February 2 to 4, Salt Lake City
RootsTech is only in its second year, but is on its way to becoming one of the largest and most influential genealogical conferences in the world! 

Its brief is to bring technologists together with genealogists, to stimulate cross-pollination of ideas for creative technological development.

The impact of family history and genealogical research on the world, has led to some stunning technological breakthroughs.

For example, the host, FamilySearch, has the largest and most successful digitisation project in the world. The high speed, high quality scanners that FamilySearch use to digitise the millions of microfilms in their Vault, were specifically developed for their use.

This year, the Conference will be exploring latest technologies using Cloud computing, mobile apps, social networking and geo-mapping.

Hosted by FamilySearch, sponsors this year, include some pretty big names: Microsoft, Oracle, brightsolid, vmware, Dell, ancestry.com, Association of Professional Genealogists, Archives.com, Federation of Genealogical Societies, NGS, Brigham Young University and IIMI.

We're 11,000 kilometres and a time zone ahead of Salt Lake City, but you can listen to some of the lectures via livestreaming - you can access the schedule from Randy Seaver's geneamusings blog:

A tip from Carole Riley, Australian genealogist and editor of Descent: the journal of the Society of Australian Genealogists: