Brand new to the O’Reilly conference line-up this year is Velocity and we’re excited to be opening up a conversation in this space. Program chairs Steve Souders and Jesse Robbins have just unveiled the preliminary line-up of speakers and sessions, which follow two tracks: Performance and Operations. (Registering by May 5 saves you 350 bucks, too.)
Program chair Brady Forrest has confirmed the preliminary agenda for this May’s Where 2.0 Conference. Once again, lots of food for thought: GeoDjango, map-based advertising, gaming, OpenLayers, mobile apps, and much more.
New to Where 2.0 this year is a full day of tutorials for folks who want to go more in-depth with location technologies.
The early registration discount will be available until March 23.
If you’re interested in more location information, check out select keynote presentations (video and audio) from the 2007 conference.
Once again Chad Fowler and his Ruby Central cohorts have put together an excellent schedule of sessions and tutorials. This probably explains why, like last year, seats are going fast for RailsConf 2008, so sign up while you can.
One of the speakers at Money:Tech wrote this wrap-up of his panel discussion:
I recently had the opportunity to participate in a panel discussion at the O’Reilly Money:Tech conference. We discussed the extent that the financial technology community had embraced open source. Other members of the panel were Tim O’Reilly of O’Reilly Media, James Altucher who founded StockPickr and Graham Miller of Marketcetera. I was representing free financial open source software developers in my role as founder and project lead for the QuickFIX/J project.
MySQL’s Zack Urlocker has posted some thoughts about Sun’s acquisition of MySQL:
I’ve been through several acquisitions over the years, both on the acquiring and the acquired side, and so far, this one has gone the smoothest….Over the coming weeks, we’ll no doubt be looking for ways we can further integrate with some of Sun’s key technologies and products to accelerate our roadmap and improve our scalability. We’ll have more news in this area at the upcoming MySQL Conference & Expo, April 14-17 in Santa Clara.
Kermit Pattison references TOC in this Fast Interview with Harlequin’s Brent Lewis on how romance novels are being read–and writte–on cell phones and why size really doesn’t matter.
Next Monday night at GSP West, ten awesome developers will be presenting lightning-fast five-minute demos. Will you be among them?
It’s not too late to enter your app(s) in one of two categories: Facebook-compatible (Facebook, Bebo) or OpenSocial-compatible (MySpace, Hi5, Orkut, Friendster, Ning).
Five apps from each category will be selected to present at AppNite, and the top app in each category, as determined by audience vote, will win a new Apple MacBook Air portable.
Extra bonus: ALL developers who apply to enter AppNite get a discount code for 50% off registration fees for GSP West.
Program chair Jay Pipes and the team over at MySQL AB have been hard at work lining up a particularly interesting group of folks to present keynotes at this year’s conference.
Read the full press release; an excerpt is below:
MySQL AB CEO Marten Mickos and Jonathan Schwartz, president and CEO of Sun Microsystems, will kick off the conference with keynotes highlighting the strategic, technical and community synergies between the two companies and their pending merger. Additional conference keynotes include: Jacek Becla, Stanford Linear Accelerator Center, “The Science and Fiction of Petascale Analytics”; Rick Falkvinge, Swedish Pirate Party, “Copyright Regime vs. Civil Liberties”; Dick Hardt, Sxip, “Who is the Dick on My Site?” Other keynote presenters on the agenda include Raj Cherabuddi of Silicon Query and Chander Kant from Zmanda.
InfoZine posted this article based on the EFF’s press release on the 2008 Pioneer Award winners, which will be celebrated at ETech:
Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) is pleased to announce the winners of its 2008 Pioneer Awards: the Mozilla Foundation and its Chairman Mitchell Baker, University of Ottawa Professor Michael Geist, and AT&T whistleblower Mark Klein. The award ceremony will be held at 7pm, March 4th at the San Diego Marriott Hotel and Marina in conjunction with the O’Reilly Emerging Technology Conference (ETech).
Kassia Krozser has posted two very thoughtful pieces about TOC 2008 over on Booksquare:
Peter Osnos posted this piece on the event:
In New York last week there was a three-day event in a midtown hotel called the O’Reilly Tools of Change for Publishing Conference, organized by O’Reilly Media, one of the leading digital information companies. These occasions have a particular rhythm of keynotes, breakouts, and networking designed to feature the new products of supporting vendors and panels or speakers evangelizing for their take on the next big thing. Chris Anderson’s The Long Tail, for example, and The Tipping Point by Malcolm Gladwell were seminal in defining the phenomena of media delivery and popular preference. For all the brouhaha around the digital revolution, I should add, both of these were read in very large numbers in printed books. In any case, the goal of Tools of Change and similar occasions is to find coherent ways to explain change in the media world and to supply the apparatus and services these systems make necessary.
Andrew R. Albanese devoted two sections of the February 12 issue to TOC articles, “Publishers Look Warily to the Future” and “Publishers: If You’re Not Failing, You’re Not Trying Hard Enough.”
