Kind words from Continuent, one of our valued supporters of the MySQL Conference & Expo–they sent out this press release this morning:

“We have been a sponsor of every MySQL Conference, since the very first annual MySQL Users Conference in San Jose in 2003,” said Eero Teerikorpi, CEO at Continuent. “We are excited to be part of the MySQL Conference & Expo once again in 2008. Our participation is of significance in projecting our plans for the global MySQL ecosystem as well as highlighting our innovative solutions and support programs.”

Early registration ends today Monday, January 28th Wednesday Thursday, January 31st. Use the following code: et08rdr for a 35% discount. ETech is March 3rd to the 6th in San Diego, CA.

ETech this year is going to be great. We’re going to hear about Energy from Saul Griffith, how information travels at Google from Bo Cowgill, Corruption from Larry Lessig, and we’re going to get to see ourselves as photomosaics in the McLeod Mirrors.

Early registration ends today Monday, January 28th Wednesday, January 31st. Use the following code: et08rdr for a 35% discount. ETech is March 3rd to the 6th in San Diego, CA.

ETech this year is going to be great. We’re going to hear about Energy from Saul Griffith, how information travels at Google from Bo Cowgill, Corruption from Larry Lessig, and we’re going to get to see ourselves as photomosaics in the McLeod Mirrors.

Early registration ends today Monday, January 28th Wednesday, January 31st. Use the following code: et08rdr for a 35% discount. ETech is March 3rd to the 6th in San Diego, CA.

ETech this year is going to be great. We’re going to hear about Energy from Saul Griffith, how information travels at Google from Bo Cowgill, Corruption from Larry Lessig, and we’re going to get to see ourselves as photomosaics in the McLeod Mirrors.

Over on his blog, program chair Paul Kedrosky notes some interesting developments that will happen during Money:Tech:

-Motley Fool and LinkedIn have been added to the program, both with some very neat stuff
-Two new stealth companies will launch, taking to total to four company launches, and at least many other new products, but I have admittedly lost count

The conference will be upon us quickly. Here’s the rest of the [schedule] story.

Dave McClure, the program chair for Graphing Social Patterns, sent a note around that Justin Smith, a blogger at InsideFacebook.com, has just posted an entry about GSP and the panel he’s moderating:

I will be moderating the Designing Viral Apps: Engineering the Viral Loop panel, and will be joined by Andrew Chen (entrepreneur), Blake Commagere (Mogad), Jia Shen (RockYou), and David Gentzel (SocialMedia). It should be a fantastic panel for those looking to hear from some of the top thinkers on viral app development.

Check out the GSP schedule for more info on Justin’s panel as well as the other excellent sessions at the show.

Mobile is alive at ETech this year. While it was never explictly requested in the CFP many varied and interesting mobile talks came through the pipes. Here are some of them:

Connecting Your Life to the Web, with Android - Dan Morrill (Google)
By now, everybody understands the web. However, for most people today the web is something you go to and not something that goes with you. With Android, the Open Handset Alliance aims to extend the web to you - wherever you are - not just your desktop. Android will let developers build applications that don’t just go with you, but become part of your lives. We’ll introduce the Android platform, and show a few examples of applications that fit into your life so naturally you’ll wonder how you ever got along without them.

iPhone Software Development: Past, Present, Future - Nate True
The presentation will begin with a brief history of hacking the iPhone, from the first jailbreak to remote shell to Installer and onward. Then we will examine the recently released iPhone SDK, and analyze its utility and potential. Finally, we will go through the process of creating a typical iPhone application using the SDK, and explore a few tricks to make the most out of the iPhone’s capabilities.

Reality Mining: Inference in Complex Social Systems via the Mobile Phone - Nathan Eagle (MIT)
Nathan Eagle has used mobile phones to continuously gather information including proximity, location, and communication from 100 human subjects at MIT. Systematic measurements from these people over the course of nine months have generated one of the largest dataset of continuous human behavior ever collected, representing over 300,000 hours of daily activity. Additionally, in collaboration with one of Europe’s major telecommunication companies, Eagle is currently analyzing the call logs of an entire country—a dynamic social network consisting of 250 million nodes (people) and 12 billion temporal edges (calls).

The Case for Africa as a Mobile Development Hothouse - Joel Selanikio (The DataDyne Group)
Africa is leading the world in year-over-year growth in mobile penetration, and other parts of the developing world are close behind. Most of the people who are now gaining access to cell communications and Internet via cell phones have no other method to access the Internet: their paradigm for Internet use involves mobile devices and small screens, unlike developed country users that generally use cell phones for voice calling, with Internet access being an occasional activity.

Early registration ends Monday, January 28th. Use the following code: et08rdr for a 20% discount. ETech is March 3rd to the 6th in San Diego, CA.

