On Saturday I was a panelist at the Stanford Engineering School’s annual e-Day conference. Having neither attended Stanford, nor graduated in Engineering, it seemed an unusual lapse of quality control.

The conference was keynoted by Jeff Raikes who runs Office for Microsoft and is by far the best communicator I have ever seen from Redmond. Granted this is not a very high hurdle, but he may have missed his calling in politics. The guy is a combination of aw-shucks Midwestern humility with an obvious keen mind and strong presence – the guy is devastating.

He talked to the standard issue Microsoft Presentation (one word per slide) and discussed the vision for the forthcoming Office 12:
“Remove corporate boundaries” – Groove operating through the firewall.
“Connect information and people” – Search
“Broad control” – Document DRM
“Business Applications” - Play nice with ERP/CRM applications
“Software services” – Live Meeting
“Unified Communications” - He gave an example of being able to take phone calls when he is on IM. Not sure if he realizes a million people were doing that while he was talking.

They are moving in this direction as Microsoft chose to “Expand the view of the Opportunity.” As such Office is no longer about productivity applications, but about “enhancing the productivity of those who do information work.”

I don’t know. For the first time I had to give serious thought about whether to buy Office with my new PC. I did, because of Outlook. But I find myself using OpenOffice more than Word as it has a great HTML editor and every document can be turned into a PDF. And it’s free. Their grip is tenuous. And the fact that he never mentioned RSS when his goal is “enhancing the productivity of those who do information work,” is stunning.

Moving on to our panel, Jeff Kleck did a stellar job of keeping it conversational and fun, complete with Nerf rockets to shoot at audience members who asked bad questions. While we were supposed to talk about “Managing Next-Generation Information Technologies and Services,” the discussion quickly veered to entrepreneurship and software business models. But not before someone asked me about the relative benefits of XML vs. relational database as a data model – a question I am uniquely unqualified to answer as a Finance major.

At the conclusion a member of the Stanford engineering department presented me with a token “as I do not have an affiliation with Stanford.” It was a School of Engineering drink coaster.

Well, it’s not an honorary doctorate, but I will get plenty of mileage out of this with the development team.

Walking up Broadway on my way back from dinner, I noticed a crowd of people cheering under bright lights in the middle of Times Square. AudioSlave was blasting. Being a fan of the Jimmy Kimmel Show, particularly the concert series, I guessed it was a live simulcast and went over to join the fun. The picture below is the camera man dancing to the music while operating the steady cam.

Part of the concert series is the ability to buy the live performances. It was a good song and a nice “only in New York” moment, so why not?

Because to get the music, you must download Sony’s soundstage software. I don’t know what that will do to my computer, and Sony is not telling as there is not even a FAQ on the site. Even better the music is DRMed to death - it only comes in Sony’s proprietary file format which only plays in SoundStage or Sony’s iPod knock-off.

I would have happily paid my $0.99. I would have paid $10. But if you want to install your spyware on my PC and give me a crippled product, no thanks.

Earlier in the Day I had listened to Scoble discuss a major value point for RSS - he is happy to have relationships with companies, but it must be on his terms. I could not agree more.

Returning to my hotel (too cheap to stay in the conference hotel), I found that the common areas had been rented out for the Radar Magazine Launch Party. Pushing through the Paris wanna-be’s on my way out to dinner, I was talking with my daughter on the mobile who was enthusiastically telling me the results of her swim lesson. As I exited the hotel, one of the staffers ran after me down 45th street and in panicked tones yelled that I forgot my goodie bag. I began to object and he screamed “Just take it!”

In the Bag
Match.com ¾ arm length “70’s burn-out” t-shirt.
“Don’t you know who I think I am” Radar Magazine T-Shirt
Jhane Barnes eye glass case (no glasses)
Radar magazine
Altoid “smalls” mints
Bottle of Mark Body Lotion, “Hollywood Pink Flamingo”
Mark Kiss Therapy lip balm, “Sheer Red”
Hotel QT Lollypop
Small Piece of “Unblessed Kabbalah” Red String
Hardcopy book “StarStruck – When A Fan Gets Close To Fame”
One bottle each Gardnier Shampoo, Conditioner and Leave in Conditioner
Pamphlet, Betty Ford Institute.

Overall it was a rousing success, especially given it was a first time conference. A sell out crowd – I moderated three panels and I did not get a conference bag – they ran out. The audience was heavy on execs from the publishing side of media companies trying to figure out the implications for their business. Mix in a few technologists and a few dozen corporate marketers and you quickly see that RSS is everywhere and changing everything. Below are a few of the most interesting thoughts/factoids from the conference.

Paul Kedrosky – Companies give their CEOs $500,000 of training on proper disclosure under Sarbanes Oxley. Then they give a product manager a blog. Both are disclosures in the eyes of the SEC. This will lead to a lock down of information in the post hobbyist phase of blogging.

Elliot Ng and Scott Wilder of Intuit. There are 20 million small businesses in America and only 3 million use account software. Our challenge is to reach these late technology adopters. We use Blogs, Wiki and RSS Feeds to help create highly engaged customers that will evangelize our product and create new customers.

Charlene Li – email is my to do; RSS is my to know.

Bill Flitter – our customers are lowering their cost of customer acquisition by 50% using RSS Advertising.

Rok Hrastnik – Three case studies with hard facts:
RSS for Search Engine Optimization resulting in a 75% increase in traffic,
Private label branded RSS Aggregator resulting in 23% click-through rates
RSS Feeds to customers with click through rates 75 times higher than commercial email.

Let’s just say it - Skype has build the operating system for the internet in two years. In the annals of the technology business, it’s probably only second to Paul Allen buying DOS for $50k. But 20 years later, Redmond fiddles (with Longhorn) while Skype burns up the internet with a scalable (peer-to-peer), secure, real-time communication network with directory and network-based identity.

The first application of course, is voice. When I talk to my fellow Americans about Skype, the universal reaction is – why not just use your cell phone? With our inexpensive communication services, huge country, and globally-challenged thinking, rich Americans don’t get the power of free global calling. But it caused 100,000,000 people to download Skype. Think about that - how many broadband lines are there in the world? Did I mention that this is the size of their directory? Their milestone last week was three million concurrent users.

Baring the Telcos introducing network latency prior to the arrival of WiMax, the telco’s will suffer, but you still need broadband. However, the disruptions caused by Skype go much further, because if they can do secure voice, everything else is a lay-up.

Skype recently added the number three communication application, Chat. They have also added file sharing and voicemail. What’s next? My guess is email and then RSS. Then they watch for interesting applications created by third parties via their API. Skype rips off the idea and makes it better since they control the platform – see, they really are the new Redmond.

Remember all those cool applications that the rich client crowd promised LongHorn would deliver – you know before they stripped out WinFX and made it XP 2.0. Longhorn was to empower information workers by intelligently prioritizing the flow of information we all receive, IM, RSS, phone calls, web and video conferences, voicemail, email, etc.

Who’s the one company who can do that now? And can do it from any device? And look at the lock-in - screen name, billing relationship, Skype-in number today. Tomorrow your contacts, your data, the relationship between and among both, and finally, network intelligence. It’s finally come true – the network is the computer.