August 8, 2011 — Mike Zobitz, director of sales at SingleHop, started his presentation “In Your Customer’s Shoes: World-Class Hosting Sales Techniques” at HostingCon 2011 by asking the audience words they associate with sales. Words like commission and lies came up. Zobitz says that a lot of times sales people are equated with liars, but he says effective sales techniques involve the “brutal truth.”

The most highly attended ICANN conference to date may also be the meeting we will look back on as the precise moment when the Internet business ceased to be synonymous with the Wild West. As ICANN and the satellite businesses and organizations which support the function of the Internet gain notoriety and publicity and institutionalized “big business” steps into the space as players in the New gTLD realm, the existing community must also step up its game.

Bill Clinton is addressing the San Francisco-Silicon Valley ICANN meeting this Wednesday and ICANN has asked for questions from the audience. Questions for President Clinton need to be submitted in advance and will be moderated with Rod Beckstrom, ICANN President and CEO, joining President Clinton on stage after the speech asking the questions on behalf of the community

Web 2.0: RIM CEO Says Apps Unnecessary For Web Moments before Web 2.0 Summit co-chair John Battelle invited Research In Motion CEO Jim Balsillie on stage, he asked attendees how many had BlackBerry mobile phones and somewhere between 10% to 20% of the audience members raised a hand. Then he asked how many used to have BlackBerry mobile phones and noted that the number of hands was comparable.

VMware: Get Ready for the New Infrastructure As virtualization continues to grow, the jobs of mediating access to and coordinating hardware is being taken over by a new layer of software VMware calls “extended virtualization,” the company’s President and CEO Paul Maritz told the audience at VMware Tuesday.

Jobs to developers: Stick with the winning team Facing growing competition from Google Android and an amassing army of appealing smartphones, Steve Jobs played defense Monday. At Apple’s Worldwide Developers Conference where Jobs introduced the iPhone 4, he also spent a good amount of time selling his already popular platform to his audience of developers. More so than at past iPhone developer events, Jobs was careful to spend time talking about how the App Store approval process works, how much money there is to be made from iAds, his device’s market share and reach, and the potential for growth that they have by placing their creations in the App Store.

Business Intelligence Software: Cloud Burst Ahead The four CIOs sitting on the stage of the Microsoft Global High Tech Summit 2010 in Santa Clara earlier this month were all early adopters of various technologies, and had the scars to prove it. One noted that providing cloud-based access for an enterprise data warehouse was his biggest pain point these days.