SiteGround Internal Conference Fall 2011 – you can now explain your granny what you really work!

I recently overheard my mother telling one of her neighbors that I work as a computer programmer. You can imagine my surprise, as I am a marketing person, and I have never written a single line of anything even remotely resembling a source code. But it was definitely not my mother’s fault, it was me, apparently not being able to explain to her what web hosting is and what I do in a web hosting company. The thought that the situation can be similar for many of my co-workers worried me a little, because as Albert Einstein says: “You do not really understand something unless you can explain it to your grandmother.”

I know that each and everyone in SiteGround is a fine expert in his/her day-to-day activity, but what each of us tend to miss to some extent is the big-picture perspective. So here comes the first internal conference aiming to make all of us understand the underlying trends in our industry and the company business strategies better.

There were few lectures that did a great job for getting some general web trends revealed. For example in the HTML 5 presentation, Mihail Irinchev – head of our Software Development department, who was pointed by the attendees as the SiteGround’s most charismatic speaker – told the amazing history of the HTML development and enlightened all of us about how the great functionality of HTML 5 can change the way websites perform. From Niki Todorov we learned several interesting statistics about spam activity worldwide. Did you know for example that the number of unwanted email messages has drastically dropped in October 2010? Many of us did not know that, but now we know even how it happened, what are botnets and which ones were stopped so that such an amazing result was achieved. (details on this subject can be found here)

Other presentations focused more closely on the web hosting industry. Our mastermind Tenko Nikolov introduced the hottest legal topic in our industry – the so called PIPA (Protect Internet Privacy Act) that is discussed currently in USA and has the potential to turn upside down the current view about who is responsible for any copyrighted materials that appear online and thus the way web hosting companies do business. (see more on this issue at: http://savehosting.org/). Our guest speaker from www.1h.com Marian Marinov focused on the Cloud – the buzz word in hosting industry for the last few years. As it may have been expected, the opinion of this great technical mind about what cloud really means differs a lot from the view of the marketing people in the industry:)

At the end of the conference day we felt valuable insights were given about the important technological and industry developments that influence the decisions made in our company. Thus we all understand better the specific SiteGround business strategies, the philosophy behind our day-to-day work and last but not least, we can even explain better the industry in which we work to whomever is interested:)

Lilyana Yakimova
Marketing Manager