ONHOLLYWOOD AND WORLD AFFAIRS COUNCIL CONFERENCE HOPPING

This past week was awesome. Professionally satisfying, personally rewarding, thought-provoking, hilarious, entertaining,...

Tuesday through Thursday I was down in LA for Tony's OnHollywood conference. GoingOn was providing a sneak preview to our new platform by having the conference's live webcasts, blog and links on a GoingOn network. All went well besides a bug on one blog post during the first few hours of the conference where users couldn't see the webcast hyperlink unless they clicked to the second page and the Wi-Fi connection at the Roosevelt Hotel was very slow or erratic for more than half of the conference. Anyway, even though I posted it below already, you can check out the OnHollywood conference network here.

Valerie did a kickass job on pulling together the program and most of the speakers, Allison and Debbie's Cerulean Media Group did the logistics well again, and Big Picture did the video and audio well again too. Valerie is on "loan" to AlwaysOn and now will be transitioning full-time to GoingOn to clarify for some of you that asked. Also there was a fair amount of confusion on the relationship between AlwaysOn and GoingOn, so I might as well write about it here.

AlwaysOn is Tony's media brand that he built up after Red Herring where he had to foresight to see how media, user-generated content, and social networking was developing online. GoingOn is a separate legal entity and operations that is providing a new blogging and community building platform for companies and organizations, and AlwaysOn is one of its first customers. Of course the common element is that Tony is the CEO and a shareholder in both companies. My only connection to AlwaysOn is that I try to be a part-time columnist covering the blogging and social software space, but fail miserably since I write an article every few months instead of weeks :)

After OnHollywood, I suffered through a two-hour delay to San Francisco on Friday(lame United), then rushed to pick up Christine. I finally arrived at her office around 6pm and we drove down to the Asilomar Conference Center in Pacific Grove, CA. The World Affairs Council of Northern California was holding its 60th Annual Conference where it has been at Asilomar every year since its beginning. The conference's theme was "Global Change: The Balance of Power in 2020" where it focused on the emerging roles of China, India, and Brazil in the world order. A solid lineup of speakers where a handful were truly thought-provoking and have pushed me towards possibly becoming a voice for some of these causes. I'll post more on this later.


[tags: onhollywood, alwayson, goingon, media, hollywood, technology, tech, foreign affairs]