The Internet World 2007 event took place in London from May 1 to 3, and was was like any other industry event – lots of brochures, gift pens and mugs, and workshops and seminars – with giants like Yahoo, MSN, Google, and also many start-ups. And like everywhere, it took a while to figure out which stalls to stop by. The event’s website: http://www.internetworld.co.uk

While a variety of topics were covered, two categories really dominated:

1. Internet Marketing – I think half the stalls were about it – showing ways to reach audience through post, emails, mobile text messages and specially designed websites – and also how to collect user information in a legitimate way. A couple of vendors said they could do a marketing blast for MyOrbit.tv – pushing it to 5 million people worldwide. Obviously we are not in that business, and I put a reverse question to them: “How can I best reach 500 people and engage them on a topic they follow?” They had no good solution for it, and in fact most firms in the event talked at 10,000 and above – “we can paint London with your message” kind of pitch – which may have a suitable role while releasing a mass market product – but in general the role of such ‘whole world marketing’ is reducing especially where we want to engage with the other person. That took us to the other main section of the event.

2. Web 2.0 section where one could learn about how to engage with the ‘You’. Various things were explained – Blogs, Forums, Better Layouts, etc. There were multiple seminars – most of which talked about how to make a website more interesting, how to enagage the audience and have them sign-up for different information feeds etc – these are real challenges of any business operating on the Internet, so the event made some contribution.

And, it was good meeting the managers of of Lulu.com and LinkedIn (one of their directors flew in from Palo Alto) – both of them have a strong value prop for an individual professional. There was a good interest in MyOrbit.tv from different companies, and a couple of them also played our videos on their giants screens to show other people what’s possible with new media.