I've spent the last couple of days at the inaugural Wall Street Journal Conference called D: All Things Digital. The conference was conceived of and hosted by Wall Street Journal reporters Walt Mossberg and Kara Swisher and has taken the form of live interviews with an impressive list of technology leaders, including Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Barry Diller, Meg Whitman, Terry Semel, Larry Page, Sergey Brin and others. Despite the last few years of tech malaise, the tone of this conference has been unquestionably upbeat. Each of the speakers feels great about his or her prospects. Each of the speakers is developing what they see as important new technology. And each of the speakers is certain that customers will pay a fair price for their company's innovation. I certainly hope they are all right. If Microsoft, Apple, USAI, Ebay, Yahoo, Google, Real and MusicMatch all thrive, then we are once again experiencing a robust technology market. It has been so long, I'm not quite sure what that feels like, but to the best of my recollection it felt good.

When I get a chance, I will try to highlight some of the things said over the last couple days and give you some of my observations. While much of what was said had the feel of corporate PR, each of the speakers had a moment or two of being candid or clever or compelling. And those moments have made the conference well worth attending.