Silicon Alley '99 Conference

Lots of people may have heard about the Silicon Alley '99 conference hosted by the Silicon Alley Reporter Feb. 23-24th. And lots of people were overheard complaining that there was no connectivity at a show that's about the Internet, new technologies, new companies and new ways companies are using technology. And even more people were heard grumbling under their breath about the price of admission for the show and the "exclusive" party.

But it was set way over on the west side in a stunning TriBeCa loft with views galore, bars on every side and plush exclusiveness oozing about. Thomas Flynn and Shan Franklin of Flycast network and Richard Sheinker of ITG were some of the reps from their firms talking with attendees. Peter Kirwan, now CTO of NaviSite also made an appearance since his job (and city) change from Servercast. Matthew Crehan of Applied Theory explained their company's plan of project expansion, which was quite impressive. Guests milling about included Michael Diamante (T3), Courtney Brown (Virtual Resource), Howard Greenstein (Microsoft), Kevin Werbach (Release 1.0). Mark Jefferies (Electric Communities) was also a showcaser and Christine Harmel (Interactive Resource) came out to check it out, even on her birthday! But meanwhile, the big, ol' lumbering Javits Center had a conference on Feb. 23-25th, complete with connectivity, and all for FREE on IT for Wall Street '99.

This well attended event had firms representing staffing solutions, networking, and connectivity interests. Distribution and customer service were hot topics for this year's conference. Familiar Silicon Alley firm Random Walk Computing was also partook in a career forum simultaneously and Eric Lehrfeld, director of biz. dev for the company was enthusiastic about prospects. Adam Levy of RadWare was working the booths and Arthur Patterson, CTNY.com and Sam Lembo (IMRglobal Corp) were friendly at their booths. Peter McMullen of Interwoven enthusiastically told me all about the fantastic website updating, maintaining and other capabilities of their software.