August 2008 Archives

Sebastopol, CA–How does new technology help us perceive things that were barely noticeable before or draw attention to important issues, objects, ideas, and projects, no matter their size or location? These and many other questions around the future of technology were explored at ETech, the O’Reilly Emerging Technology Conference. This annual gathering of people passionate about computing innovations brought together over 900 developers, technologists, geeks, researchers, academics, artists, activists, and makers in San Diego, California, March 3-6, 2008.

“ETech is a mental battery charge that will last all year, ” observed Chris Anderson, Editor-in-Chief of Wired Magazine.

The seventh edition of ETech focused on the brand new technology that is tweaking how we are seen as individuals, how we choose to channel and divert our energy and attention, and what influences our perspective on the world around us. Just a few of the topics participants tackled during the four-day event included food, body, and sex hacking; DIY drones and survival techniques; technology lessons from emerging markets; visualization of data; energy, defense, and genetic policy; crowds and ambient data; gaming, both small group and massive; and much more.

Read about all the details.

Sebastopol, CA- O’Reilly’s Tenth Annual OSCON Explores Open Source’s Dynamic Future-
Open Source Community Prepares for Challenges and Opportunities Ahead

More than 3,000 developers, entrepreneurs, and visionaries attended the 10th annual OSCON in Portland, on July 21-25, and they left knowing that the open source community is stronger than ever.

Program chairs Allison Randal, Edd Dumbill, and the OSCON program committee chose from more than 700 proposals and produced five full days of stirring talks and practical demonstrations at the cutting edge of technological and commercial innovation. Rich in content and inspiration, the convention featured the key players and issues influencing open source today, and it explored the greatest potential for open source tomorrow.

Read full press release.

Sebastopol, CA, July 30, 2008–The second O’Reilly Money:Tech Conference will mine the new veins where technology and finance meet February 4-6, 2009, at the Marriot Marquis in New York City. Program Co-chairs Paul Kedrosky and Robert Passarella invite proposals for conference sessions and a newly added full day of tutorials at this year’s expanded Money:Tech Conference.

An intimate, collaborative event that melds thought leadership with practical how-tos, Money:Tech 2009 will showcase the new kinds of technology and data from today’s increasingly networked world that can become the foundation for insight and value creation. Money:Tech brings together institutional and professional investors, web entrepreneurs and activists, technology and research experts, VCs, and high-profile thought leaders to expose the edges and give fundamental research new traction.

Read full press release here.

The O’Reilly Tools of Change for Publishing Conference 2009 will parse the future February 9-11, 2009, at the Marriot Marquis in New York City. Following last year’s sold-out conference in New York, Program Chair Andrew Savikas invites proposals for conference sessions and tutorials for this third year of the TOC Conference.

“The 2009 TOC Conference will explore the changing meaning of ‘digital publishing.’ New devices like the Kindle and the iPhone have opened up new sales and distribution channels for paid content, and those channels are as open to new players as to existing publishers. New business models are emerging that look very strange to a publisher, but at their core do the familiar jobs of developing content, aggregating audiences, and connecting the two. The act of publishing is here to stay, but the role of existing publishers remains an open question,” says Savikas.

Read more.

David Hobbs writes:

The Web 2.0 Expo will be in NYC for the first time this year, and I’m happy to be attending. Although also interested in the grander discussions of the direction of the industry and social aspects, I’m most interested in how things get implemented. On the implementation side, there’s both the technical perspective (the design and architecture of delivering solutions) as well as the people perspective such as consensus-building. In terms of Web Operations Management, I’m most interested in the Execution layer. This implementation aspect seems to get a lot of attention at the conference, and in particular there are several sessions around the theme of managing Web products.

Read the rest of David’s article.

News Blaze highlights RailsConf ‘08:

“Passionate and fascinating” is the way one developer summed up RailsConf 2008 in Portland May 26-June 1, the largest physical gathering of Ruby and Rails developers in the world.

Read more.

Ryan Paul of ARS on his experience at OSCON 2008:

The event, which started ten years ago as a venue for bringing together Perl enthusiasts, has grown into one of the most important open source conventions in the United States.

Read all Ryan’s coverage at OSCON.

