We sponsored a B2B Marketing virtual conference by MarketingProfs last week, and I wanted to give my impressions of how this may become a new, important marketing trend. And our friends at MarketingProfs provided the data to support this.

First of all, 4,000 people *attended* the virtual conference. They expect 350 people to attend their ‘live’ conference in Chicago. I starred the ‘attended’ because being virtual, people were in and out of it. But still, to get 10x more attendees has got to be significant. And it showed in the number of clicks to our ActiveConversion website, and of the whitepaper that we posted. With 10 times more people, you get a lot more interest, period.

Besides being convenient for attendees, I think it was good for the speakers because they didn’t have to take time to travel. This made for a good number of speakers, with a wide range of topics. To top it off, these webinars, and in fact the web pages supporting this conference remain in place for a year, so you can go see them weeks afterwards if you missed them or want to see them again.

Of course, nothing replaces face to face (and the freebies and parties that go with them) but convenience has its place. Not everybody has the time or the budget to go to conferences they should go to, and the advent of the virtual conference has changed that.

And it turns out that executives prefer webinars, according to a study by MarketingSherpa. They attend an average of 1 per week. Probably because decision-makers have less time, they prefer the convenience of learning this way. They even went on to say that it allows them to read email etc. while they are listening and watching. So don’t think that virtual means geek. Virtual attracts people who are going to make the final decision in many cases.

Trade shows aren’t going away anytime soon, but expect them to change, just like Tivo (PVRs) has changed network TV.

Kempton Lam, and Sarah Blue have the second DemoCamp put together for June 26 (next Tuesday). The next StumbleUpon may be demoing, so if you have the time, head down to the U of C for this short and sweet event. It goes from 6-8pm at Scurfield Hall.

For those who don’t know, Demo Camp is based on BarCamp, which are community-based efforts to feature local tech (mostly software) products and companies. There is no powerpoint allowed, so no hand waving, just demo. People sign themselves up to demo and to attend. Part of the creed is to let people know, so I’m doing my part

The camp’s demos are:

• Renoworks: Doug Vickerson
• Curve Dental: Matt Dorey
• MOBY Pages: Sami Khan
• MoboVivo Inc.: King Chung Huang and Trevor Doerksen
• Jetstream Media: Jeff Bradshaw

At the end, the demo’ers then ask the attendees what they need: money, people, press, buzz, beta testers etc.

It’s very informal Web 2.0 collaboration, so come see what the next $75 million startup company in Calgary might be!

See you there.

I thought I would finish up my observations from the Salesforce.com (SFDC) Developer Conference held at the end of May.

A lot of the one-day SFDC developer conference centered around UI improvements and UI ‘kits’ to easily be able use the latest lipstick products such as Ajax, Flex and Adobe Apollo. Interface obviously matters, and SFDC seemed to be reinforcing the theme, that the better your UI looks, the better we look. Makes sense, given that this was to a crowd of SFDC development partners. What was impressive is the amount of integration that makes creating and changing the UI look pretty easy.

There were also discussions about the SOAs available between SFDC, Google, and Oracle to get data back and forth these various products. In particular there was a preview of SFDC accessing a Hoover (credit bureau) database, then an in-house Oracle database, and then sending the resulting data back to SFDC.

I found this kind of amusing as Oracle and SFDC are fierce competitors, both in product and human resources. Many of SFDC’s people are ex-Oracle as I discovered so to have them cooperating is actually rather refreshing. I guess the enemy (Oracle) of my enemy (Microsoft), becomes my friend as both SFDC and Oracle are rather outspoken critics of Microsoft.

The hush-hush announcement between Google and Salesforce became public last week. SFDC users will be able to buy and manage Google Adwords directly from the SFDC app. Good for Google because they now have exclusive (no Yahoo, or MSN) access to SFDC’s 30,000 customers, and good for SFDC because Google has over 500,000 advertisers, many of which can now use Adwords to get leads.

For ActiveConversion,  this is great validation, as it was designed to take allow B2Bs such as Salesforce users take advantage of excellent lead generation tools like Adwords, and other offline and online ads. It will be used in many cases alongside Salesforce and Google, just as it was designed to be used.

StumbleUpon, a Calgary startup created by Garrett Camp, Justin LaFrance and Geoff Smith with 2.4 million users, was acquired last Friday by eBay for $75 million. Started in a Calgary apartment in 2002, their technology helps to find websites that you are probably interested in, based on your demographics and interests. Created with a need to find quality photo sites by amateur photographer Garrett, it has morphed into a technology that can also match users with online ads they are likely interested in seeing. A very Web 2.0 collaborative type company, much like iStockPhoto, another Calgary Web 2.0 success story.

Funded with only$1.5 million by an A-list of angel investors like Ron Conway, Ram Shiriram, Mitch Kapor and others, it’s proof positive that successful startups can be started in Calgary, funded with a modest amount of money and win BIG. A far cry from the tech boom/bust, when funding of $50 million wasn’t uncommon, and you just HAD to be located in Silicon Valley or Boston.

What’s particularly interesting to note is how online advertising and search engines are playing into their business model, something that was non-existent in 2000. There is a sea change happening in the advertising and marketing world, and it revolves around the Internet. Just ask Bill Gates.

StumbleUpon just released a version of their technology that does the same for online video and video advertisng, so that should be interesting as other than YouTube, there needs to be other ways to find and consume video on the Internet.

Congratulations Garrett, Justin and Geoff! You’re an inspiration to all tech entrepreneurs, particularly those in Calgary and Canada.