Impressive quality of presentations at this year’s DPA Conference, held recently in our home town of Brighton. Standouts for me were:

Chuck Richards of Outsell telling us that B2B users today are spending more time on search than research, clear indication that things are going badly wrong on the usability front. Publishers are paying more attention to this now than previously, but we still have a fair way to go, clearly! Chuck also revealed that marketeers spend two thirds of their budgets on their own publisher websites. It will be interesting to see how new tools such as promotional widgets, and greater use of social networking, start to change this. Online marketers are increasingly talking about taking the fight to where the customers are – i.e. on blogs and on social networking sites like MySpace et al. Will we start to see more of that spend going ‘away from home’?

Julian Ashworth, Head of Reed Elsevier Pricing Centre of Excellence talking about the importance of pricing flexibility in optimizing the value of online innovations. This is something we’re really conscious of as builders of access management systems, for fairly obvious reasons: in order to build an appropriate amount of flexibility into a pricing system it’s important to have a firm grasp of the options that might be needed. Clients, equally, need this knowledge in order to specify their requirements accurately.

Simon Ferguson, Publishing Director, RBI standing up to be counted on Virtual Worlds. Second Life and the rest may be well into ‘the trough of disillusionment’ this year, but apparently the future is (still) virtual: the top two sites visited by 12 year olds, Stardoll and Club Penguin are virtual world sites (Nielsen).

Dave Langan of Silverbear saying things that will be music to the ears of our Technical Director at Semantico in extolling the virtues of agile web development. In Dave’s view it requires more management buy-in but delivers to business requirements and to time and/or budget more effectively.