IT Conversations has posted the full audio of Peter Cochrane’s keynote from January’s Emerging Telephony Conference:
As a major driver of global wealth, the advance of technology is paced by various forces including new discovery and human inertia. In this keynote, Peter Cochrane, the highly esteemed and engaging techno-futurist, delivers a fascinating analysis of change in our increasingly smart, networked world.
Peter Cochrane is first up in this podcast from Daniel Steinberg. From the intro:
Peter Cochrane argues that it is us standing in the way of progress. He points out that he is now working with children who have been online all of their lives. How does that change our expectations for the future? Cochrane says that companies usually change when managers die and get out of the way. He looks at what might be coming next in the world of handheld devices.
Collective wisdom, that is. ETech is in good company in this new article by Steven Levy and Brad Stone that illustrates both the Web 2.0 and “architecture of participation” memes.
Annalee Newitz attended a luncheon we recently held for press to preview Where 2.0. One of the Where 2.0 speakers, Di-Ann Eisnor, was on hand at the lunch to talk about her company, Platial. Here’s Annalee’s article.
Platial provides a home for people who love quirky geographical information or just want to mark the locations that have meaning to them. Sign up for a free account, and you can start building and sharing personalized maps, complete with place markers, tags and descriptions of each spot. Collaborate on them with your buddies, or keep them to yourself.
Jason Lee Miller covers the ROOT/Vaults launch at ETech:
ROOT Markets premiered ROOT/Vaults, an application to store, manage and share personal clickstream data, at O’Reilly Emerging Technology Conference (ETech) last week. The company calls it an “attention banking service” aimed at providing a secure personal database for managing everything Web users browse online.
Jon Udell, who also was a plenary speaker at ETech, had several posts relating to this year’s event:
Carrying a BlackBerry is admitting that your commitment to your current activity is only partial, writes Steven Levy in his article on Linda Stone’s ETech presentation.
The latese issue contains an article surveying open source in business and uses MySQL as an example. CEO Marten Mickos, who will be keynoting at the MySQL Users Conference next month, is quoted.
Information overload is an increasing problem on the Web, writes Erick Schonfeld, Business 2.0 Magazine editor-at-large.
More startups are trying to cash in by cutting through the clutter. In a world of multiplying TV channels, hundreds of different types of jeans and salad dressings, and the constant pinging of e-mails and instant messages, the one resource that is increasingly scarce is our attention.
Greg Gianforte, CEO and founder of RightNow Technologies, has just been confirmed as a keynote speaker. He’ll deliver a presentation on Bootstrapping: Starting an Open Source Business With Almost No Money!
Juan Carlos Perez released this article via the IDG News Service:
Microsoft will begin testing an enhanced version of its search engine which will feature a new image search service, a redesigned user interface, new tools to refine query results and a new name: Windows Live Search… Microsoft, which will unveil Windows Live Search at the O’Reilly Emerging Technology Conference in San Diego, California, will also introduce at the show a new test version of its MSN Toolbar called Windows Live Toolbar.
Notes Stefanie Olsen:
In today’s gadget-jammed, sensory-overloaded culture, drawing and keeping a consumer’s attention is more important than ever to businesses. That’s the premise here this week at O’Reilly’s ETech Emerging Technology Conference, where the attention is on attention.
Janko Roettgers has published two more pieces:
On Monday, Quinn Norton posted a piece on Eric Bonabeau’s presentation:
Bonabeau, a former researcher at the Santa Fe Institute, calls his innovation “the hunch engine.” Presented to a general audience for the first time at the O’Reilly Emerging Technology Conference here, the engine is a technological implementation of the “obscenity principle” — a user of the hunch engine may not know what they are looking for, but they will “know it when they see it.”
A couple of posts from the Lifehacker extraordinaire Gina Trapani:
Writes danah boyd:
Last week, i gave a talk at O’Reilly’s ETech on how large-scale digital communities can handle the tensions between global information networks and local interaction and culture. I’ve uploaded the crib for those who are interested in reading the talk: G/localization: When Global Information and Local Interaction Collide.
API explosion forces questions of licensing and robustness, writes Peter Coffee earlier this week:
As I noted in a summary blog from last week’s O’Reilly Emerging Technology Conference in San Diego, the competition there to launch new Web services APIs seemed like a software-centered version of the new-hardware blitz that used to characterize the Las Vegas Comdex show each fall.
Quinn Norton sets the scene:
You’re in a maze of twisty subroutines, all alike. Now, thanks to a new software-collaboration tool, you and your intrepid party of fellow hackers can navigate your labyrinth of code and slay its dastardly bugs, all in a dungeonlike world similar to an old-school text adventure. Called playsh, the new tool is a collaborative programming environment based on the multi-user domains, or MUDs, so popular online in the early 1990s.
Alex Handy writes this about Laszlo’s commitment to Ajax, which the Laszlo team delved into at ETech:
With the announcement that IBM would be launching the Open AJAX initiative came a long list of participating companies. Among them was Laszlo Systems…
Via Cory Doctorow at BoingBoing, here is the full text of Bruce Sterling’s ETech presentation for your reading pleasure.
Over at IT Conversations, Doug Kaye has posted Cory Doctorow’s talk on Europe’s Coming Broadcast Flag from last year’s EuroOSCON. As usual, Cory’s passionate, reasoned insights are worth a listen.
ETech is over, so I’ll take a look back on some of the meta-trends of the conference, gender balance in the attendees, and covering topics Dick Cheney style.
Today is the last day of ETech and things are starting to wind down… The most interesting session I attended was Meredith Patterson’s “One of these is not like the others” presentation on her Query By Example extension for Postgres that showed how to make Postgres support advanced features for selecting and ranking data according to a given example. And even selecting and ranking data that is unlike a given example.
