Wow! When the consumers arrive, they arrive in droves! One of the more fascinating elements of the CeBIT show is the variety of people who file through. Our personal favorite is the "Moving Classroom" concept in which you'll see tightly-packed groups of people moving through the halls all wearing headphones, so they can quickly get an update on what they're seeing. And you haven't lived until you see the semi-pro gamers in a large hall playing super-competitive World of Warcraft while a commentator describes every move that's being plastered onto a 50-foot screen!

If we've learned one thing this week it's that e-Commerce has both its present and its future on connectedness. Not just in the sense of the Social Web's model of friends and connections, but also in making the right deals between individual merchants to arrive at bundles that meet customer needs and drive incremental revenues. If you thought “competition” was a word that had already escaped the common lexicon, you're in for a big surprise.

A number of the organizations with whom we spoke today commented on the need to leverage the reach of professional affiliate marketers, while maintaining control over valuable core brands. At the same time, there is real interest in executing marketing campaigns that may span several merchants' product catalogs, but doing so quickly, efficiently, and measurably. There is general agreement that e-Commerce is evolving fast into its new e-Commerce 3.0 phase, and that the ability to innovate flexibly and rapidly is going to be the key to getting a competitive advantage. With our history of providing this sort of capability to over 4,000 merchants and 40,000 affiliates, we appear to be in the right place at the right time.

No update tomorrow, as we'll be busy folding up our booth, packing our bags and heading to other locations. Some of us are headed to Ukraine and Russia to visit with our valued clients there; others are headed to Game Connection in San Francisco to renew our acquaintance with the leaders in the games industry; while others will simply plan to be back at their desks bright and early Monday morning. We look forward to hearing from, and working with, all of you very soon.