On August 8, the hosting world will converge on the San Diego Convention Center for HostingCon 2011. I’d say that SoftLayer will “be there with bells on,” but a better way to put it would be that we’ll “be there with megaphones.” There are times to blend in and participate, and there are times when you follow Winston Churchill’s advice:

“If you have an important point to make, don’t try to be subtle or clever. Use a pile driver. Hit the point once. Then come back and hit it again. Then hit it a third time – a tremendous whack.”

This year, SoftLayer will be Bigger, Better and Badder in the conference sessions, on the expo hall floor and at the biggest HostingCon party ever.

Conference Sessions
We’re honored to have SoftLayer employees speaking in six different sessions at HostingCon 2011:

Over the next few weeks, you can keep an eye on the HostingCon Blog for more information about these sessions. To kick off the fun over there, they posted a preview to my session: “Setting Cloud Expectations Before Creating Cloud Strategy”

Expo
When you’re not learning from one of our SLayers in the conference sessions above, we hope you’ll swing by Booth #421 in the Expo Hall to chat with our team, get some SoftLayer swag and try your hand at the infamous Server Challenge. We’ll have live video coverage of all of the action at our booth, and given the geek credentials of HostingCon attendees, we’re expecting record-breaking times … so start studying and training now to give yourself the best possible chance to win the iPad 2 we’re bringing for the Server Challenge Champion!

HostingCon Party
Since you’ve read so attentively to this point about the ‘work’ side of HostingCon, it’s time for some ‘play.’ At 9pm on August 9, SoftLayer, cPanel and Resell.biz will hosting the biggest HostingCon Party in history. 1000 lucky attendees will come together at 4th & B for networking, food, drink and THE DAN BAND!

Attendance will be strictly limited, and you watch the tickets dwindle before the event sells out at http://hostingconparty.com. SoftLayer customers, leave a comment on this blog or contact us via Twitter (@SoftLayer) and we’ll hook you up with a promo code that comps your registration … But remember, even if you’re our best customer ever, you need a ticket to get in the door, so please register while you can!

Yes, Mr. Churchill, SoftLayer is bringing the pile driver to San Diego.

-@gkdog

Last weekend I went to an outdoor concert where I saw a pretty decent Beatles tribute band that hails from the great state of Texas and goes by the name Me and My Monkey. The entire excursion from home to the venue and back again lasted just about six hours. I was pulling into my driveway engaged in a phone conversation with a friend about which fake Beatle was her favorite when my Android gave a strangled beep, cut us off and powered down.

At first I thought it was a glitch, but a quick attempt to turn it back on showed me otherwise. I was out of juice. My battery was drained beyond the point of no return — or at least no return without access to an electrical outlet. I wondered if I had forgotten to charge the phone the previous night. After all, I was outside with friends, food, and music all evening. My phone was snug in my pocket on standby … Or was it?

I was the first to arrive to the venue, so I made a call to let the my freinds know I had staked us out a shady spot. After that, I fired up go sms to coordinate getting the right number of chairs, and I used it again while searching the parking lot for my friend’s car to help her carry those chairs. During the Sgt. Pepper set in an attempt to settle an argument, I “Googled” which year the Beatles officially broke up (turns out it was 1970 but the break-up dragged out until 1975). Sometime between Strawberry Fields and Hello, Goodbye I got an email from the office, so I logged into my handy SoftLayer App to check on a support ticket.

During the intermission, a local radio station was piped through the sound system and someone asked me to Shazam what turned out to be a Florence and the Machine cover of a track off Abbey Road. Since my phone was at the ready, I was the point person to find out whether the chorus to I Am the Walrus really said goo goo g’joob. I didn’t have a lighter on me, but my Virtual Zippo did the trick nicely during Hey Jude. And did I mention I don’t wear a watch because if I just hit the power button on my spiffy smart phone … ta-da, I get the time!

