AlwaysOn is ready to rock

The AlwaysOn 2005 Innovation Summit kicks off on Tuesday, and it’s lining up to be a great event [link requires free registration]. I met with many of the AO100 companies on Wednesday to walk through the PR around the Summit. At that point we had about 80 confirmed media and bloggers attending. Now we’re up to over 110 and are actually having to restrict the number of press attending from individual publications (there are only 700 attendees in total). The list makes impressive reading – BusinessWeek, CNBC, Economist, Forbes, Fortune, FT, Newsweek, NYT, SF Chronicle, SJ Merc, WSJ – so it’s a good chance for companies to meet the media face-to-face.

I also had a chance to catch up with David Kelley, the founder of IDEO, who I’m interviewing for a keynote on Wednesday. He’s a fascinating character and a brilliant speaker. We’ll be discussing how design thinking can spark better innovation, not just in products but also services. We’ll also talk about Stanford’s new d.school which he has set up to train a new breed of creative design thinkers.

Meantime, there’s a profile of Tony Perkins, the founder of AlwaysOn in today’s San Jose Mercury News [requires free registration], which Matt Marshall penned following the session on Wednesday.

If you’re coming to the event, be sure to look me up. I’m also sitting on several judging panels in the CEO Pitch tent, so will be hiding out in there for much of Wednesday afternoon. I’ll post some photos and thoughts from the conference next week too.

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