conferences

Online game developers have a unique set of challenges when it comes to success. One challenge is that they need to scale – quickly. If their game goes viral – as the biggest games undoubtedly do – the game needs to stay online or else it’s toast. This also leads into a second challenge, which is availability and performance. There’s nothing more frustrating to a gamer than to be in the middle of an intense play and have the game freeze. Any way you look at it, it’s not cool – for the gamer or the developer.

Greetings from San Francisco! I’m here because there are two conferences currently occurring that we think you’ll find interesting.

Rackspace sponsored a case study presentation yesterday entitled “Determining the Right Infrastructure for SaaS and Web 2.0 Companies,” presented by Emil Sayegh (VP, Product at Rackspace) and Kraig Kuipers (CEO of Pangea Foundation). The case study walked through Pangea Foundation’s move from a colo provider to Rackspace.

I’m here in sunny California, home of the world famous In-n-Out Burger. No, I didn’t travel 1,700 miles for a cheeseburger (even if it is a double-double, animal style). I’m here for SaaSCon, the premier Software as a Service conference that brings together application developers, IT managers and infrastructure gurus. Over the next couple days, I will be providing you with a recap of the previous day’s events.

Rackspace’s own Frederick Mendler recently particpated in a panel discussion at the Customer Service is the New Marketing summit. The topic of the discussion was scaling customer service. The panel, which was moderated by Marc Hedlund of Wesabe, also included Heather Champ from Flickr, Pratap Penumalli from Google, and Ross Mayfield from Socialtext.