Ken Wasch, Ed Keating and crew put on an well attended, well-run event Tuesday and Wednesday at Cipriani. The fifth annual SIIA Information Industry Summit drew over 400 people from old information companies, new information companies, consulting and boutique investment banks. Tuesday’s highlights were Dick Harrington’s talk and follow-up interview by Lee Greenhouse and Hal Espo’s interview of Donald Katz, the CEO of Audible. Another great interview was David Kirkpatrick of Fortune talking with Jim Buckmaster, CEO of Craigslist.
Wednesday was the better day. John Blossom ran an excellent panel covering pay-per-view business models and new information consumers. This was followed by the Buckmaster interview, Google’s Tim Armstrong’s lunchtime keynote, a panel on citizen’s media and a final panel on technology.
The theme of the conference was Users Taking Control and the most relevant and insightful comments were made by the speakers who kept to the theme. Dick Harrington talked about Front End Customer Strategy at Thomson, and how they focused on how and why various applications are used among their customers. Jim Buckmaster talked about ignoring competition, ignoring revenue maximization and focusing solely on Craigslist meeting the needs of users. Tim Armstrong emphasized analyzing customer “assets” and exceeded their customers’ needs in terms of advertising effectiveness. All this was quite reinforcing to representatives of new information companies in the audience. For attendees from older information companies or mainstream media, this remains a difficult challenge.
What was missing from a conference called Users Taking Control? Users. There weren’t any. Clearly a wide range of users were discussed – users of MySpace on the one hand and users of Quantitative Analytics, a recent Thomson acquisition, on the other hand. But whereas other conferences focus on the user-publisher dynamic, IIS doesn’t, and at times it seemed as if there was a lot of talk in the very large, ornate vacuum of Cipriani. 
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