February 2009 Archives

O’Reilly contributing editor James Turner has been busy conducting a series of interviews with ETech speakers as the conference draws nigh. In addition to great insight about the wide-ranging topics ETech will cover this year, there have been some amazing, spirited discussions in the comments section of each post. Check ‘em out:

• Creating Biological Legos with Reshma Shetty of Ginkgo BioWorks; her ETech presentation is Real Hackers Program DNA
• Science Commons Wants Data to Be Free with Creative Commons’ John Wilbanks; his ETech presentation is Uncommon Knowledge and Open Innovation: Building a Science Commons
• Inside Factory China with Andrew “bunnie” Huang of Chumby Industries; his ETech presentation is Out of China: Manufacturing the Chumby
• Why LCD is the Cool New Technology All Over Again with Mary Lou Jepson of Pixel Qi; her ETech presentation is Low-Cost, Low-Power Computing

We’re looking forward to hearing from these and many other incisive, forward-thinking speakers in person at the event. Like the Radar comments, the in-person conversation is bound to be diverse and enlightening.

In other ETech news, we’re offering a new incentive to attend the conference: a 40% “Friends & Family” discount–that translates into savings of over $500. We know times are tough and many people who want to and should be at ETech simply can’t afford it. We hope this offer will help! To take advantage of this discount, use et09ffd in the discount code field when you register.

We are giving all of the attendees at ETech RFID tags that can be linked to their conference profiles (opt-in). With these tags you can interact with several projects we’ll have at the conference. BTW, ETech is happening March 9-12 in San Jose. Use et09pd30 at checkout for 30% off.

We were inspired to do this after I attended PICNIC in 2008 (Radar post) and got to experience first-hand the many, many uses of an RFID badge. Mediamatic linked your profile to it and that information was used to record your experiences. We got help from Mediamatic on our implementation and even used the same vendor.

If you make it to ETech here are the projects you can play with:

Lensley’s Photobooth: Leonard Lin’s new project is Lensley, a high-end photobooth with online photo-services integration. He’s creating a special version just for ETech that will tag photos with your name and tweet that you’ve just had one taken.

Personal Calendar: Radar’s own Edd Dumbill is the fellow behind the profile APIs. He is going to create a project that will show attendees their personal calendar at a public kiosk.

ETech Prophet: Josh and Tarikh of Uncommon Projects (they made the cool Yahoo! geo-bike) are adding an element of play to their project. They sent me a mail describing it as: “Essentially, we’d like to make an “Etech Prophet” a kind of mechanical turk idea (perhaps in another form factor)–you wave your RFID fob, it gesticulates, makes a noise and sends you your pithy fortune via twitter”

People Collector: This is a favorite of mine. Business cards are a waste of time and paper. I just want the person’s email address. Nothing else. The People Collector will be a mobile device that people can use to exchange contact information with other attendees. When you meet someone just wave your fob over their People Collector and a message will be sent to both of you. The People Collector will be built in Tom Igoe and Brian Jepson’s Hands-On RFID Workshop on 3/9.

Pulse: Attendees will be able to check-in to locations (this is all voluntary!). Overtime the system will build up information about attendees through their actions and will be able to generate a heatmap for the hotel. This project is being built by Alexander Biscelgie and Nick Sears.

Do you have something that you want to make? Let me know in the comments or find me on Twitter. We are still looking for projects.

Governmental policy and regulation can be tech’s Achilles heal. It can also create a business model. Love it or hate it if you want to get big you can’t ignore the government. With a new administration (and financial crash) there’s a change happening and we need to pay attention.

At ETech we have a number of talks that focus on policy and what you can expect. ETech is happening March 9-12 in San Jose. Use et09pd30 at checkout for 30% off. Here are just some of the policy-oriented talks:

I Just Don’t Trust You: How the Tech Community Can Reinvent Risk Ratings

Toby Segaran (Metaweb), Jesper Andersen (Open Data Group)

Financial technology - something we all thought was complete - has been upended. Fundamental assumptions have been exposed as faulty. And now we have the opportunity to recreate our finance industry from the bottom up. We have a choice: a path of openness and information sharing, or more opacity and secrecy.

Your Energy Identity and Why You Should Care

Gavin Starks (AMEE)

As we progress to a post-scarcity society, either you’ll measure your consumption or someone else will. More data is becoming accessible than has ever existed. Whether driven by climate change, peak oil or economic change, sustainability is now a fundamental factor of your business and your life. We’ll unpack and map the dramatic changes coming to industry, markets, politics - and you.

Building a New Biology

Drew Endy (Stanford & The BioBricks Foundation (BBF)), David Grewal (Harvard & BBF), Jason Schultz (Samuelson Law, Technology & Public Policy Clinic, UC Berkeley School of Law)

Three leaders in the technology and law of synthetic biology will present a crisp and accessible briefing on new cooperative efforts to make tens of thousands of open source standardized DNA parts. Discussion to follow.