Program chair Jay Pipes and his committee have put together an excellent program for the 2008 MySQL Conference & Expo, which is coming up April 14-17 in Santa Clara, California. In addition to Marten Mickos’ essential MySQL update, like last year, there will be some pretty outside-of-the-box keynote presentations, including:

• Rick Falkvinge, Swedish Pirate Party, on “Copyright Regime vs. Civil Liberties.”
  Rick will talk about the rise and success of pirates and why pirates are necessary in today’s politics. He’ll also outline the next steps in the pirates’ strategy to change global copyright laws.
• Jacek Becla, Stanford Linear Accelerator Center, on “The Science and Fiction of Petascale Analytics.” Scientists are trying to understand dark matter, discover distant galaxies, hunt for the Higgs boson, detect asteroids and take movies of molecules. Their science is fascinating, their data sizes are enormous, and their analysis requirements may seem like science fiction. Are we ready?

The early registration discount ends February 26, so sign up soon to take advantage of those savings.

Massive, dynamic data requires a new way of looking at the world. Tools like Processing have been created to produce the necessary visualizations. Here are some of the infoviz talks at ETech:

Live, Vast and Deep: Web-native Information Visualization - Tom Carden (Stamen Design), Eric Rodenbeck (Stamen Design)
Information visualization is moving out of the research lab and into our everyday lives. This workshop will share Stamen’s approach to visualization, outlining the process of taking real data from an online API and shaping it into an informative, beautiful, and useful interactive graphic presentation.

Web Visualization: Beyond RSS Lava Lamps - JC Herz (Batchtags LLC)
This presentation gives a whirlwind overview of the shiny vizporn and kinetic data sculptures to date and explains what it takes to make synthesis and visualization of Web 2.0 data useful on a daily basis, for individuals and groups.

Twine: the Social Graph meets the Semantic Web - Lew Tucker (Radar Networks)
We’ll discuss and demo an innovative new service: Twine.com, built on a semantic web platform and designed to grow and enrich communities of interest. Semantics are used through-out as the system automatically annotates information with meta data, tags, and relationships.

Early registration ends Monday, January 28th. Use the following code: et08rdr for a 20% discount. ETech is March 3rd to the 6th in San Diego, CA.

Games are a great test-bed for new technology. They expose us to new ideas by letting us imagine a new world. This year at ETech we have several sessions that focus on games and what we can learn from them.

Designing Magnets: Connecting with Audiences in the Wired Age - Elan Lee (Fourth Wall Studios)
Your ability to connect with your audience will often define the success or failure of your project. This talk will use Alternate Reality Games to explore how this new genre of entertainment can give us insight into building, maintaining, and growing an audience.

Projecting Surveillance Entertainment - Merci Hammon (GameLayers), Justin Hall (GameLayers)
This session will explore current systems of surveillance entertainment and imagine them working in other contexts. including how our personal data trails yield raw material for play.

Halo vs. Facebook: Emotion and the Fun of Games - Nicole Lazzaro (XEODesign, Inc.)
Think gamers get emotional from boiling lava monsters? Think again. From fiero to schadenfreude emotions increase focus, memory, learning, decision making, and performance. Similar emotions drive participation from Flickr to Facebook.

Your Phone is Your Controller: Collaborative Gaming in Public Spaces - Jury Hahn (MegaPhone)
MegaPhone makes digital signage interactive using a regular phone call. Learn about this phone-controlled, real-time, multiplayer collaborative gaming platform that can be used from ANY phone, ANY service provider, in ANY country as a game controller.

Early registration ends Monday, January 28th. Use the following code: et08rdr for a 20% discount. ETech is March 3rd to the 6th in San Diego, CA.

ETech 2008 is just under two months away. We’ve got a very different program this year as you can see from the tags below. We’re exploring a lot of new developments in clean technology, human enhancement, and games. Personally, I am really looking forward to Stamen Design’s InfoViz tutorial — it’s something that I could really use in my current job. I am also really excited to hear about Nathan Eagle’s research on an entire country’s phone records (I saw the ancestor of this project in 2005 at Where 2.0, he had tracked a 100 MIT students and was able to predict bahavior based on who was calling you. I wonder what he learned with a data set several orders of magnitude larger). The schedule grid is now live.

Early registration ends Monday the 14th. Use the following code: et08rdr for a 20% discount. ETech is March 3rd to the 6th in San Diego, CA.

Over on his blog, Infectious Greed, Money:Tech program chair Paul Kedrosky outlines the agenda, which he and Tim O’Reilly have been tinkering with recently. He begins with:

The conference is, of course, all about the confluence of Wall Street and Web 2.0. And what does that mean? Well, new ways of Web-2.0-style collaborating are changing money and investing, with the zero-sum game of Wall Street changing in the process. At the same time market mashups with new sources of web-based data — auctions! real estate! pricing! weather! — are transforming the never-ending hunt for a money-making edge.

The schedule has really filled in recently. Speaker additions include big thinkers like Nouriel Roubini from RGE Monitor, Cary Davis of Warburg Pincus, Jonathan Glick from Gerson Lehrman Group, and Renny Monaghan of Salesforce.com.
Other folks have some thoughts on Money:Tech too, including:

• Roger Ehrenberg, Money:Tech 2008–Be There or Fall Behind
• John Musser, Enterprise Mashups and Money
• Tim O’Reilly, Human vs. Machine: The Great Challenge of Our Time
• Tony Leach, Zecco At Money:Tech in New York