August 8, 2011 — Matthew Prince, co-founder of CloudFlare, spoke about different services that hosts can use to improve service and lower costs in his presentation on Monday afternoon at HostingCon 2011. Perhaps the most interesting part of the presentation was, albeit a bit off topic, was near the end of the session when Prince revealed the analytics of CloudFlare’s possibly most infamous customer: hacker group LulzSec.

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.”

August 8, 2011 — In his presentation, “Ready or Not… IPv6 is here!”, John Curran, president and CEO of American Registry for Internet Numbers talked about the depletion of IPv4 and the imperative need for the Internet community to adopt IPv6. IPv4 was first developed in spring of 1978, which allowed for a total of 4 billion IP addresses available.

August 8, 2011 — Tom Millitzer, president of NCC International and WHIR blogger, spoke about 2011 mergers and acquisitions in his presentation on Monday afternoon at HostingCon 2011. The presentation started with a few technical glitches, but overall he spoke about the recent acquisitions in the hosting space.

August 8, 2011 — In the fourth session of the Technology and Operations track, Jim Curry, GM of Rackspace Cloud Builders, delivered his presentation, “Unlocking the Cloud — The Case for Open Standards”. Curry first gave a brief introduction to OpenStack, which is a next generation cloud operating system that transforms data centers into pools of resources.

To support the implementation of the ATRT Recommendations relating to Public Comment Processes, the ICANN Public Comment landing page (see: www.icann.org/en/public-comment/ ) has been redesigned and restructured as of 30 June 2011. The Public Participation Committee (PPC) of the ICANN Board reviewed and approved these changes during its meeting in Singapore, as the first phase of improvements in the public comment process. The new design is intended to standardize and simplify navigation and the presentation of the content. The information elements have not been altered substantially (other than an addition of Upcoming Public Comments list), but the page contents have been reorganized for uniformity and consistency. In essence, the aim is to place the predominant focus on topics that are OPEN for Public Comments while links are provided to various other categories such as Upcoming, Recently Closed, and the Archived Public Comments. The Upcoming page represents a new concept and is intended to provide the community a preview of potential topics that may be opened in future periods. The current list was compiled with input from ICANN Community Leaders and the ICANN Staff. Once each year, a formal collection and publishing cycle will be launched; thereafter, the list will be updated regularly. We hope you like the new design and that it makes your work with Public Comments more productive. If you have any comments, suggestions, or other feedback, please write to: participation@icann.org . This ICANN announcement was sourced from: www.icann.org/en/announcements/announcement-30jun11-en.htm

According to an upcoming  report by EdisonResearch.com , entitled, The Infinite Dial 2011: Navigating Digital Platforms, more than 50% of all Americans ages 12 and older are on Facebook. The study, fielded in January of 2011, indicates that 51% of all adults 12+ have profiles on Facebook. “We have been tracking the growth of Facebook since 2008, and have watched it go from 8% usage just three years ago , to 51% today.