Paul Krill writes about what OSCON had to say about mobile computing:

The iPhone attracted attention at the conference. An audience member during a morning keynote presentation event asked why the open source world has not done anything as “insanely great” as iPhone.

Read more.

Sean Michael Kerner sums up OSCON 2008:

Tim O’Reilly (you know the guy who runs the big tech publisher) is still bullish on the prospect of open source. After 10 years of running the OSCON conference he still sees innovation on the horizon.

Read more.

Paul Krill reports on the Open Web Foundation announcement at OSCON 2008:

The Open Web Foundation, a non-profit organization intended to help create an “Open Web,” was announced Thursday at the O’Reilly Open Source Conference (OSCON) in Portland, Ore. Specifically, the organization is dedicated to the development and protection of non-proprietary specifications for Web technologies. The effort was announced by David Recordon of blogging tools maker Six Apart.

Read more.

Esther Schindler Recaps OSCON 2008 and Tim O’Reilly’s Keynote Address:

While celebrating the many accomplishments of free software, O’Reilly put most of his attention on the new challenges where open source could-and in his opinion should-make a difference. And he brought several people on stage to back up his points. “We have to pay attention to the real consequences to the wave we’ve unleashed,” he said.

Read more.

David Pescovitz’s favorite geek confab of the year!

The presenters aren’t usually celebrity types but just supersmart nrrrds making fascinating tech and thinking about the impact of innovation on our lives. I’m really excited to be on the program committee again this year. The Call for Participation is now open and we’re looking for big ideas across a huge spectrum of tech/culture, from materials science and synthetic biology to nomadism and sustainable life.

Read more.

ETech veteran Cory Doctorow’s kind words on this year’s conference and the Call for Proposals:

The call for proposals for O’Reilly Emerging Tech 2009 has just gone up: “Living, Reinvented.” I was involved in every ETech from the first P2PCon in 1999 right up to last year (I’m taking a year or two off while I catch up on fatherhood and book-deadlines), and I have had some of my most mind-blowing, life-altering conversations and experiences at these events, which showcase the leading edge of (often impractical but never boring) experimentation, skunkworks, and passionate development. This year’s theme sounds fantastic, too. Proposals are due Sept 17, and the event is next March 9-12 in San Jose.

Read the rest of Cory’s post.

David Miller came to OSCON and interviewed Jim Zemlin, Raven Zachary, and Rick Turoczy:

It’s open source time again in Portland: the Open Source Convention, or OSCON, is back in town. Of course, you could argue that every day is open source day in Portland. The inventor of the wiki lives here. So does Linus Torvalds of Linux fame. As do a number of companies based on open source architecture, like the Collaborative Software Initiative.

LISTEN TO “Open Source City”

Web 2.0 Newsradar spreads the word about Al Gore at Web 2.0 Summit by reposting Tim O’Reilly’s announcement.

BuzzTracker says the announcement about Al Gore at Web 2.0 Summit is its most blogged piece on Mr. Gore.

Yahoo! Buzz runs the announcement that Al Gore will speak at Web 2.0 Summit.

Listen to this mechanical reading of the Boing Boing post about Gore coming to Web 2.0 Summit.

David Pescovitz writes about the terrific speakers scheduled for Web 2.0 Summit:

Our fearless band manager John Battelle is the co-host, along with Tim O’Reilly, of the Web 2.0 Summit, a huge confab where Internet heavyweights talk big vision. Combined, John and Tim know everyone on the Internet (and their brothers) and so they always line up great talkers. They’ve just announced the speaker list for this year’s Web 2.0, to be held November 5-7 in San Francisco. It’s no “insider baseball” Internet conference. Indeed, the big thematic question of Web 2.0 2008 is: “How can we apply the lessons of the Web to the world at large?” Folks like Al Gore, Lance Armstrong, Saul Griffith, Elon Musk, and Michael Pollan will attempt to provide some answers.

Read the rest here.

Tim O’Reilly on the exciting news that Al Gore will join the conversation at Web 2.0 Summit:

As I wrote last month in What Good is Collective Intelligence if it Doesn’t Make Us Smarter?, at this year’s Web 2.0 Summit, we’re focusing on how what we’ve learned from the web over the past decade can be applied to solve the world’s hard problems. That’s why I’m really excited to see that John Battelle has persuaded Al Gore to join us.

