Emerging Technology Adopted as Tool for Success

Sebastopol, CA, March 23, 2009 - ETech 2009, O’Reilly’s Emerging Technology Conference held March 9-12 in San Jose, urged web technologists and visionaries to grasp the opportunities in today’s financial and political turmoil by focusing on work they care deeply about. Through four jam-packed days, conference-goers immersed themselves in revolutionary ideas and emergent technologies they can exploit to succeed.

The conference has been O’Reilly Media’s flagship event since its inception in 2002, fulfilling the company’s mission of “spreading the knowledge of innovators.” More than 130 speakers explored the far edges of web innovation, robotics, data applications, urban planning, and more.

Read the full press release.

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.

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

ETech is a technologist’s playground. We specifically design the conference to expose new ideas and learn from the people behind them. This year the focus is on how the way we live is changing — through policy, technology and ideas. The proliferation of sensors, advances in materials and manufacturing, the changes in government and the financial market will all have a profound effect on our industry.

ETech is a four-day conference that runs from March 9-12 in San Jose, CA. Early registration ends on Monday. Use et09rad at checkout for an additional 10% off (this will work even after early registration pricing ends).

ETech is a broad conference. The first day is filled with three-hour tutorials that range in topics from Refactoring Your Wetware (by Andy Hunt), Lilypad Arduino (was sold-out, but we were able to free up some new spots), an RFID-Arduino project, mapping with Stamen Design, 3D printing with the Reprap, and programming with MIT’s Scratch. The following three days will be mix of plenary and breakout sessions. Here’s a listing of all the talks and speakers. They’ll be focused on:

• One of the major focuses is on the changing tech of cities - how sensors can track the real time city to how mobile phones can reveal habits of its citizens to Dubai’s new location-aware playground.
• It’s not just cities exploring the use of sensors, companies like the New York Times will share how they have been exploring their use in content delivery, Herman Miller is examining worker controlled sensors in the workplace, and Nike Techlab’s has already selling sensor-laiden fitness equipment. Wired’s Gary Wolf will expand on the Quantified Self and how personal sensors can teach us about ourselves.
• Many entrepreneurs are moving from virtual goods to physical ones. Bunnie Huang is going to lead a session on manufacturing in China, in another we’ll learn about a new high-tech system for manufacturing chocolate. On Monday there is a workshop on 3D printing at home with the Reprap. Tom Igoe will examine where items go at the end of their lifecycle.
• New materials are being developed that will change what products can be built, what biomaterials can be sourced and how flexible screens will be developed in the coming years.
• We’re not turning a blind eye to politics and finances this year. We’re taking a geeks-eye view at credit risk and the financial markets, at the money in politics, and synthetic biology policy.
• We can’t ignore engergy this year. There’s a chance for America to become sustainable, for an electric grid to change the tech industry, for each of us to own our energy identity and how we can crowdsource energy-awareness.
• Constraints drive innovation and we can look to developing markets to find progress in action (such as the Playpower 8-bit computer from India). We’ll learn about healthcare clinics and mobile versions of Mechanical Turk in Africa. Julian Bleecker of Nokia will share how fictional worlds can help us create new designs.

I hope to see you there.

In addition to the formal program that includes the likes of Leah Buechley (MIT), Greg Elin (Sunlight Foundation), and Eric Rasmussen (InSTEDD), Brady and the ETech team have also been busy lining up extracurricular events that add a new dimension to the ways we’ll be able to connect during the conference:

MAKE Room: Brian Jepson and some of his fellow Makers will have their own room during ETech to spread out and help you get your DIY on.

FreeTech: an unconference, ETech style.

Zoe Keating: a cellist and composer, Zoe fuses layers of music into an incredible sound using her cello and her Mac.

LateTech: This is still in the noodling phase, but we’re thinking of an after-hours open-mike-meets-lightning-talks kind of event

Ignite will be back, too.

