Comic book legends Jim Steranko, Joe Quesada and Jim Lee, Famous Monsters cover artist king Basil Gogos, Joe, Adam and Andy Kubert frm the famous comic art school, Adam Hughes and more.

There were more toy and collectible, comic book and memorabilia dealers than you could handle. One of the most impressive was Comic Connect.com which boasts very rare items. The firm does not charge listing fees, has a low seller's premium and no buyer's premium. They are constantly on the look for new items, so call them if you have a collection you ant to turn into cash. Prices at some booths went to 50% at the end of a long,long Sunday. Naturally, there were scards of people in costumes to give all attending a big photo op...along with Pete Rose!

For a full list of guests see http://www.wizardworld.com/home-apple.html

It seems when NASA landed on the moon and didn't find any spacemen or aliens the interest in space toys plummeted and the line was discontinued.

More info?

www.theouterspacemen.com

Washington, DC, August 24th, 2009 -- Washington, DC-based technology group, The Cool Blue Company LLC announces "The Cool Twitter Conferences World Tour" eighth stop taking place in New York City on Thursday, August 27th at the Playwright Tavern – 202 W. 49th Street, New York NY.   Register for Cool Twitter New York at http://www.shop.cooltwitterconferences.com/category.sc?categoryId=8

The Cool Twitter Conference provides an environment for developers, business people, and enthusiasts from multiple disciplines, who seek to understand and maximize the power of Twitter, the chance to contribute to the discussion and tap into this real-time use of the web. This forum is ideal for advertising and marketing professionals, business owners looking to increase visibility and improve customer experience, and anyone looking to polish their brand or to become more informed on the subject.

For the uninitiated, Twitter is the free real-time web service that allows millions of users to send frequent, short updates - up to 140 characters - to "followers."
"Twitter has truly been the lifeblood of my small business.” said Lev Ekster,  Cool Twitter New York keynote presenter and Founder of CupcakeStop. "Since starting CupcakeStop in June 2009, we've been able to amass over 6,000 followers from all over the world.  I've used Twitter for a multitude of business purposes including staffing, taking orders, announcing specials, and most importantly, providing the location of my mobile cupcake truck.

In addition to the conference, there will be a "Twitter Beginner Boot Camp" in session from 8:00am – 9:30am, aimed at educating and helping participants to become more familiar with the basics of Twitter and its potential applications.
Organizers are calling for speakers for upcoming conferences, encouraging submission of abstracts from individuals interested in presenting on Twitter. All topics are welcome, including for-profit and non-profit ideas, government, culturally impacting social media applications and development APIs.

Upcoming Cool Twitter Conferences Tour Cities/Dates:
1. Boston – Thursday, September 10th, 2009
2. San Francisco – Thursday, September 24th, 2009
3. Atlanta – Tuesday, October 6th, 2009
4. Miami - Friday, October 9th, 2009
5. Vancouver - Wednesday, October 21st, 2009
6. Anchorage - Wednesday, October 28th, 2009
7. Orange County - Thursday, November 5th, 2009
8. Philadelphia – Tuesday, November 10th, 2009
9. Pittsburgh – Friday, November 13th, 2009

A current list of speakers and more details about the conference can be found online at the Cool Twitter Conference site: Cool Twitter Conferences (http://www.cooltwitterconferences.com)

"The global market for speech technology is expected to reach $78 billion next year," said Tom Hogan, Sr., president and CEO of Information Today, which owns and manages the SpeechTEK conferences. "Europe is the heartbeat of the speech technology industry. We are looking forward to bringing SpeechTEK to the market where so many of the leading companies in the industry are located."

The call for speakers will be available in September on www.speechTEK.com/europe. SpeechTEK Europe will consist of two days of seminars, demonstrations, case studies, and keynotes covering every aspect of the speech industry. The SpeechTEK Europe Expo will be a showcase of the industry's leading vendors and solutions providers from around the world.

The conference agenda will be built around addressing the challenges specific to doing business in Europe. Sessions will focus on exploring how speech technology has become a strategic asset in today's businesses and organizations and how the technology is helping them cut costs in a difficult economy.

In today’s economic environment, successful businesses need to understand what opportunities speech technology offers for maximizing the money invested in CRM, and more importantly, how to harness those opportunities. SpeechTEK used to be a show about people talking to computers that spoke to them in human voices and related technology.   Now the show and the technology has morphed into the 'CRM show' with the major emphasis on how to stop people from pressing '0' and increasing costs by necessitating human CRM attendants.  The keynotes given at the luncheons were very up front about this fact and had lots of statistics from those who have deployed speech to provide better service to their customers and to generate revenue to improve their bottom line by avoiding pressing '0'.

Among the better vendors we spoke to were Nuance, whose Conversations 2008 is a product touted to be a real money saver for all businesses with CRM cost problems.  Avaya;s Voice Portal is a web-based self service platform that claims to tie together the advantages of IP Telephony ad the Web. The demo was VERY impressive. 

IQ Services new White Paper Series of voice recognition software deals effectively with problems related to echo and load capacity. Again, the demonstration was very helpful in understand how they handle these aspects of customer satisfaction. SugarCRM  showed off their total CRM package of open source CRM tools and solutions including their client/servcer, hosting services and software products.: Sugar Enterprise, Sugar Professional and Sugar Community.

Keynote speakers included Paul Greenberg, President of The 56 Group and Jeffrey F. Rayport, Founder and Chairman of Marketsplace, LLC.

SpeechTEK Labs
The SpeechTEK Labs provided hands-on experience with new tools, applications and devices. Learn from face-to-face conversations with the developers who created them and kick the tires to see how they work. 

SpeechTEK University gave courses to provide in-depth, 3-hour seminars on compelling topics for speech technology and information technology professionals.

"Since 1999 Voxeo has enabled enterprises to reduce the cost and complexity of voice application delivery," said Jonathan Taylor, CEO of Voxeo.  "By enabling multi-channel self-service with no additional development costs, Prophecy 10 can 'multiply the ROI' of any enterprise voice self-service investment."

Prophecy's scalable SIP server foundation is compliant with more than 30 Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) and IP Multimedia Subsystem (IMS) SIP standards. Prophecy works with SIP platforms and services from AT&T, Avaya, Cisco, Digium/Asterisk, Global Crossing, Nortel, Verizon and more than 40 other companies. This foundation bridges diverse SIP services and devices, eases integration with IP-PBX and call center investments, and lowers the cost of connecting and transferring calls with direct IP connectivity.  Prophecy 10 features VoiceXML compatibility modes that make porting VoiceXML IVR applications as easy as changing a single Prophecy setting. Voxeo's VoiceObjects platform enables customers to build applications once and deploy them on more than 30 VoiceXML platforms. In combination, these features enable Voxeo customers to choose the best vendor for their needs at any time, with no fear of vendor lock-in or incompatibility, and with the knowledge that they can easily move applications on to and off of Prophecy at any time.   Prophecy 10 also includes 15 built-in VoiceObjects Analyzer reports for any existing VoiceXML application. Enterprises can access 30 additional reports by adding analytics notations to existing VoiceXML applications. VoiceObjects Analyzer also integrates with business intelligence (solutions from SAP BusinessObjects, IBM Cognos and Microstrategy.

"VoiceObjects Analyzer fits very well in the context of the Unlocked Communications Platform," according to Dan Miller, Sr. Analyst at Opus Research. "Deployment of communications applications in open environments cry out for flexible monitoring and reporting resources that recognize and log problems in real time and support rapid remediation."

Prophecy 10 can run up to 100 concurrent calls on power-sipping Intel Atom-based servers, and up to 500 calls on a typical Windows, Linux, or Mac OS X server. Prophecy 10 is also the first fully 64-bit enabled VoiceXML and speech recognition platform.  When run on a 64-bit OS, Prophecy 10 supports up to 2,000 concurrent calls on a single high-performance Intel Xeon server.  Prophecy 10 uniquely includes support for intelligent speech transcription products and services from Nuance Communications, PhoneTag, SpinVox, Yap, and Vlingo. This unique capability allows nearly any spoken dialogue to be converted to text input, greatly widening the potential uses of speech-driven self-service.  Prophecy supports advanced call control via both the CCXML and Java SIP Servlet standards. Prophecy's built-in SIP Servlet engine is fully Java JSR-289 compliant and can support more than 20,000 concurrent SIP sessions per server.

Platform resources can be logically separated, aggregated, or virtualized to partition customers or applications on a single server. Multiple servers and geographic installations can be combined to deliver extremely large multitenant systems.   Prophecy's multi-tenant capabilities are used to power the worlds largest and most widely-used XML telephony hosting services.  Prophecy 10 includes free U.S. English ASR and text-to-speech (TTS) engines and supports more than 30 additional language engines from Cepstral, IBM, Loquendo, LumenVox, Microsoft, Nuance, and Telisma.