A blogger who normally focuses on “the interface of biology and information technology was intrigued by some of the conference presentations:
Over at the Money:Tech conference (O’Reilly does organize some of the coolest conferences), a couple of talks caught my eye, notably one by Michael Stonebraker on Streambase and another by Steve Skiena on using computer simulations and mathematical modeling to make bets (You can find the slides on the web site). After going through the slides, I wondered, is there anything there which would be useful for the life sciences.
Tech Ticker host Aaron Task posted a video interview with speaker Jim Cramer shot during the conference.
The “Mad Money” host and my old boss at TheStreet.com reveals his favorite shorts in tech, a sector he believes will lag for several months because of the mindset of institutional investors. But is Cramer a contrarian indicator?
Dave Kellogg, CEO of Mark Logic Corporation, posted some notes and thoughts on Tim’s TOC presentation.
Money:Tech program chair Paul Kedrosky wraps up the first-ever event on his blog:
Money:Tech came off better than I could ever have reasonably expected, especially considering it was a) a first-time event b) in an emerging subject and c) on the other side of the country. Ordinarily, self-centered sort that I am, I would cheerfully accept all praise for the event’s success and motor on, but it sure wasn’t me. Far from it.
First, Money:Tech was about the people who attended. We had more than 400 registered Money:Tech conference-goers, which was great. When I finally forced myself to peek out from behind the on-stage screen Wednesday morning minutes before showtime and saw a full house, it made all the work and worry of the last six (!) months worth it. As I said at the end of the event, the Money:Tech audience’s enthusiasm and interest carried the show (and I’m personally delighted at all the people I had a chance to meet and talk to).
On February 12, 2008, Near-Time and O’Reilly Media announced the prepress launch of Software Craftsmanship on the Near-Time platform. The site features the entire book contents and includes interactive components powered by Near-Time.
Ron Hogan posted several entries on TOC:
More notes from participant George Walkley, on talks by Bob Young of Lulu, Tim O’Reilly, and Kirk Biglione.
“The second O’Reilly Tools of Change for Publishing conference ends today,” wrote Caroline Vanderlip last week, “and it is remarkable to see how much more vibrant this conference was compared to the first last summer. Yes, the first was in CA - close to the tech world that is supplying many of the ‘tools’ but not to the greatest number in the publishing community, for whom these tools are meant. But I also believe that the publishing world has started to embrace the digital era more energetically, recognizing that it will transform the industry in untold ways, and attention needs to be paid.”
At Authorlink, Doris Booth has posted two stories:
Call for Participation Now Open
SAN FRANCISCO, Feb. 15 /PRNewswire/ –CMP and O’Reilly Media, Inc., co-producers of the annual Web 2.0 Expo San Francisco and Web 2.0 Summit, today jointly announced the launch of Web 2.0 Expo New York. The Web 2.0 Expo brand was introduced last April in San Francisco and received an overwhelmingly positive reception, with double the expected attendance and dozens of major announcements. The New York event is poised to take advantage of the demand for education and networking in the Web 2.0 world, and will highlight the many innovative companies and individuals on the East Coast, as well as welcome visitors from around the world.
Calvin Reid has posted a thoughtful piece wrapping up the last day of the conference, opening with “Although this year’s O’Reilly Tools of Change for Publishing Conference may have lacked the keynote star power of last year’s event, the conference’s move from San Jose to Manhattan clearly reaped benefits.”
We pre-recorded an interview for TOC with Kathy Sierra of Creating Passionate Users and O’Reilly CEO Tim O’Reilly to show on the opening day. We’ve just posted it on blip.tv with the keynote presentations from 2007.
Today marks the conclusion of the second annual O’Reilly TOC (Tools of Change) Conference for Publishing,” writes Michael Drew. ” As you might expect, virtually every discussion that took place at that conference revolved in some way, shape, or form around how technology is evolving the book industry.”
TOC participant George Walkley has written the first in a series of posts with his notes from the conference, bullet-point style.
Mark Coker, a speaker at TOC this year, made this announcement at the conference about his company, Smashwords:
NEW YORK, Feb. 11 /PRNewswire/ — O’Reilly Tools of Change — Smashwords, a new digital publishing startup, today previewed a breakthrough ebook publishing platform for authors and publishers at the O’Reilly Tools of Change publishing conference in New York City. The company began accepting applications today for a limited number of beta testers at http://www.smashwords.com .
TOC committee member Jeff Gomez muses on the idea of content vs. context vs. contact:
During this morning’s opening keynote sessions of the second O’Reilly Tools of Change conference, which is being held this week in Manhattan, a number of the speakers did their best to kill the age-old (well, maybe not age-old, but certainly decade-old) notion that “content is king.”
