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California: Final day of ISOC & 3COM |
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Written by Stephen Baines
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Friday, 25 June 1999 |
I went along to the final sessions of INET and to an amazing speach from Debrah Ch? of E-Trade. She spoke at length about how the company had gone from being a $200m a year company to a $5billion a year company in just 3 years - that's sales, not value. The company, unlike a lot of Internet companys is profitable, and has no debt! The mark of the company is that last year they had 4 days when trading was interupted for an hour or so. This is the only time this has happened, and it made headline news across the country. The company used the experience as a basis for a series of new adverts. Though they calculated the news was worth over $20m in airtime, and actually increased the number of customers they had. Quite remarkable!
After that I called on the 3com stand to finalise the details for the afternoon. Details sorted, I went to the hotel, picked up my car (now minus a wing mirror... Hmm), and made my way to Santa Clara to the headquarters of 3com.
The American Way is a remarkabe road lined with the great and the good of Silicon Valley... CA, NA, NORTEL, and many, many more! I then saw the 3com campus - wow! What a site! It really is quite impressive. I found my way in and looked for building 1. Once in, I signed in and waited for my personal tour of the Education Lab. An amazing place, showing things such as the new generation of white boards that take it to the next step. Also, video over IP that doesn't go jerky, or hog bandwidth. Also IP phones for phoning real phones, wireless IP phones that you dial either real numbers or an IP address - the quality of them all was very impressive.
Suitably impressed I left with a lot of things to think about. And now back to the hotel to sort things out for the plane to Boston in the morning. The packing of course took hours - memo to self, don't buy anything else without dumping something else first!
I went out for a late night wander through San Jose - I'm going to miss this place, it's a place I could live in, and that's not something I would have said before leaving England over 2 weeks ago. |
