Saturday 17 May 2008

Sky High


Sometimes as an entrepreneur you spend days and weeks in the office, brainstorming, planning, fixing problems, dreaming up schemes, hiring new people, dialing for dollars and all that. And sometimes you get out and about and do a bit of jet setting. Well, this coming week is my jet setting week so I'm dusting off my suit carrier and preparing myself for a tiring week.

First stop (Monday) San Jose in California where I am attending and speaking at the Semantic World 2008 conference. This is one of, if not the biggest gathering of folk involved in the semantic web, which is essentially the next generation of the web itself. Garlik has "bet the ranch" on semantic web technologies so we have a lot to learn from and a lot to offer to this community.

I will also take the opportunity to have a few meetings with key tech, VC, banker, contacts while I am over there, starting with a horribly early "power" breakfast in Palo Alto, on to Menlo Park and finally back in San Jose in time to do my talk at 5pm (which I've just relised will be 2am UK time - groan!).

Then a quick dash to the airport to fly back to London, which due to the time difference means I won't get back until mid-night Tuesday.

Up again Wednesday for a 6.30am flight to Geneva to attend a meeting of the High Level Expert Group on Cybersecurity of the United Nations agency, the International Telecommunications Union (ITU). I was invited by the Secretary General of the ITU to join his advisory group recently and this is my first meeting. It should be fascinating judging by the expert participants from almost every corner of the globe converging on Geneva for the two days and I am slightly nervous about whether I will have anything of interest to say to them when I address them. Well, let's give it a go!

Back again on Thursday night in time for a few hours sleep and a lengthy Board and Audit Committee meeting on Friday.

All I can say is thank goodness the following Monday is a Bank Holiday!

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