Due to popular demand I wanted to give a little more detail about the UTR conference here, just some random thoughts and observations.

Unfortunately Julian is right when he talks about Microsoft loosing traction in the Office space with a rooster of very good Online Office applications coming along. But there are two other topics that were very present during the conference that I consider very interesting: intelligent ways of connecting data streams and the fast vanishing of the Online/Offline boundary.

Services like Mashery (http://mashery.com/), Proto (http://www.protosw.com/) or WorkLight (http://www.myworklight.com/) show the way to a SOA for the Web in general. Most amazing is what Teqlo (http://www.teqlo.com/) does, some sort of Yahoo Pipes, but much more flexible and much more powerful. I'm looking forward to all those things building and transforming the Web and the way we interact with it.

Many tools are coming with powerful offline capabilities now, erasing the border between the Desktop and the Web. Scrybe (http://iscrybe.com) is one of those applications, but I think this will be the biggest topic coming in 2007, and will settle in 2008.

One particularly interesting thing about UTR is the system of judges that are present in any of the sessions, asking questions to the presenting companies and also giving feedback to the product and the business model. This worked very nice, the  judges were really challenging, but the feedback was mostly to the point and provided good feedback. I think this is a model for many conferences, where overly positive product pitches are often diminish the quality of the conference.

And all judges asked what I call the "adoption question", dealing with adoption of Web technology within the enterprise. And that question is really an important one, not easy to answer.