inbox conference
Really looking forward to being at Inbox tomorrow; I’ll be surprised if anyone actually shows up for my session at 8 am. I’m very interested to see if there’s any connection there between the email “industry” and the folks that are buyers / consumers of enterprise-level email services. While I didn’t get a chance to hit this year’s Ad:Tech, what I heard over and over from attendees was that the buzz was high, but it was all the usual suspects talking to themselves again…and very few buyers of the products and services being hawked and squawked. (Is it even possible to put on an industry conference in a vertical and break out of the echo chamber?)
Relatedly, Esther Dyson reports that the CIOs in attendance weren’t really clued in to sender authentication: “‘Are you prepared to implement Sender ID?’ Excuse me, but they didn’t even understand the question. One started talking about how he wants a personal spam filter. Another said yeah, we’re a PR firm and we really are careful about what we send out.” Without a homogenous spam filtering solution (and thank GOD for that, that’s the last thing we need is a single toll taker deciding what’s in and what’s out), it’s going to take a lot of down and dirty blocking and tackling to get the Fortune 1000 (not to mention the middle market players where stuff like sender auth really could have an impact) to pay attention.