Once again theWHIR will be sponsoring the Networking Lounge at HostingCon 2008, the largest gathering of hosted service professionals in the world.

theWHIR team will be on hand to facilitate important business connections and provide a relaxed and comfortable environment complete with refreshments where you can meet with potential or existing clients and partners. Wireless internet access will also be provided.

Feel free to schedule meetings at the Networking Lounge Booth # 627 located in the far right corner of the show floor. If there is any way that you would like us to assist in making the right connections, please do not hesitate to contact us directly.

The July 2008 issue of WHIR Magazine will be available at HostingCon and will be a great supplement for you during the show as we have included notes throughout the issue intended to steer readers toward the sessions and exhibits where they can meet the people and companies they're reading about on the page.

While at the Networking Lounge you can enter our draw to win a 50" HDTV Plasma with 5.1 Surround sound and Wireless Sub-Woofer (open to USA residents) and an 8GB iPod Touch for International residents.

We look forward to meeting you at the Networking Lounge.

Although we've taken many an opportunity to speak to c-level execs, marketing VPs and industry analysts at all the conferences we've attended, rarely have we actually sat down and interviewed those typically-endearing, developer "geeks," that often attend these events, about the newest and coolest applications they've been developing, on yes, your servers :)

However, while at LT PACT 2008 we were introduced to the co-founders of Woopra, Elie Khoury and Jad Younan, by Layered Tech's marketing guru, John Pozadzides (who also happens to be the ever-enthusiastic CEO of Woopra) and after hearing an in-depth spiel about their intriguing application (as well as their tumultuous journey to get to the US from Lebanon!) we felt compelled to share their story with you.

Woopra is a real-time web analytics tool with a unique socialization aspect woven into it (by which I mean, full-out two-way chat functionality with ANY random visitor on your website), and has been garnering a reputation as one of the hottest new "blogger-must-have" applications today. However, that's not to say that "serious" businesses can't benefit from this as well, especially with some of the new updates Elie and Jad are planning in the next few months.

In an exclusive WHIRtv interview, Elie and Jad talk about their beginnings, the challenges along their journey and their future goals with what is easily one of the most fascinating, dare I say, revolutionary, applications on the web today.

[NOTE: if you want to skip my pitch and go right to the signup page, I guess my ego can handle it. Here's the link.]

This is a first for us - next week we'll be hosting a webinar, in cooperation with Agile Equity, a mergers and acquisitions advisory firm located in New York city and Reston, Virginia.

The webinar's title, "Web Hosting M&A Trends & Outlook," ought to go a long way toward explaining the intent of the session. It's designed to help inform web hosting providers who might find themselves on the radar of one of the companies looking at the hosting business for acquisitions, so that they might better prepare themselves in advance to maximize their valuations.

The webinar will take place next Thursday, July 24, from 2:00 to 3:00 p.m. Eastern Time, and is free to attend.

Agile Equity will be delivering the session, and I'll be on hand to moderate questions from attendees after the presentation.

I think the best way to describe the content of the session would be via Dave Cummings, of Agile Equity, who was kind enough to put together a description for me.

He says the intent of the webinar is to give people who own web hosting and web services businesses a window into current corporate finance activity in their sector and industry:

"Specifically, who's buying and who's selling; what turbulence is going through the marketplace; what new public companies may become a competitive threat. And to also help them better understand the current value of their business based on previous comparable acquisitions."

Basically, if you own a web hosting company and you've considered, or are considering, selling it; or if you're not actively considering selling, but you'd like to know more about the possibility; or if you're not interested in selling at all, but you'd like to know what your company's worth by current measures; or if you'd just like to know more about the M&A landscape, and the effect this activity is likely to have on the hosting business in the near future, I think it would be an outstanding idea for you to set aside an hour this Thursday and come to the webinar.

You can reserve yourself a spot by signing up here.

See you there.

The main image on the cover of the upcoming July issue of the WHIR magazine has to do with a feature on the return of physical data center security as an issue, borne by a recent string of notable break-ins and thefts at data centers in the US and UK.

Our starting point for the issue, however, was software as a service. In designing the editorial for July, we began with an idea to assess the SaaS landscape as it stands today. Unmistakably one of the major issues in hosting, the SaaS discussion has evolved somewhat from evangelizing to strategizing - as hosting providers are no longer asking "should I?" but instead asking "how should I?"

It was that shift that we took as the starting point for our SaaS feature, since the idea of hosts talking about SaaS is, in and of itself, nothing new.

We looked at SaaS from the standpoint that hosts, software developers and their customers are largely all on board, philosophically, with the hosted model for application delivery. As a result, the platform builders have shifted their focus from singing the praises of the model itself to promoting their products as the best platform for distributing hosted applications.

With that in mind, Wayne Epperson, a regular on the pages of the WHIR mag, put together a SaaS scoreboard feature, incorporating the input of a long list of platform builders, trendsetters and decision makers, seeking the answers to questions like "what are the right ways to build a SaaS platform?" and "what applications are ready to put into production right now?"

One of the key venues for this sort of messages up to this point has been the Web hosting conferences that take place each year. And I expect them to continue to be interesting as a means of tracking the evolution of that message.

It is fortunate, then, that HostingCon, the biggest of the hosting industry events - which was acquired today by iNet Interactive, if you hadn't seen that news - is right around the corner. We've taken some special steps to tie the issue's content in with HostingCon itself, designed as a kind of primer to help you get the most out of attending the event.

The most obvious of those efforts is a feature by Esther Bauer (another WHIR regular), designed as a kind of primer for getting the most out of the event.

In addition, we've tried to tie the magazine's content throughout to the event by flagging the people and companies in attendance and making it clearer how they can be located at HostingCon.

Speaking of which, as I'm sure we've mentioned elsewhere by now, the entire WHIR news team, along with WHIR tv, will be in attendance at HostingCon this year, delivering our most comprehensive ever coverage of the event through news, features, blogs and video clips. We'll be a media partner, sponsoring the networking lounge at booth #627 in the exhibit hall. And there we'll be giving away a 50" HDTV and an iPod Touch.

Along with the news team, we'll have sales and business development representatives on hand. So those of you going to HostingCon, please stop by the networking lounge.

I promise to mention the lounge ad nauseam over the next couple of weeks.

As for the magazine, if you don't yet have a subscription, you can get a free one here. There's probably still time to sign up in time to receive the July issue. But not much time. So I'd do it about now.