Monday was good for framing questions, but not so helpful at answering them. For example, on health care, "How do you increase health and decrease costs of care in a system that compensates care but doesn't compensate health?" Good question, no clear answers. That's more or less the point of PC Forum though; new companies and technologies chasing hard problems with varying degrees of success.

I always enjoy the new company presentations, but I didn't see much this year that struck me as revolutionary. One company was promoting a sort of Applescript for Windows. Another company had an impressive calendaring program that was well ahead of Mozilla's Sunbird ...but for how long? Another company had a P2P system that connected you with persons actually known to you -- good idea generally, but I don't see it as a solution to the IP issues around file-sharing. (The presenters claimed to have spent tens of thousands of dollars on legal opinions, but I'm fairly sure that none of those opinions described a file-sharing safe harbor.)

One problem with company presentations generally is that, for obviou$ reason$, they tend to promote proprietary solutions over standards, but history shows that for the long term interoperability wins the day. As one presenter said, interop is usually the last stage of development. Too bad.

I had dinner with Paul Stahura and enjoyed a second night of great ICANN, DNS, and domain discussion. On to Tuesday...