And news for the pocketbook: we’ve also moved the early registration discount deadline for ETech to January 26. We know times are tough and unpredictable, and we hope keeping the discount active longer will help more people attend what’s shaping up to be an amazing event this year.

Sebastopol, CA, November 6, 2008—Registration has opened for ETech, the O’Reilly Emerging Technology Conference, scheduled for March 9-12 at the Fairmont Hotel in San Jose, California. Conference chair Brady Forrest has unveiled the program, which explores the technology of abundance and constraints to discover ideas that matter.

ETech is O’Reilly Media’s flagship “O’Reilly Radar” event. Since 2002, ETech has put onstage ideas for radical innovation, bringing to light the disruptive yet important innovations that we see on the horizon, rather than the ones that have already arrived.

Read the full press release.

Living, Reinvented: The Technology of Abundance and Constraints
ETech Opens Call for Participation and Invites Proposals

Sebastopol, CA–The O’Reilly Emerging Technology Conference will explore the technology of abundance and constraints March 9-12, 2009, at the Fairmont Hotel in San Jose, California. O’Reilly Media and Program Chair Brady Forrest invite proposals for ETech 2009 conference sessions, panel discussions, and tutorials, as well as brief and rapid-fire High Order Bits.

ETech will gather hackers, grass roots developers, researchers, strategists, makers, thought leaders, artists, entrepreneurs, business developers, venture capitalists, city planners, medical professionals, life scientists, CxOs and IT managers, doers, and other technical visionaries. These futurists will turn their energies toward reinventing the ways in which their lives, and those of the entire world, can use new technologies. Centered around the technology of abundance and constraint, the program will define how those technologies can intersect for a better world.

Read more here.

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.

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.

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

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.

Alex Steffan shares some of his and Saul’s thoughts from their time at ETech:

Saul Griffith is a remarkable guy: inventor, entrepreneuer, Squid Labs, ThinkCycle and Instructables founder, columnist, genius grant winner and now president of the clean energy start-up Makani Power. A couple weeks ago, I did a talk at eTech, and while I was there, I had the fortune to hear Saul give his presentation on energy literacy and climate change. Saul’s essential point is that climate change is a problem we can choose to tackle: that the means are within our control, if we’ll learn to think clearly about them.

Wendy Grossman asks the question, and answers with:

Probably not - or not directly. But some of the same people that have 2 million people tracking their MPs’ voting records via the site theyworkforyou.com and who, through farmsubsidy.org, got the EU to publish full subsidy data, have set up UNdemocracy.com, an attempt to shed light on the inner workings of the UN. The UN has for some time made copies of its resolutions and other information online at un.org, but like a lot of government initiatives the data published is hardly reusable in any meaningful way. URLs are not persistent, and data formats are not open. A small group led by Julian Todd, a “civic hacker” in Liverpool is seeking to change all that by laboriously scraping the data out of the site and republishing it with persistent URLs. That way, even if the UN removes the information it will be retained in Google caches or the Wayback Machine at the internet archive (archive.org). The site also links through to other decisions and debates. When you do that, said Stefan Magdalinski, Tom Loosemore, and Danny O’Brien at the Emerging Technology conference (conferences.oreilly.com/etech) last week in San Diego, some strange voting patterns emerge.

Over at Nikkei Electronics, Tatsurou Hokugou reports on OpenMoko’s announcement at ETech that it will start selling mobile phones to general consumers.

Another post from Wired’s Ryan Singel:

Stanford law professor and internet icon Larry Lessig called on geeks Wednesday night to be “heroes” who can help Americans believe in their government again, by creating tools to help drive the influence of money out of politics.

