During my first-ever live Internet TV broadcast, I accidentally kicked over-and broke-a big Klieg light. It was during the last day of Web Services Edge East 2004, an event produced by SYS-CON Media at the Hynes Convention Center in Boston.

It was quite the auspicious debut for SYS-CON.TV. We had cool staff t-shirts and everything.

I don't remember whom I was interviewing, but I do remember that he rolled with it, and had a good laugh in the spirit of our grand experiment to try live TV from a small, temporary stage in the middle of a convention floor. My producer, graciously, did not bill me for the light.

Two Generations Ago
That wasn't really so long ago, but it seems as if the industry has advanced at least two generations since then. We've sinced moved from Web Services to SOA and Ajax, and now to Cloud Computing.

To be sure, the Worldwide Web had clearly established its central role in business and personal computing well before 2004. And we were streaming our live broadcast over the Web, of course. Salesforce.com had been around for a few years, but had not yet gone public and was still considered an ASP company.

So even though the pieces had begun to fall in place for today's enterprise IT picture, the term Cloud Computing was not yet a faint wisp on the horizon. Many of today's top Cloud vendors had not yet been born; the big stories at Edge East 2004 involved BEA WebLogic (since subsumed by Oracle), Java (also subsumed by Oracle), JBoss (subsumed by Red Hat), IBM WebSphere, and Software AG.

Over these past seven years, I had the opportunity to interview hundreds of others, some live, some taped, at numerous SYS-CON events, other remote locations, and in-studio at Times Square in New York. One time, I got a guy to do a stupid dance. Another time, I interviewed a robot. There were also some very serious, extended interviews in the mix.

The Next Cloud Expo is June 6-9
All of this comes to memory as we approach the latest SYS-CON event, the 8^th International Cloud Expo, at the Jacob Javits Center in New York June 6-9.

This time, news will be made not only by companies that were well-known in 2004 such as Oracle and HP, but also by companies such as Abiquo, Adpativity, Rackspace, and Terremark, all of whom are flying high in today's Cloud Computing world.

My colleague Jeremy Geelan has done most of the heavy lifting for SYS-CON.TV over the years, and will be his usual indefatigable self again in New York. Jeremy was originally trained by the BBC; I doubt he's ever broken a thing on camera.

I've been spending most of the past year in Southeast Asia, from where I've been able to report on how the world's most dynamic economic region is embracing Cloud Computing, and how it compares with the rest of the world.

So I'm looking forward to getting back to New York--an international destination if there ever was one--and catching up with everyone. Whether I get onto TV will be solely up to whomever's in charge of the lights.