What a ride! And what a great way to launch the official SmarterTools blog.
SmarterTools arrived in full force at HostingCon 2008. When we attended last year, one of the most frequent requests from customers, partners, and friends was to be able to meet a few of our lead developers who had been with us since the beginning. Mission accomplished--Grady Werner and Bryon Grosz helped man our booth this year with six other SmarterTools staffers. Everyone was glad to see them.
We had literally dozens of our Authorized Resellers and Bundle Partners come by and we signed up several more. Everyone seemed really excited about the new version releases. We had a lot going on with a Major version of SmarterStats 4.x coming out just days prior to the event and with SmarterMail 5.5 (adding BlackBerry support among other things) and SmarterTrack 3.5 (adding WhosOn and more) coming out at the same time.
The list of Partners and Friends is so long that I hesitate to try and list them. I would hate to leave anyone out accidentally, but we saw:
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Lou, Brian, Rob, Derek, and many more from
HostMySite
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Many, many more...
Tim Uzzanti, the SmarterTools CEO, hosted one of the meeting sessions title "Customer Support and Its Discontents." He did a great job and we received a lot of positive feedback. We will likely be presenting this topic again at other events throughout the year. So if you missed it, you will probably have another chance to hear it and we will keep you informed.
As you can see, our booth was right up front--taking one of the three premier positions in the exhibit hall. It turned out great (if I do say so myself) and we are very proud of the whole SmarterTools team that participated. We gave away SmarterTools t-shirts and did product demos, but it seems that the most popular part of our booth was the free cans of Brawndo energy drink that we gave away.
Big "thanks" go out to our promotional partner Redux Beverages--the makers of Brawndo--who shipped us all of those cans just so we could give them away. For those of you "out-of-the-know," Brawndo stems from the movie "Idiocracy" from 2006--a futuristic dark comedy in which the previously fictitious drink plays a major part. Seeing the movie makes tasting the drink all the more sweet!
The show was a big success for all. Thanks to the good folks at Interjuncture for putting it all together. iNet Interactive has 
purchased the show and will be producing it next year--we wish them continued success.
Until next time,
Jeff