Today we officially opened Influence Forum 2008 which will be held at the Crowne Plaza Hunter Valley on September 21 and 22.

Our goal for Influence Forum 2008 is to bring together Australia's most influential and brightest individuals to talk about the pressing issues facing the IT industry. We're aiming for between 70 and 80 independent influencers this year, which will include up to 60 technology journalists, plus bloggers, analysts, industry body representatives, high-profile users and other IT identities.

Influence Forum splits into two streams - business technology and consumer technology and the session topics are as follows:

Business Technology
- Business Communications (networking, VoIP, converged communications, mobile business)
- IT Security (Internet and network security, content filtering, endpoint security, etc)
- Business Applications (Enterprise 2.0, SaaS, SOA, Business Intelligence, App Development)
- IT Infrastructure (Enterprise storage, virtualisation, systems, infrastructure management)

Consumer Technology
- The Online Consumer (Broadband, online applications, search, social networking, etc)
- Personal Computing (PCs, peripherals, components, personal storage and applications)
- Lifestyle Technology (Home and entertainment technology, gadgets, consumer electronics)
- The Connected Consumer (Home networking, mobile communications, personal VoIP)

Obviously these session topics are very broad and we'll be looking for our presenting vendors to identify hot topics for discussion within that session framework.

The biggest change to this year's event is we've dropped back to two days so the event only requires delegates to miss one work day. Rather than have people coming in and out of the event due to time restraints, we hope to keep everyone together for the duration of the event.

We haven't really had to cut anything except for a session in each stream, so the popular Demo session and Influence Expo remain as a key part of the event and we're also introducing for the first time a special round table luncheon on the Monday which we believe will be a fantastic networking and educational addition.

If you have any questions about the event or are interested in participating, please contact Tamara Jawad on (02) 9894 6277 or at tamara@mediaconnect.com.au