I'm horrifically behind the news stories these past weeks, so what better place to start than a time-critical one ;)

The seventeenth iteration of the bi-annual BeOS users conference BeGeistert is being held on December 9th and 10th in, err, Milan. For the first time ever, the official BeGeistert conference is leaving Germany, heading to the slightly warmer for the time of year climes of Italy.

While theres been "BeGeistert on Tour" events previously, this marks a departure from the tradition of holding the conference in a major German city. The last conference, 016 was held in Berlin, itself a first, as it had always been held in Düsseldorf prior to this.

The website says attendence is limited to 25 people this year. Its unknown what might be shown off or what firms might make an appearance - bar one. The next version of BePodder is going to debut at the conference. It appears that this will bring the long-awaited R5 version to the public, as well as official Haiku support, making it the first commercial application to support the fledgling OS. As it is, 20% of the sale price of the application, which works out at €3 a copy, is donated to Haiku.