• New IT Strategies for a Digital Society - Susan E. Metros, Associate Vice Provost and Deputy CIO for Technology-Enhanced Learning and Professor of Visual Design and Clinical Education, University of Southern California
• Creating Flexible, Technology-Enhanced Collaboration and Learning Spaces - Ron Danielson, Vice Provost and CIO, Santa Clara University
• Building a Foundation for Integrating Rich-Media on a Web 2.0 Campus - Adam Smeets, Digital Media Specialist, Loyola University Chicago, John Drevs, Manager of University Web Content, Loyola University Chicago, Bruce Montes, Director of Academic Technology Services, Loyola University Chicago

Make sure you check out Vitrium’s virtual booth and say hello to Susan Daly, our Senior Marketing Manager, as well as a few of our sales representatives.

Several attendees stopped by our booth and entered to win a Grouse Mountain Zipline Adventure for 2. We haven’t drawn the winner yet, but for those of you who entered, keep an eye out in your inbox for an email announcing the contest winner soon!

A few of our favourite speakers included:

• Peter Hrabinsky, Director of Marketing for Antarctica Digital – Ways to Ignite Your Social Media Initiatives
• Chris Breikss of 6smarketing – Integrating Email Marketing with Social Media

And of course…

Guy Kawasaki! Speaking about “Enchantment: The Art of Changing Hearts, Minds, and Actions”, Guy inspired the audience to be enchanting, to enchant customers with their products and services, and how specifically they can achieve the status of “enchanting”.

Conferences coming up for Vitrium Systems include Adobe Max and Salesforce’s Dreamforce, make sure to stop by our booth at both events!

Vitrium’s booth showcased our PDF lead generation solution – PDFSalesLeads, where our knowledgable sales representatives helped conference attendees understand how they can be leveraging their PDFs to generate more sales leads. Many internet marketers, in particular B2B marketers, gate their PDF documents behind web registration forms that deter visitors from downloading the PDF. PDFSalesLeads embeds a contact form into the PDF, allowing viewers to preview your content (if you want them to). By previewing some of the content, readers are able to engage with the document and assess whether or not they want to read the rest of it. Engaged readers are more willing to provide accurate contact info for your sales department to follow up with!

Follow what’s happening at IMC on twitter, just search for #IMCYVR to keep up-to-date!

Day 1 of the conference involves intensive training sessions on various topics related to successfully marketing on the web. Days 2 and 3 consist of short speaker sessions, these are the speakers we are looking forward to seeing on Day 2:

• Writing for the Web with Crawford Killan – Room 3 at 9:45am
• Ways to Ignite Social Media Initiatives with Peter Hrabinsky, Director of Marketing for Antarctica Digital – Room 1 at 1pm
• Online marketing Scandinavia Style: How to create big results in a small market with Steen Rasmussen & Henrik Stenmann, Senior Partners IIH Nordic – Room 2 at 1:45am
• Augmented Reality – Enhancing Interactive Marketing with Mathijs Gajentaan, CEO and co-founder of Winvolve – Room 3 at 3pm

On Day 3, make sure you catch these speakers:

• Enchantment: The Art of Changing Hearts, Minds, and Actions with Guy Kawasaki, CEO of Garage Technology Ventures
• Integrating Email Marketing with Social Media with Chris Breikss, 6S marketing
• Fifteen Ways to Destroy Your Social Media Marketing (and some ways to make it stronger) with Jeff Nelson, CEO of Anduro Marketing

Check out IMC’s full schedule to find out who all their speakers are. It’s going to be a great show, so make sure to check out our tweets from it!

Yesterday, Vitrium attended its first virtual conference as an exhibitor at Publishing Business Virtual Conference 2010. We wanted to say a big thank-you to everyone that stopped by our virtual booth! Our staff was able to live chat with anyone that was inside our booth, and visitors were also able to download a variety of informational materials about protectedpdf.

Since the focus of the conference with digital and mobile publishing, we wanted to inform our booth visitors about how the can start leveraging PDF protection to protect revenue generated from sales of online publications. We answered many questions from attendees about why protectedpdf would be the best PDF protection solution for them. Many visitors were concerned about the ease-of-use for their readers. It turned out that many felt that PDF DRM was a hinderance to access for their readers and wanted to stay away from PDF protection, mainly because their readers would have to download extra software to access publications. Our booth staff were very pleased to dispel that myth, and explain to our booth visitors that, in fact, protectedpdf documents can be viewed using Adobe Reader without any additional software or plug-in downloads required!

Next Tuesday, you will be able to find the Vitrium booth at IMC Vancouver at the Four Seasons Hotel. For all of you who are interested in internet marketing, make sure to check out the conference and stop by our booth!

On May 25^th I attended the SIIA NetGain Conference and Technology Innovation Tour in San Francisco, California, to Adobe Systems, Google and Apple.  I was at Apple Corporate Headquarters standing in the Apple Store examining the new iPad.  Slick doesn’t begin to describe what Steve Jobs has done in transforming already 2 million folks away from their PC’s to mobile computing!  So, where is the Microsoft supported version of this really cool device?  Well, look no further I found a ton of them here in Taipei at Computex!

What also excites me most about these mobile slates and tablets are that the majority of them are running Microsoft’s Windows 7 Home and Pro OS.  Brilliant!  Vitrium Systems’ protectedpdf will be supported by any device that supports Adobe Reader, Adobe Acrobat and Foxit Reader, all of which will be run on these mobile slates and tablets running Windows 7!

Here is one you probably have never heard of that I found at the Microsoft booth.  Introducing the ExpoPC Slate from Canada!  This sleek slate has a 8.9 inch multi touch screen, an Intel N270 1.6GHz processor, 2 GB memory DDR2 RAM 667Mhz, disk storage 32 GB SSD, 1024×600 display, 802.11 b/g, bluetooth, card reader SD/MMC, webcam 1.3 megapixels, 3 USB ports, headphone and mic, internet LAN plug, VGA port, port CDMA/SIM, 4 hour battery life and runs Windows 7 Pro.  My goodness, I can’t believe they packed all that into this fantastic slate!  Microsoft had it locked up and sealed in the display case for viewing only.  Even some Microsoft suits couldn’t gain access to the device to show it to customers. The ExpoPC is reported to ship September 2010 for about $600.00.  The one thing I don’t get is the PC part of the branding – the PC is dead!

Follow me on Twitter! @peternieforth

There are lots of new chips being announced, it is hard to keep up with all their names and the collision of the CPU and the GPU on a single piece of silicon.  Day two was really iPad killer day at the show, also netbook killer day as tablets are back!

Intel introduced the next generation of Atom Chips for netbooks, tablets and smartphones which will ship by the end of the year. Qualcomm is out and shipping their third generation Snapdragon chips. AMD demonstrated two of their Fusion accelerated processing units. The Ontario and the Llano will ship in the first half of 2011.

If you don’t wish to pay the “Apple Tax” and premium that goes with patronizing a closed proprietary vendor like Apple, the Taiwanese PC makers are coming to the rescue! Tablets or Slates?  Vitrium Systems CTO, Dr. Terry Coatta is going to love the fact that Microsoft’s vision for the tablet/slate let’s you do the same things as what you can do on a PC.  Asus announced the Eee Pad tablet running Windows 7 backed by the Intel Core 2 Duo processor.  I saw two sizes, a 10 inch and 12 inch tablet/slate, with promises of 10+ hours of battery life.  I can’t wait for these to ship in early 2011. MSI announced the Wind Pad – a 10 inch tablet/slate, that will come in two models and either run Windows 7 or the Android platform.  These will ship by the end of the year, and I heard with a price tag of $500.

Will Microsoft win the tablet/slate battle?  Microsoft VP Steve Guggenheimer told the WSJ that there’s always lots of noises at the beginning of a new category.  He says that today 95% of all netbooks run on Windows.  Three years ago it was just 5%, with most running on Linux. 

So are those E-book readers dead?  How many devices are you willing to carry?

Tomorrow is E-book Reader Day at Computex Taipei, I can’t wait.  I think I’ll wear black.

It’s the first day of Tools of Change in New York! For the next two days, Vitrium Systems will be there and we’re looking forward to listening to all the speakers, but a few in particular:

• Tim O’Reilly (@timoreilly) of O’Reilly Media is one of the keynotes and his talk is titled “The Future of Digital Distribution and Ebook Marketing”. We’re especially excited to hear what he thinks the next generation of digital distribution infrastructure is going to look like. If you’re at TOC, make sure to catch his talk at 2:25pm Wednesday in the Broadway Ballroom.

• Sameer Shariff of iPublishCentral is another keynote speaker. His speech, “The Next Generation of Ebooks – Invent It or Witness It!” is not to be missed if you’re interested in finding out how ebook publishers are pushing the envelope and creating innovative ways to leverage technology to develop the next generation of ebooks. Don’t miss Sameer at 10:45am on Tuesday in the Wilder Room.

• Scott Sigler of Dark Overlord Media is speaking to both authors and publishers about the pros and cons of authors partnering with publishers versus publishing independently. “Who Needs You, Big Publishing? How Authors Can Own All Rights and Make More Money” is at 1:10pm on Wednesday in the Broadway Ballroom.

If you’re at TOC this week, check out these keynote speakers and tell us what you thought.

And don’t forget to stop by booth #19 for your chance to win an Apple iPad!

With only a few days left until O’Reilly’s Tools of Change conference in New York, we’re gearing up to make sure it’s a great experience. Peter Nieforth and Mark James, our CEO and Business Development and Product Management Director are going to be there. So make sure you drop by the Vitrium Systems booth and see what they’re giving away. Click here to find out!

One of the main topics that this year’s TOC conference is focusing on are new technologies that are changing the publishing industry and helping to create a more profitable future for it. That’s where Vitrium comes in. We want to showcase to large and small publishers how they can begin to track and monitor their electronic content if they aren’t already and if they are, how they can do it in an affordable and user-friendly way.

We’ll make sure to keep you posted about TOC and who we’re excited to hear speak!