolm!

Guy Kawasaki at SXSW 2009.

Lucky me. I got to sit down with marketing guru and popular author, Guy Kawasaki across from our ServerBeach booth just minutes ago at SXSW. A Tweet up was brought together at the Opera booth with Guy who fielded any questions. He’s really excited about his latest venture, Alltop. He’s launching a MyAlltop this upcoming week. Very cool guy and refreshingly down to earth. I’m a big fan of Guy. My company, PEER 1 is one of the sponsors of JFSA’s Innovators Lunch with Guy as the speaker in Vancouver on April 1st. This by chance meeting was a nice surprise.

Just got back from the Structure 08 conference hosted by GigaOM and headline sponsored by my company, Vancouver-based PEER 1. The sold out event was a tremendous success with over 600 people in attendance representing companies like Google, Facebook, Microsoft, and VMWare. A third of the conference room was allocated to media alone.

Making the decision to sponsor Structure 08 was an easy one. It is so rare to have a room full of the brightest minds discussing and debating the latest technology impacting IT infrastructure. “Cloud Computing” was by far the topic of the day, a buzz term that seems to encompass anything related to virtualization or on-demand scalable web hosting, which is sometimes, well, cloudy.

The line up of speakers included Jonathan Yarmis of AMR Research, Mendel Rosenblum of VMWare, and a heated discussion that included panelists from Google, AT&T, GigaSpaces, Mosso, Joyent, and XCalibre. Read more

You may have already noticed, there is a thriving technology community here in Vancouver with a thirst for innovation and being on the bleeding edge. If you are not convinced, events like this one, as well as the BarCamps, Massive and Northern Voice will convince you. If you can find the time, I encourage you to attend. You can see the details here. We are also running our 12 Months Free Managed Hosting contest at the event.

Got back Friday night from Office 2.0 in San Francisco. The place felt like ground zero for web 2.0 and SaaS companies. The St. Regis was buzzing with people clamoring to find out primarily the impact social media and networking will have on enterprise. Also, product demonstrations from new startups and growing firms like Spanning Sync and Smartsheet. I just installed Spanning Sync on my computer, awesome tool! It syncs my Google calendar with Apple iCal and solves a problem I’ve been having with keeping my laptop up to date. And now that I got the iPhone (yeahhhh!), it is coming in even handier. Robert and I had the opportunity to briefly meet Om Malik of GigaOM up in the terrace. The guy has terrific sense of humor and I’m looking forward to taking him up on his invitation to meet over a beer soon.

On Wednesday, we had dinner with Wordpress’s Matt Mullenweg and RevCube’s Dan Simoes at First Crush. Both great, down-to-earth guys who I really enjoyed spending time with. Lots going on in their respective businesses. Matt’s got many exciting things in the works for the Wordpress users, so stay tuned. Back to the event, lots of positives with the event. On the downside, the lack of a paper agenda got annoying at times. I know it was an experiment in a ‘paper-less’ conference, hence the iPhones containing an agenda app from Etelos, but what the experiment should have proved is that technology can’t overpower and replace certain human needs in face-to-face settings, the same way an ebook can’t replace the feel of reading a physical one. I had a laugh with Mark Mader of Smartsheet over lunch where he relayed a story from earlier in the day when he asked someone for their business card after a conversation. The guy said he didn’t have any, “It’s a paperless conference”, he added. He tried to instruct Mark on how to use his iPhone to get the contact information, which seemed like much more trouble then it was worth, so no exchange occurred.

Technology is useful as long as it helps individuals bring balance in their life, rather than overpower it. People who use Facebook and Myspace to feel the ‘high’ of being well-connected or popular from their laptop, but still can’t navigate themselves through a real face-to-face, social setting is just one example of where technology can hurt. Just like to old cliche “life is all about balance”, you can modify it to these days to read “life is all about how you balance technology”.