“Where does it hurt?” your humble blogger asked fellow attendees at the Specialized Information Publishers Association Conference this week in DC.  I was collecting conference pain stories to use in my roundtable on “Conference Pain Relief; Developing or Fixing Business Models.”

As I suspected, the conference pain fell into four categories:

Losing opportunity or losing sleep were the primary complaints of the publishers who admitted to experiencing conference pain .  Few said they actually lost money but several said their margins didn’t seem consistent with their efforts.  Damage to the brand was mentioned as a fear but not as an experience.

“Conferences have been my least favorite but most profitable line of business,” confessed one publisher.  Fear of risk, distaste for the demanding nature of the business, and lack of resources were the primary road blocks to starting or growing a conference line.

Clearly however, conferences are worth getting right.  Several publishers said their conferences were critical to their business and very profitable.

The future growth of events was reinforced in a general session when panelists John Suhler, CEO of Veronis Shuhler Stevenson and Don Pazour, CEO of Access Intelligence both strongly endorsed conferences and trade shows as paths to profits.  Face-to-face is a fundamental medium.

Pain is the symptom of a flawed business model.  The central point of your humble blogger’s roundtable was that there are countless ways to adjust a business model to your specific niche and that there is a profitable and relatively painless solution available to almost any information company.

“Human API” (application programming interface), mobile platforms, new platform entrants, and of course, iPad apps were among future hot topics tagged by speakers at the SIPA UK Online Publishing and Marketing Summit last week.  This year’s event focused heavily on the mechanics of new product launches, marketing automation, and web analytics.  The London conference was put on by the UK branch of the Specialized Information Publishers Association (SIPA UK). 

Your humble blogger was there, representing our newMeetia initiative.  Despite the distance from home, I knew instantly that I was with kindred spirits, entrepreneurial media utilitarians, very much like the SIPA members in the U.S.  The only adjustment was getting used to hearing expressions like “brilliant,” “dodgy,” and “jolly.”

The conference offered many practical lessons but the experience of the London region was itself a powerful lesson.  In a vibrant city, surrounded by the evidence of over two thousand years of human history one gains a perspective on the breaking news and trends.  The swirling change; the rise and fall of individuals, tribes, and empires; the roar of commerce and rush of technological change all seem less important than the consistencies of human nature, both brilliant and dark.

The Royal Observatory at Greenwich provided perhaps the most powerful lesson of the trip.  In the middle of the my trip, I finished the book Longitude about centuries of search for a solution to the problem of finding longitude and especially about John Harrison, a self-educated carpenter-turned-clockmaker who came up with a practical solution in the 1700’s.  Harrison spent most of his life perfecting a timepiece accurate, durable, and cheap enough to be used to calculate longitude at sea. Marine navigation caught my interest years ago when I saw how much Bernie Goldhirsh, the founder of Inc. Magazine, relished plotting his course, under sail.   Between business meetings, I set out to have a look at Harrison’s prototypes on display at the Observatory. 

H4 became the prototype for further simplified and improved clocks which could be produced in volume and which became known as Chronometers.  Especially once key patents expired, chronometers became essential equipment on board ships and remained so until replaced by satellite navigation systems.  The advanced technology spread to common watches and to the timepieces many of us wear on our wrists today.

Encircled by the Observatory's loudly ticking display of the march of 18^th of century technology, and knowing a little of the longitude story with all its hard fought battles, your humble blogger was struck with commonalities to our own age of change.

Today we are navigating through a new media world.  Claims of solutions to our business challenges, dismissive commentary about every experiment and countless counter-claims abound.  At least one thing is clear: the future of media and communications involves new digital platforms which are better, cheaper and more portable.  

Perhaps soon we simply will wear a media device, instead of a watch.  But the people who figure out successful new information business models integrated with these platforms will probably be practical entrepreneurs, learning by doing, like the members of SIPA and like the determined clockmaker, John Harrison.