BBers Cory Doctorow, Mark Frauenfelder, Xeni Jardin, and David Pescovitz were all at ETech in March and posted these items:

DIY Drones with Chris Anderson

ATT-NSA whistleblower Mark Klein, EFF legal director Cindy Cohn

Nikita Chrusov of Soviet Unterzoegersdorf crashes party

Fritz Nelson shot a lot of video at ETech last month, including these two interviews with innovators:

Stamen’s Stunning Approach To Data Visualization

One of the most exciting concepts demonstrated during ETech was a data visualization concept, a phenomenally attractive and useful way to find information so quickly and thoughtfully, it seems at once elegant, clever, and obvious. The company: Stamen, a design studio in San Francisco.

Energy Literacy: Saul Griffith Unplugged

The monumental imperative to save our planet requires launching ourselves over what seems an insurmountable hurdle involving the orchestration of global agreement and policy combined with individual actions that manifest themselves as a nebulous series of micro decisions. So good luck with all of that and call me when the polar bears and penguins are tanning themselves on Fire Island. Or maybe we should completely re-examine our own lives like Saul Griffith, MIT PhD, chief scientist at Makani Power and the most fascinating presenter (despite some 70 slides) at ETech last week.

Krista Zala mentions ETech in a piece about the DIY movement:

Capturing the spirit of the emerging culture, the O’Reilly Emerging Technology Conference that took place this week in San Diego, California, ran sessions on how to make aerial drones and on hacking — beyond gadgets to the body, brain and food.

Another piece from Fritz Nelson

Some companies here at ETech are so new they don’t even have business cards yet. Jing Chen flew in a mere hour before she was expected to demo K-Factor Media’s DeveloperAnalytics at AppNite in San Diego, and it turned out to be one of the more compelling early success stories. In the not too distant future, she won’t have to be giving out slips of paper with her e-mail address instead of business cards.

Earlier this week, Victoria Barret posted this article from ETech:

If you want to see the seeds of the future, check out what people with spiky hair and multicolored eyeglasses are doing. At least, that seems the lesson to be learned at the O’Reilly Emerging Technology conference, held in San Diego earlier this month. The undercurrent here is that exceptions might be the next norm. “The essence of ETech is our idea that you often see the seeds of the future in places where people are having fun with technology,” says Timothy O’Reilly, the founder of ETech, as well as other technology shindigs, and the publishing house that carries his name. So, no shoes? No problem.

“Researchers exploring devices to enhance behavior, sensation,” writes Nathan Halverson in this article on one of the themese of ETech:

In an era where hackers are modifying everything from computers to iPhones, it’s only natural they would turn their attention inward and begin hacking the human body. Technology is increasingly being used to augment human behaviors and sensations, ranging from sex and depression to trust, several scientists said this week at the Emerging Technology conference organized by Sebastopol publisher O’Reilly Media.

Check out the PD’s ETech photo gallery too.

Wired photographer Dave Bullock came to ETech this year and shot portraits of some of the participants:

O’Reilly’s Emerging Technology Conference brings some of the brightest minds in the online world together every year for four days of talks, panels and workshops. ETech is really about ideas and the people behind them, so we wrangled a sample of willing geniuses and made them pony up some mug shots and tell us their latest projects.

Prolific Ryan Singel has posted two more:

Hackers have long been used to cranking out code in the morning and having a working prototype by the afternoon, but have been frustrated that they can’t do the same with hardware. That’s starting to change, and fast, driven in part by robotics enthusiasts and do-it-yourself types who are utilizing a new generation of open source hardware platforms and rapid fabrication tools.

Imagine a drug that can reduce your need for sleep, increase your concentration and make you smarter, with minimal side effects.

Rafe Needleman posted thoughts on the launch of Fire Eagle: “At ETech this morning, a nervous Tom Coates announced that Yahoo’s geolocation service Fire Eagle was leaving the nest, and he began handing out invitation codes to the product’s private beta.”

“Bug Labs wants to make innovating hardware as simple as innovating software,” writes Mitch Wagner. “So they created the Bug, an open source hardware design and software for building modular mobile devices.”

