This morning I spoke at a meeting of the Utah Technology Alliance on web services.  I posted a copy of my slides yesterday.  Rod Linton, who heads UTA, was the host of the meeting and there were probably about 30 people there from Utah companies with an interest in web services. 

After my talk, Henrique DiAguantini, Utah's International Office spoke on the upcoming trade missions that the Governor's office and DCED are putting together.  Henrique is specifically interested in central america, but there will be trade missions to a number of places around the world.  I was really looking forward to going back to Asia, but I won't be doing that now. 

Evelyn Rodriquez, who, among other things runs the Chasm Bridge conference, has set up a Yahoo! Groups email list for utah companies and individuals interested in web services at utah-ws{at}yahoogroups.com. 

The group broke into two subgroups to discuss standards development and marketing/education.  The standards group has been and will continue to monitor various XML standards and find volunteers from Utah companies to work in standards area.  The Marketing/Education group is putting together case studies of what others have done, why it worked, what the ROI was, etc.  They're also putting together templates and toolkits for Utah companies to build these case studies.  The ultimate goal is a web site with case studies from Utah companies that can be publicized and marketed.

A few upcoming events: UITA is sponsoring a Web Services summit in the spring.  Evelyn is running a ChasmBridge conference on web services in March in San Jose. 

A few people I ran into: 

• Al Byers from the Web Automation Group has an open source XSLT debugger.   I haven't tried the tool out yet, but I've written before about what a bear XSL can be to debug, so I'm anxious to take a look.   I know that there are tools like that in Visual Studio .NET (and I have a copy I've been meaning to play with). 
• I also ran into Scott Lemon who has a blog called the.Inevitable.Org/anism.  Scott's name was immediately familiar to me because I've been to his blog before.  Scott has been kicking around the Utah high tech community for some time (worked for for Novell four times).  Right now he's serving as Chief Scientist for a company called Vultus.  Vultus builds javascript apps that run inside the browser. They used to be called iBASE and I've talked to them before.  Pretty cool technology for the presentation layer.  I wonder how something like this meshes with thick clients that some people think might be making a come back. 

At the end, Evelyn Rodriguez ran a workshop on making contacts.  It was an interesting format.  Each person introduced themselves, what they do, and who their most wanted client is.  The group then volunteers contact information that they have to help get them in the door with a warm lead.  It worked surprisingly well.