Mr. Hacker Goes to Washington

Greg Elin (Sunlight Foundation)

Want to help fix democracy? Hackers, those crazy Utopian dreamers with DIY attitudes, have begun a sustained assault on government with projects like the Sunlight Foundation, OpenCongress, GovTrack, Watchdog.net, FedSpending, MySociety, and Public.Resource. The goal?

Sensors tell us about the physical world and allow us (or machines) to make informed decisions. As sensors become more ubiquitous what will we be able to learn from them? What will we be able to do with them?

At ETech we have a number of talks that demonstrate sensors effect on news, sports, office environments, cities and art. ETech is happening March 9-12 in San Jose. Use et09pd30 at checkout for 30% off. Here are just some of the sensor-oriented talks:

Sensors, Smart Content and The Future of News

Nick Bilton (The New York Times R&D Labs)

We are currently in a time when sharing and social networks are changing the way we consume editorialized media and the definition of ‘content’ is increasingly blurred. In the R&D Labs at The New York Times we are exploring some of the questions around how we will consume information in the next 2 to 20 years.

Building the Programmable Environment: Co-Design and Physical/Digital Space Making

Jennifer Magnolfi (Herman Miller)

The design and production of physical/digital spaces is at the heart of what we call the Programmable Environment. Instead of environments complete and fixed in time, subject to renovation or demolition when their purpose is no longer relevant, the result is a spatial system designed to evolve over time, in interaction with the users who inhabit it.

Urban Futures

Chris Luebkeman (Arup)

When we look at the world around us we see many examples of places and spaces that we both love and hate. What would you ‘cut and paste’ from different parts of your city to create the ideal sustainable urban environment? Arup have spent a number of years discussing what the eco-city would need to look like if we are going to move towards an Ecological Age.

Making Art with Lasers, Sensors and the Net

Aaron Koblin (Google)

Aaron Koblin will discuss the process of turning data into visual expression. As Director of Technology on Radiohead’s latest music video for “House of Cards,” he worked with sensor technologies as an alternative to traditional video. Aaron will also discuss his role at Google’s Creative Lab in San Francisco, and discuss some of his other data-visualization software.

The Greatest Virtual Marathon: Computing and Materials in Sports

Michael Tchao (Nike Techlab)

The greatest sports athletes’ records live and die by their hi-tech gear. They use new swimsuits like the razor to shave seconds off their laps and sensors like the Nike+ to record their training. Michael Tchao of Nike Labs and will share with us the process behind these creations and the new materials and technology that make them happen.

Mobile Phones Reveal the Behavior of Places and People

Tony Jebara (Columbia University & Sense Networks)

As more of us generate GPS data with our mobile phones, how can this aggregated information give us an unprecedented new understanding of the people, places, and rhythms that make up our cities? Location data combined with learning algorithms lets us cluster different places and people into social categories and tribes.

Who wants to be stuck just working in software? At ETech we’re going to discuss domestic and overseas manufacturing, the latest materials and open-source electronics for creating the physical computing device of your dreams. Here are some of the talks:

Holistic Service Prototyping: Sketching Hardware and Software

Matt Cottam (Tellart, Rhode Island School of Design and Umeå Institute of Design), Maia Garau (Dynamic Diagrams), Jasper Speicher (Tellart LLC), Brian Hinch (Tellart)

The Economist has defined services as “products of economic activity that you can’t drop on your foot.” Where businesses once viewed services as a necessary but inconvenient accompaniment to their product offerings, they now increasingly look to designers to develop holistic, human-centered and innovative service solutions that can help expand profits and cement brand loyalty. Read more.

LilyPad Electronic Fashion

Leah Buechley (MIT Media Lab)

Come build a shirt that sings when you’re squeezed, a purse that sounds an alarm when someone touches it or a jacket that shines and sparkles at your command. This workshop will guide you through the process of building an interactive garment that incorporates touch sensors, light, and sound

Printing in 3D

Zach Smith (RepRap Research Foundation)

An exciting 3 hour workshop led by Zach Smith featuring RepRap, the open source self-replicating 3D printer. The workshop will consist of discussions of the RepRap technology, 3D printing and digital fabrication techniques, and 3D modeling. We’ll also have the RepRap fired up and making your creations real.

High-Low Tech: Democratizing Engineering and Design

Leah Buechley (MIT Media Lab)

People knit scarves and solder radios together in their homes and garages. In contrast, companies produce high-tech things by high-tech processes. A host of new tools is making many of the resources previously available only to companies accessible to individuals, empowering people to design, engineer, and build devices that integrate high and low technology

Socializing Stuff: a Wireless Objects Workshop

Rob Faludi (NYU)

Objects are beginning to socialize. A new era of low-bandwidth, low-power wireless networks is enabling a revolution in device communications. In this DIY session we’ll insert you into those conversations and introduce you to device communications technology that could change our homes, cars and clothes.

Hands-On RFID for Makers

Tom Igoe (Interactive Telecommunications Program, NYU), Brian Jepson (O’Reilly Media, Inc.)

