The tech events theme that Topaz has blogged about these past few weeks continues — today with a focus on mobile. March is “mobile month” in Massachusetts — an effort supported by the Governor’is office, industry organizations like MassTLC and the British Consulate in Boston, and media like Xconomy. You can learn more about this and see a summary of the month’s events on the Mass Mobile Month website. This focus on mobile actually started a few weeks back with events like the MassTLC Mobile World Congress debrief. I missed that one, but I did catch last night’s Mobile Monday Boston event sponsored by the UK Trade and Investment group, featuring Boston area and UK-based mobile firms. There were a handful of company presentations, covering a broad range of mobile markets — for consumers, carriers, content developers. Two local firms I found fun and interesting — Textaurant (replacing those crazy restaurant pagers with text messages to your cellphone) and Hellovino (a free mobile wine pairing and recommendation service). Tonight the Mobile Month continues with the MassTLC’s Tech Tuesday event focus on mobile. These are great networking and learning opportunities — and this one promises to be particularly interesting.

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Over the past few weeks, Topaz has been focusing on events and their importance in the world of tech PR. I can add another piece of evidence based on an event I attended last week — the IDC Directions 2010 conference. This may be the grand-daddy of all tech events…according to IDC’s Kirk Campbell, it’s the longest running tech conference at 45 years! Based on my experience over the course of the day last Thursday, IDC Directions still has a lot to offer (the good news for those of you on the west coast — there’s an opportunity this week to experience it yourself, as they do this again on March 10 in Santa Clara). The biggest takeaway for me were insights into a broad range of tech topics — wireless, outsourcing, sales enablement, cloud computing to name just a few. There was so much to take in, I had to pick my spots. I caught John Gantz, who offered a look ahead to the year 2020 (billions of personal devices and tens of billions of embedded systems) and an encouraging perspective on the nearer-term prospects for the tech industry. Rich Vancil and Michael Gerard talked about why/how tech companies should focus on sales and marketing (investing to improve sales productivity is key). Frank Gens looked at cloud computing (we’re just at the beginning of mainstream adoption). Amy Lind and Carrie MacGillivray focused on the evolution of the wireless marketplace (by 2013 broadband will be ubiqitous and operators will shift from a focus on the voice/data split to revenue per device). David Tapper and others analysts took a look at outsourcing (a means to enabling intelligent enterprise). I’m not doing any of these justice, but there was just too much to cover. And beyond all these learnings, there were the other benefits Topaz pointed out in earlier blogs and in our enewsletter — connecting with these and other influencers, with clients (Black Duck was well represented) and with former colleagues. All in all, a very good way to spend a Thursday — and another example of the value of tech events.

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