TOC sponsor LibreDigitial made this announcement at TOC today:
New eCompile Services Allows Publishers to Deliver Custom Book Content Offerings On-Demand
NEW YORK - February 12, 2008 - At the O’Reilly Tools of Change for Publishing Conference, LibreDigital, a division of NewsStand, Inc., today announced the availability of its next-generation eCompile Service, a technology enhancement to the LibreDigital Internet Warehouse for Publishers that empowers forward-thinking publishers to provide consumers with book “mash-ups” - or custom books made from content compiled from different book titles in publisher portfolios.
Calvin Reid provides an overview of some of the first-day highlights at TOC:
O’Reilly’s second annual Tools of Change for Publishing conference opened yesterday in New York City with a series of keynote speakers who challenged publishers to embrace opportunities in a new digital era that has fundamentally transformed the nature of reading, the delivery of content and, indeed, the role of the publisher altogether.
“Many of the more interesting presentations at the Money:Tech conference dealt with the topic of data overload,” writes Stacy-Marie Ishmael “with an emphasis on how best to mine the Web and related online resources for ‘investment-grade information.’”
Conference-goer Patrick Nielsen-Hayden blogged some of his favorite lines of the conference so far:
In case any Making Light readers happen to be here, I should mention that I’m at the O’Reilly Tools for Change for Publishing conference in New York all day today, as I was most of yesterday as well…it’s been pretty interesting. From my erratic notes, some favorite moments so far:
Stephen Abram: “What does it mean to deal with a world with too much information? By 2020 your iPod will have enough storage for all the information ever created in all media. Formats die; human social needs trump everything.”
Ben Vershbow: “Curating the conversation will be a whole new kind of editorial job.”
Abram again: “Context, not ‘content,’ is king. If you don’t know the context in which your users are inhaling your information and making use of it, what their goals are, you’re not there.”
One of our TOC participants is blogging TOC:
Today and tomorrow, I’m at the Tools of Change for Publishing conference, for work. I’m here to understand how the publishing industry is using technology, and how I can help them get their digital content on site faster and more effectively.
The conference started with the message that the biggest challenge facing publishers isn’t piracy, it’s obscurity. Following that were many keynotes and sessions that focused around the idea of creating and engaging with community.
Over on his Publishers Weekly blog, David Rothman writes about a new tool for small publishers:
Tizra, Inc., a new company based in Providence, R.I., which is putting on a demonstation Monday at around 7:30 p.m. at the Tools of Change Conference in New York, is aiming for customers like you. The same demo link will lead to info on other five-minute presentations from organizations ranging from the accessibility-oriented DAISY Consortium to Tipjoy (”supporting free content through micropayment tipping”).
Carlie Fairchild, publisher of Linux Journal, lists some highlights of the first day of TOC:
I’m in NYC for the O’Reilly Tools of Change for Publishing conference. Here we have a chance to meet like-minded publishers, albeit most here are in the book, not magazine business. Regardless the attendees here say words like “XML”, “RSS” and “long tail” and we’re just giddy to hear our little techie language spoken.
This episode of Loaded with Natali Del Conte features interviews with a couple of Money:Tech participants onsite at the Waldorf=Astoria in New York.
A post on AllAboutAlpha.com observes that the intersection of finance and technology is getting crowded.
Along with information aggregation services and social investing networks, today’s the O’Reilly MoneyTech conference in New York featured celebrity financial bloggers. Barry Ritholtz (The Big Picture), Roger Ehrenberg (Information Arbitrage), Veryan Allen (Hedge Fund Blog), and even the reclusive and media-shy “Finbar Taggit” (Fintag.com). The event itself was moderated by blogger Paul Kedrosky (Infectious Greed) and counts among its four promotional partners, Footnoted.org and AllAboutAlpha.com.
Christian Braun summarizes the highlights of final day of Money:Tech, including Devin Wenig of Reuters; Richard Bookstaber, author of “A Demon of Our Own Design”; Martin Wattenberg of IBM Research; and Bill Tancer of Hitwise, plus others.
“Call it the monetization of opacity,” writes Felix Salmon. “One of the biggest buzz topics of the Money:Tech conference is dark pools: the way that stock trades are migrating away from open and transparent public exchanges, and into black boxes which don’t make their trade data public.”
In her Financial Times blog, Stacy-Marie Ishmael posts a brief overview of the conference:
How do you find Alpha in a world where data is essentially a commodity? That was the question posed by the organisers of the Money:Tech conference in New York this week, Messrs. Tim O’Reilly and Paul Kedrosky.
Program chair Andrew Savikas announced two new features to further the conversation around the future of publishing: Tools of Change for Publishing blog and the TOC Job Board.
Anju Marempudi, a speaker at Money:Tech, announced the launch of eventVestor during his presentation. “EventVestor aims to become the most comprehensive data and analytics platform for event driven investment analysis and business decision-making. We identify, synthesize, and quantify key corporate actions, market reactions, and macro economic events into a near real-time structured database and provide an advanced analytics and flexible data delivery platform.”