Ever wanted to get a real understanding of how RFID works? In this workshop, you’ll learn about the different classes of RFID devices. We’ll discuss what RFID can and can’t do, what devices are already on the market, and what kinds of future applications are possible. $70 materials fee required.

Out of China: Manufacturing the Chumby

Andrew “bunnie” Huang (Chumby Industries)

China is one of the US’s biggest trading partners, and is one of the premier regions for manufacturing electronic goods of all types. When startup Chumby Industries needed to migrate their US-built chumby device prototypes to production, they sent bunnie to China to build the chumby supply chain.

New Materials

Andrew Dent (Material ConneXion, Inc.)

True innovation in materials takes on many forms, and for 80% of the worlds population means the effective use of often scarce resources. ‘Technology Transfer’, a term used to refer to the process of converting academic research into useable products, is just as important when between the developing and the developed world or between two disparate industries.

Sebastopol, CA, February 3, 2009 - You can’t go anywhere or do anything these days without finding one map or another, but location technology continues to grow far beyond those tools. See all the other directions location tech might take at the O’Reilly Where 2.0 Conference, May 19-21, 2009 in San Jose, CA. Program chair Brady Forrest has revealed the program, and registration has opened. An early registration discount remains available until March 31.

Now in its fifth year, the Where 2.0 Conference claims the space where developers building location-aware technology intersect with the businesses and entrepreneurs looking for location apps, platforms, and hardware to give them a competitive edge. Where 2.0 delves into the emerging technologies surrounding the geospatial industry and asks the crucial questions.

Read the full press release.

Tim O’Reilly with O’Reilly Insights in Forbes.com:

Don’t look for the gilded road to fortune. Look for passion.

Forget Silicon Valley. Traditional wisdom is that it represents the model for American innovation: a hotbed of young entrepreneurs with easy access to capital from a large pool of savvy investors.

Read more.

Mobile is alive at ETech this year. We’re featuring talks on location, sensors, multi-screen worlds and developing markets. Here are some of them:

txteagle: Crowd-Sourcing on Mobile Phones in the Developing World

Nathan Eagle (MIT)

txteagle is a mobile crowd-sourcing application that will be launching in Kenya on the Safaricom network. It enables people to earn and save small amounts of money by completing simple tasks on their phones for companies who pay them either in airtime or cash. http://txteagle.com

Mobile Phones Reveal the Behavior of Places and People

Tony Jebara (Columbia University & Sense Networks)

As more of us generate GPS data with our mobile phones, how can this aggregated information give us an unprecedented new understanding of the people, places, and rhythms that make up our cities? Location data combined with learning algorithms lets us cluster different places and people into social categories and tribes.

Sustainable Design for a Multiscreen, Info-Overloaded World

Kevin Lynch (Adobe Systems Incorporated)

Understanding how humans can better interact with and consume information is critical as we work to solve the increasingly complex challenges before us. Adobe CTO Kevin Lynch will explore three aspects that will shape the next generation of computing applications.

Enabling Citizen Science

Eric Paulos (Carnegie Mellon University)

From communication tool to “networked mobile personal measurement instrument”. Mobile phones as “personal measurement instruments” enable an entirely novel and empowering genre of computing usage called citizen science. Through the use of sensors paired with personal mobile phones, citizens are invited to participate in collecting and sharing measurements of their environment that matter most

Shared and Sometimes Stealthy: Urban India’s Mobile Phone

Molly Steenson (Princeton University School of Architecture)

We typically think of the mobile phone as a device belonging to and used by an individual. Yet in urban India, people share their mobile phones in unique ways, regardless of class and depending on where they are in the city

The schedule for the 2009 edition of Where 2.0 went up late last week. Yes, I’m biased, but for the fifth year in a row it’s shaping up to be another stellar experience.

One of the best things about Where 2.0 is that it’s a mix of the practical (cartography, local search, data management) and inspirational (augmented reality, 3D imagery, crowdsourcing). It’s not easy to meld the skill building with the visionary, particularly in a single-track conference, so props to program chair Brady Forrest and his program committee for making that happen.

Some highlights:

• Workshops are a little shorter this year (75 minutes vs. 3 hours in 2008) and more plentiful, giving attendees more topics to choose from
• Local Search: Funding Geo–Danny Sullivan (Search Engine Land) will share his thinking on the latest advances across all of the search engines
• Indigenous Mappers–Rebecca Moore (Google) has been working closely with indigenous tribes to put their data online, a difficult but rewarding experience
• Maps in Space–the always entertaining Chris Spurgeon (spurgeonworld.com) gives a fun-filled overview of some of the techniques we use to find our way in space
• Mobiles Around the World–Nokia’s Michael Halbherr shares the latest news on geo-aware web apps
• The Shape of Alpha–Aaron Cope (Flickr) answers the question: If all of Flickr’s 100+ million geotagged photos were plotted on a map would there be enough data to generate a mostly accurate contour of that place?

More is on the way as Brady and company continue their work on the agenda. For those interested in attending, the early registration discount is currently in effect.