One of those hard problems that requires all the intelligence we can throw at is global warming. And there’s no one who deserves as much credit as Al Gore for getting it on our collective radar. Through persistence, vision, and hard work, and a real mastery of the new tools of global media, he made all of us pay attention. His work has been a textbook demonstration of the power of media to change the way people think.

That’s Gore’s continuing focus, with his role at Current TV. He’s also joined Kleiner Perkins as a partner involved in cleantech investing.

When I first saw Gore talk about climate change at the TED conference in early 2006, everyone wanted to know what we could do about it. People are still struggling to answer that question, but it’s clear that technology can play a large role: helping us to monitor and measure the rate of change in crucial environmental variables, creating feedback loops that change behavior at both macro-levels (like carbon markets) and personal levels (like home energy monitoring); creating green data centers and low-power devices; creating new forms of renewable energy generation or storage, new materials that require less energy to create; alternative fuels and vehicles. The list goes on and on. (Reminder: we’re looking for innovative “web meets world” startups for the Web 2.0 Summit Launchpad.)

Of course, global warming is far from the only “web meets world” theme that we’re exploring. The conference will cover everything from the latest trends on the web (the rediscovery of e-commerce as a business model, cloud computing, social networking, mobile applications, and the inevitable platform wars) to politics, global disease detection, personal genomics, private space industry, and even military infotech. Speakers I’m particularly excited to see, in addition to Vice President Gore, include Tony Hsieh (@zappos, for those of you who see him continually on twitter), Elon Musk (who’s got to have the coolest portfolio of investments since retiring from PayPal, with SpaceX, SolarCity, Tesla Motors all under his wing), and Michael Pollan, who’s completely changed the way many of us think about food. Check out the confirmed speaker list, but keep in mind that there are more yet to come as John and I firm up the program.

John Battelle announces a splendid addition to the Web 2.0 Summit:

Those of you following my posts around the theme of this year’s Web 2 Summit already know that we’re expanding the scope of the conference this year, and asking a core question: How can we apply the lessons of the Web to the world at large? From my post outlining the theme:

As we convene the fifth annual Web 2.0 Summit, our world is fraught with problems that engineers might charitably classify as NP hard—from roiling financial markets to global warming, failing healthcare systems to intractable religious wars. In short, it seems as if many of our most complex systems are reaching their limits.

It strikes us that the Web might teach us new ways to address these limits. From harnessing collective intelligence to a bias toward open systems, the Web’s greatest inventions are, at their core, social movements. To that end, we’re expanding our program this year to include leaders in the fields of healthcare, genetics, finance, global business, and yes, even politics.

Increasingly, the leaders of the Internet economy are turning their attention to the world outside our industry. And conversely, the best minds of our generation are turning to the Web for solutions. At the fifth annual Web 2.0 Summit, we’ll endeavor to bring these groups together.

To my mind, no person better exemplifies the merging of these two worlds than former Vice President (and Nobel laureate) Al Gore, the Chairman of Current TV. Gore and CEO Joel Hyatt started Current as “a new breed of media company that works with its young adult audience to create media that informs, enriches and inspires,” by integrating online and offline media, a very Web Meets World endeavor indeed. Readers may recall that Gore recently joined Kleiner Perkins as a partner focused on green issues, as well. And we are very pleased to announce that VP Gore will be joining us at the Web 2 Summit this year.

Others joining VP Gore include Elon Musk, of PayPal, Tesla, SolarCity and SpaceX, Larry Brilliant, the head of the Google.org foundation, and Michael Pollan, author of many wonderful books on our relationship to food, including my favorite: The Botany of Desire. The full lineup is truly wonderful, and we’re still adding speakers.

Requests for invitations can be found here, this is going to be one special event.

Suw Charman Anderson explores this year’s ETech theme and wonders about submitting a proposal. Read more of her thoughts here.

Christian Lupp is really looking forward to his talk at RailsConf Europe:

From Sept. 2nd to Sept. 4th 2008 the Ruby on Rails community will meet at the RailsConf Europe. It’s the third RailsConf in Europe and it will located in Berlin/Germany again. Last year, more than 800 Rails enthusiasts joined the conference - a great developer community event - and always the chance to drink your coffee besides one of the creative minds of the Rails Core team ;-) There is nothing that can replace the face-to-face communication within the community. So, I can warmly recommend joining the conference in Berlin to every Rails developer who is able to get there. And all those, who want to develop elegant web applications and do not work with Ruby on Rails yet - they should join us more than ever.

