Conferenza Announces Annual Awards; PopTech & Chris Shipley Get Top Honors.

SAN FRANCISCO -- Conferenza, Inc., the leading publisher of news on technology executive conferences, today announced its awards for 2004. And the winners are:

1. Conference of the Year -- PopTech, for the extraordinary quality of its content.

2. Host of the Year -- Chris Shipley (repeat), host of Demo and DemoMobile. Audiences believe in her, presenting companies excel under her guidance and her events are consistently glitch-free.

3. Speaker of the Year -- Malcolm Gladwell, for giving two completely different, but equally memorable, talks at TED and PopTech.

4. Surprise of the Year -- Bloggers. Through their unfiltered perspective, they improved the structure of the executive conference, extending the conversation from local to global.

5. Rookie of the Year -- Geoffrey Moore, TCG advisors partner, for his debut as Vortex co-host. Moore demonstrated a deep knowledge and created a consistent framework that's rare at executive events.

6. Best Moment of 2004 -- Author John Patrick, CEO of Attitude LLC. From the floor of PC Forum, he asked Plaxo Chairman Tim Koogle why anyone should trust the company. After Koogle delivered a long-winded, but unconvincing answer, Patrick asked the audience if anyone trusted Plaxo. Almost no one did. Later, we would learn that Patrick subsequently met with Plaxo's senior team and has since subscribed to the service -- but we still loved the moment.

7. Comeback of the Year -- Vortex. A year earlier, it looked like it was time for them to fold up the tent. But IDG repositioned it, relocated it and provided improved content to a broader, happier audience.

8. Best Crowd -- There was no better place to rub elbows than "D, All Things Digital." Co-hosts Walt Mossberg and Kara Swisher assembled headliners that included Bill Gates, Larry Ellison, Carly Fiorina and Steve Jobs. The attendee list read like a Who's Who in Technology.

9. Lemon of the Year -- AlwaysOn's Innovation Summit (repeat), for a persistent and consistent lack of substance.

According to Conferenza Editorial Director and co-founder Gary A. Bolles, "The year of 2004 was a bumper period for executive conferences. Attendance, sponsorship and quality were all consistently up. Unfortunately, attendees should expect to see registration fees head in that direction as well."

Based in San Francisco, Conferenza, Inc. (www.conferenza.com), publishes Conferenza Premium Reports, a subscription-based e-newsletter covering at least 15 top-tier technology news conferences a year for industry insiders.