It’s a funny feeling when you realize how something that didn’t really exist five years ago has managed to ingrain itself so deeply into your everyday life. That’s what I found myself thinking as I was drifting off to sleep Saturday night, me in my bed and my Android recharging on the night stand … Well, that and who are the eggmen? Goo goo g’joob.

-William

Welcome to the next installment in our blog series highlighting the companies in SoftLayer’s new Technology Partners Marketplace. These Partners have built their businesses on the SoftLayer Platform, and we’re excited for them to tell their stories. New Partners will be added to the Marketplace each month, so stay tuned for many more come.
- Paul Ford, SoftLayer VP of Community Development

Scroll down to read the guest blog from Joe Pezzillo of Push IO, a SoftLayer Tech Marketplace Partner powering the mobile app explosion. To learn more about Push IO, visit http://push.io/.

One Day Soon, Everyone Will Have an App

It seems like only yesterday that Dan Burcaw and I were sitting at a diner sketching out our vision of the mobile app industry’s future.

In our vision, the mobile industry was poised to rocket through the next decade on a trajectory like the one the internet and web have been on since the 90s.

And the parallels don’t stop there.

Just like in web 1.0, the early days of mobile are characterized by custom development of the wild west variety, with everyone rolling their own solutions to a set of commonly recurring problems. Think back to the earliest days of the web and recall what it was like to add a shopping cart to your website. It was a team of developers and a year of time. Now, if you’re not careful to uncheck the box when buying a domain name, you end up getting a shopping cart added to your site for a couple bucks a month.

That same transformation from custom to commodity is also taking place in mobile right now.

And so, at that same diner table, we decided to create a company with the goal of providing the picks and shovels for the mobile gold rush that was already underway, with the idea that one day we’d help power a world where everyone had their own app.

Then, when Apple announced iOS 3.0 with features that required developers to provide servers, we knew we had an opening. Less than two weeks later, we founded Push IO.

Since Dan and I both have deep engineering backgrounds, we set out from day one to build the best possible software platform for getting data onto mobile devices in real-time, and we knew it would have to be designed to support the complex needs of large scale apps. We started with a completely virtual solution expecting that eventually we’d transition to a mix of virtual and physical servers. We didn’t know this transition would come so fast.

We were using a different provider when we started seeing a couple of apps for our sports broadcaster customers really taking off, all of which were demanding constant improvement in performance. So demanding, in fact, that we knew we had to shift to the hybrid-cloud system sooner rather than later, a technically involved move that was not yet being done by other providers in our space.

And that’s where SoftLayer comes in.

SoftLayer has been a key partner in our growth, supplying our hybrid-cloud infrastructure as we take on new customers and expand our platform from big sports broadcasters to multi-national businesses. SoftLayer gives us control of our own destiny, helping us avoid some of the high-profile problems that the multi-tenant virtual hosting providers have experienced, and providing us with the geographic redundancy and continuous availability we need to serve our demanding broadcast customers.

Proof of our platform’s success was revealed recently, during Apple’s WWDC 2011 Keynote announcement that they have shipped 100 Billion Push Notifications on iOS. From this we learned that Push IO has shipped 2%…2 Billion!!!…1 in 50 of those!

This summer Push IO made an exciting move: We acquired TapLynx (http://www.taplynx.com), a simple yet powerful platform that helps businesses, designers, publishers and even developers quickly create apps with no knowledge of Objective-C code required. All you need are RSS feeds and an idea of what content you want streaming into your app. Things like push notifications, In-App Purchase and user control over content updates help app creators to maximize their users’ engagement and monetize content.

Acquiring TapLynx is a huge step towards our vision, where “everyone has an app” becomes a reality. We know SoftLayer will continue to play an integral role in supporting Push IO during this exciting next step: scaling our industrial strength platform to the growing number of people who want their own mobile apps.

Many thanks to our friends at SoftLayer for making this possible and letting us share our story!

- Joe Pezzillo, Co-Founder, Push IO