In case you missed the Laszlo (one of our sponsors, thanks!) announcement at ETech on Tuesday, here’s the updated, full text of the press release:
Dennis O’Reilly dropped me an email today pointing to two posts from ETech (”It was indeed ‘mind-boggling,’” writes he)–he also promised to write a news story on Jen King’s RFID security presentation, which should be on the site tomorrow.
Stefanie Olsen describes one of the extracurricular ETech activities:
Last August at O’Reilly’s exclusive Foo Camp, where geeks meet to camp and brainstorm, some attendees stayed up to the wee hours of the night playing an organized bluffing game called Werewolf, also called Mafia. It was apparently a Foo Camp hit, according to conference-goers and organizers, and now it’s back at O’Reilly Emerging Technology confab in San Diego this week, where more than 1,200 showed up.
From Cyrus Farivar’s introduction to his podcast:
The Macworld Podcast heads south toward the future this week. More specifically, I’m in San Diego for the O’Reilly Emerging Technology Conference 2006, an annual event focusing on high-tech trends. This year’s conference focuses on the Attention Economy, a phrase dealing with efforts to streamline information consumption. I sat in on a few sessions I’d like to call your attention to—everything from discussions of the Firefox extension Greasemonkey to Amazon’s Mechanical Turk. We’ll close out the show with a look at future of multi-touch user interfaces, including an interview with Jeff Han of New York University, talking about his research in this field.
From yesterday’s PR Newswire, a press release gives details on a new service from EVDB, which CEO Brian Dear announced here at ETech.
Power to the people has now reached the world of event bookings with EVDB Inc.’s new Eventful Demand, a free online service for mounting grassroots campaigns to attract performers, personalities, conferences and more to local venues.
David A. Utter posted this yesterday:
Microsoft upped the ante in the quest for more users with a couple of updates to Windows Live that offer new search capabilities and toolbar functionality. The O’Reilly Emerging Technology Conference continues to provide a platform for product debuts. Microsoft brought along a couple of new toys to share with the crowd, as they announced their latest updates to the Windows Live service.
Ewan Spence and his cohorts over on The Podcast Network have uploaded a swath of ETech podcasts for your listening pleasure, from Tim O’Reilly and Bruce Sterling to previews of the show with speakers like Peter Morville and Maribeth Back. He’s promised us several hours of interviews, which we’re looking forward to.
A new kind of search engine could make the act of Web searching more sociable, writes Michael Fitzgerald.
At the O’Reilly Emerging Technology Conference in San Diego this week, a new software application was introduced, called Boxxet (pronounced “box set”), which allows online interest groups to form by aggregating content from users, instead of the more traditional way of networking around a person or event.
Writes Laurie Sullivan:
Laszlo Systems Inc. said it plans to extend its Ajax development platform, OpenLaszlo, to support applications for browsers on multiple platforms. Laszlo Systems Inc. plans to extend its Ajax development platform, OpenLaszlo, to support applications for browsers on multiple platforms, a company executive said Tuesday night at the O’Reilly Emerging Technology (ETech) Conference in San Diego, Calif.
As the year before, ETech featured a night of Makers exhibiting their fascinating, fun, and warranty-voiding work for attendees.
Jennifer King, a master’s student at UC Berkeley School of Information, has been studying RFID and the govenment’s approach to using this technology in passports and immigration documents. Her case-study of the upcoming e-passports which incorporate RFID tags shed some needed light on this complex and controversial issue.
Danah Boyd takes a look at g/localization, a nasty term used to describe cultural clashes between global and local cultures. What happens when a local culture with one morality clashes with another culture of another morality in a global online space? Danah studied this issue and suggests a few courses of action to avoid these culture clashes.
Mark your calendars, y’all. ETech will be back at the Manchester Grand Hyatt in San Diego, March 26-29, 2007. Look for the call for participation this summer; we’ll open registration in the fall.
Janko Roettgers has filed three stories (so far):
Amy Jo Kim studied experimental psychology as an undergrad, received a Ph.D. in Behavioral Neuroscience from the University of Washington, and now (among many other things) teaches game design at USC. Her session at ETech was called “Putting the Fun in Functional” and focused on the mechanics of game design and how these concepts can be extended to other non-game systems and applications.
Last October I attended the Web 2.0 conference and all during the conference I was trying to put my finger on what Web 2.0 really means. Have you wondered what the term Web 2.0 means? I have, and here at ETech Tim Bray offers a solid definition.
Sun’s Tim Bray has a unique and accomplished resume that few in the Internet world can compare. Here’s what he had to say at ETech on Atom and standards in general.
Clay Shirky just gave a fantastic talk at ETech about the patterns behind moderation systems, which went beyond that. Best talk so far for me.
Another thing that gives me a warm glow inside, akin to how I feel about announcements and launches at our conferences? A “twofer” mention of O’Reilly stuff in the first paragraph of a news article, by Stefanie Olsen of CNET News.com no less:
Mark Pilgrim, author of “Greasemonkey Hacks: Tips & Tools for Remixing the Web with Firefox,” gave a talk Tuesday afternoon at O’Reilly’s ETech Emerging Technology Conference in San Diego to show off the promise (and peril) of the Firefox Web browser add-on, which is nearly at its one-year anniversary.
(Here’s the link to Greasemonkey Hacks for more info.)
“A new tool offers to create websites on any subject, allowing web surfers to sit back, relax and watch a virtual space automatically fill up with relevant news stories, blog posts, maps and photos,” writes Celeste Biever of Boxxet which made its debut at ETech.
Cyrus Farivar blogged this about ETech:
So I’m attending the opening days of the O’Reilly Emerging Technology 2006 conference in sunny San Diego. One of the highlights of
