Peter,

Does anyone know what happened to the Usenix e-commerce conferences? They were in the vein of what FC used to be ... there's also the EC-Web conference, although that has more of an emphasis on web technology than EC.

I founded this series in 1995 and was proud to have done so; we ran them in 1996 and 1998 as well, but the cutting edge quickly moved away from USENIX's core and forte to where every conference organizer on the planet had an e-commerce workshop of some sort up and running. Whether these were technical, financial or sheer hype, the noise factor was too great and we (USENIX Board of Directors) moved on to other things where we could make a difference without having to wage an advertising war in the middle of an investment bubble. I'm open to suggestions, of course, but in the meantime you might enjoy reminiscing about 1995 as seen through this lens: http://www.usenix.org/publications/library/proceedings/ec95/index.html --dan (current usenix president)