Read his whole post here.

Tim Bray offers more notes on his OSCON Keynote:

Here are all the missing pieces, should you want to watch it (only 15 minutes, remember); plus a little extra commentary.

AshMUG member John Clark soaks in the best of O’Reilly’s convention in his special guest column.

RIchard MacManus supports the “Web Meets World” Auction by offering free passes for the best auction item ideas:

This year the Web 2.0 Summit conference (5-7 Nov) is hosting an auction to benefit a few innovative organizations that are solving big problems.

To show our support for this initiative, ReadWriteWeb is running a competition in this post.

From ETech chair Brady Forrest:

ETech’s CFP has launched. The theme this year is Living, Reinvented: The Technology of Abundance and Constraints. To that end I spent time with MITs Scratch Team (changing computer education) and the RoboScooter team (changing transportation). We’re going to explore the following themes.

Esther Schindler came home from OSCON with thoughts on growing the size of the pool in open-source development communities. And it’s all upbeat news.

Michael Dory, Adam Simon, and Scott Varland of Socialbomb presented a tutorial on Arduino hacking at last month’s O’Reilly Open Source Convention:

Arduino is an open-source electronics prototyping platform based on flexible, easy-to-use hardware and software. It’s intended for artists, designers, hobbyists, and anyone interested in creating interactive objects or environments.

In this tutorial, participants will learn how to create devices for sensing and communicating with the physical world using the Arduino platform.

Read the rest of the tutorial.

Sebastopol, CA–Co-presenters O’Reilly Media and Ruby Central have unveiled the program for RailsConf Europe, the official trusted event for the Rails Community in Europe on 2-4 September, 2008, in Berlin, Germany. Organizers have extended early registration until 30 July, offering community members the chance to save up to £150.

“RailsConf Europe is in its third year, and like Rails itself, it’s an established presence but one with energy and real freshness. This year we’ve added some more presentations to the schedule, and we’ve got a great lineup of keynote talks and sessions centering around the Rails core team and both the present and future of Rails,” says program chair David Black. “The presentation schedule is packed with focused, technically informative talks from experts in everything from security to internationalization to deployment, metaprogramming, database and UI engineering–the whole range of Rails activity and interest. The Rails scene, like the Ruby scene, has always been vibrant and rich in Europe, and we’re tapping right into it.”

Read more here.

Our good friend Ricky Montalvo and his crew shot some great footage at OSCON. Check out their coverage and conversations here. Fishsticks?

Andrew Savikas, chair of the O’Reilly Tools of Change for Publishing Conference, on The Times and Derek Gottfrid’s presentation at OSCON:

But there’s something going on at the Times that probably won’t make it to Silicon Alley Insider, much less the mainstream business press, and it’s something that’s starting to make me think the Times just might succeed in adapting to the changing rules of the media and publishing game (though there will almost certainly be many more casualties before it’s over).

So what’s the Times doing that’s so important? They’re hacking.

Read the rest of the story.

Slashdot on some of OSCON’s greatest hits:

An anonymous reader writes “Infoweek wraps last week’s event with Inside The OSCON 2008 Conference, which pulls together interviews with Mark Shuttleworth, Linux Foundation’s Jim Zemlin, MySQL’s Zach Urlocker and Sam Ramji, who directs Microsoft’s Open Source Lab. Best quotes: ‘We will make a significant attempt to elevate the Linux desktop to the point where it is as good or better than Apple,’ from Shuttleworth; and ‘If I would start a business tomorrow I’d do it in the netbook marketplace. I’d build a dead-simple $200 device that targets sports fans, women over forty,’ from Zemlin.”

Serdar Yegulalp brings all his OSCON coverage together.

We round up our coverage of the open source OSCON 2008 conference. Don’t miss Q&As with Ubuntu’s Mark Shuttleworth and The Linux Foundation’s Jim Zemlin. Check out the photo gallery, too.

See all of Serdar’s terrific coverage here.