It's amazing to see the reward for restructuring a telecom carrier, writing off most of its debt and selling off its Canadian assets is a job as president and CFO with Oracle Corp. Greg Maffei, this is your life! It's a great gig for Maffei, who has spent the last six years running 360Networks Corp., which had lofty aspirations during the telecom boom to be a tier-one North American data network operator. Maffei was lured to Vancouver-based 360Networks with a ton of stock options from Microsoft where he was CFO. Unfortunately, the telecom boom ended soon after Maffei signed on. Stuck with way too much debt, 360Networks filed for bankruptcy protection and promptly went into stealth mode. About a year ago, Maffei, who split his time between Vancouver and Seattle, started to come out of hiding - as he clearly was trying to position himself for a post-360Networks move. He did a series of media interviews talking about how 360Networks was back on its feet after a successful restructuring, and how it had made some strategic acquisitions in the U.S. Et voila - a nice job at Oracle. Silicon Valley This Morning suggests Maffei's extensive M&A and investment experience could be leveraged by Oracle as the software industry consolidates.

According to Nielsen//NetRatings, Google 48% of the U.S. search market. Yahoo is a distant second with 21%, while MSN has 12%, AOL 5% and Ask Jeeves 2%. A survey by Harris Interactive about what people are doing with search engines finds that 88% are researching specific topics, looking up directions/ maps (75%), looking for news (64%) and shopping (51%).It has been interesting to see the amount of attention Google has been getting this week for its impending move into the online payment market. While Google has super-smart people, its track record of moving into new markets - with the exception of paid-search - has been underwhelming. There have been some bloggers suggesting Google's payment system will ignite the pay-for-view online content market. If Google can do that, I will bow down before them in awe.

Like a lot of people, I got invited to Tony Perkins' AO2005: The Innovation Summit. Looking at the list of speakers, it's a conference that I'd definitely attend if the National Post had a bigger travel budget. The invitation got me thinking about how the high-tech conference world seems have been brought back to life. It wasn't that long ago that attendance at conferences was dwindling as companies scaled back their marketing and travel budgets. Some shows such as Comdex Las Vegas lost their mojo and disappeared, while others scaled back. These days, however, there seems to be renewed interest in conferences. Maybe letting employees get away for a few days is an effective tool companies are using to reward people with something other than money. Maybe high-profile senior executives believe speaking at these shows is a strategic necessity given intense competition. Perhaps conference organizers have become smarter in putting on shows that really have value rather than competing for who can have the most booths. One of the trends I've have noticed is smaller show with excellent speakers. It seems to be based on the idea people will pay a premium price - not including the cost of travel and accomodation, if the speakers are first-rate and there are good forums to discuss new ideas. The Canadian Telecom Summit, for example, was a three-day industry bonanza featuring many of the leading Canadian telecom executives - along with a handful of U.S. executives (Michael Capellas, Jeffrey Citron). For people who shelled out $1000 to $2000 to attend, it was probably well worth the money. With conferences making a comeback, the big concern is that too many fee-hungry organizers will jump on the bandwagon and ruin the party. Just this week in Toronto, there was yet a VOIP conference with many of the same speakers who had appeared at VON Canada a month earlier. Not surprisingly, it was lightly attended.