Developers can snap together a cell phone, camera, LCD display, GPS, accelerometer, and more to build custom tools. Software innovators have a simpler job than hardware innovators, said Peter Semmelhack, president and CEO of Bug Labs, making a presentation at the O’Reilly ETech Emerging Technology Conference in San Diego Wednesday. “The world of atoms is very different from the world of bits,” he said. Software innovators with an idea for a new application have a wealth of open source code to use, and the Internet handles distribution.

Janko Rottgers posted this article on an ETech session that peels back some of Google’s technology:

Yesterday, Google’s director of research Peter Norvig let visitors at the Emerging Technology conference in San Diego look into the technology that his firm uses in search and translation functions. As Norvig put it, a lot of the time Google does not rely on complex models and theories, but simply on large amounts of data.

Ryan Singel reports on a session where ETech program chair Brady Forrest gets his iPhone hacked:

Your credit card, the lock on your front door, your cell phone’s voicemail, your hotel television, and your web browser are all not as secure as you might like to think, as Pablos Holman, a hacker clad in all black, gleefully demonstrated on stage Wednesday like an evil Las Vegas magician.
Holman used caller ID spoofing to break into the AT&T voicemail of the organizer of the O’Reilly Emerging Technology conference being held this week in San Diego.

“Government-reform advocates plan in two weeks to launch a system for members of Congress to pledge to reduce the role of money in government, Lawrence Lessig said,” writes Mitch Wagner:

The Change Congress project will ask members of Congress to make three commitments: To reject contributions from lobbyists and political action committees (PACs), work to ban earmarks, and support public funding for elections. Officials who take the pledge will be allowed to wear a badge — like a Creative Commons badge — indicating which of the three reforms they support, Lessig said Wednesday night at a presentation at the O’Reilly ETech Emerging Technology Conference in San Diego.

Bug Labs Shows News Ways to Build Gadgets writes Mary A. C. Fallon:

Adobe Systems and Yahoo!’s Brickyard will offer developers new programming tools and Web services for creating content-drive communications and location services, and start-up company Bug Labs announces a new, easier way to build electronic gadgets for niche and custom uses.
Adobe senior engineering manager Danielle Deibler invited a packed meeting room of developers at the O’Reilly Etech conference here the opportunity to apply for the pre-release, private beta of Pacificia (pacificiabeta@adobe.com), Linux-based tools to create voice plug-ins for Flash widgets and applications. Pacificia is named for a beginner’s surfing point along California’s shore a few miles south of San Franciso.

Jascha Hoffman recently profiled ETech speaker Marc Powell:

“I think of cooking as hacking,” says Californian computer programmer Marc Powell, who led a ‘Kitchen Hack Lab’ demonstration at the O’Reilly Emerging Technology Conference in San Diego this week.

This afternoon I had the pleasure to listen to Kyle Machulis’ talk about teledildonics in his “Really, Really, Really Intimate Interfaces” talk. I’ve been joking about teledildonics to my friends for many moons, only to be met with incredulous looks of “Really?”. Little did I know that teledildonics is real and here today — it may not be as polished as a lot of the gadgets out there, but if you want to have a hand in pleasuring your long distance relationship partner, there is hope today!

My second day of ETech started off with Mike Walsh’s “Futuretainment: The Asian Media Revolution” presentation. Mike presented a view of how young people in Asia consume media and how their experiences differ vastly from what kids in America and western Europe experience.

Tom Coates took the stage at ETech in San Diego to announce the developer release of Fire Eagle. Fire Eagle is a system that brokers location information. It is designed to help users safely share information about their location with sites, services and people on the Internet.

Another article from Ryan Singel in Wired:

For the past two and half years, Google employees have bet on internal company projects — a tool known as a prediction market — providing plenty of data for the company to mine to figure out how information flows internally. The result is surprisingly ironic for the internet giant.

“Re-engineered human brains could be in our future, researchers say,” notes Jon Brodkin in this article:

Your mind: it’s just another piece of hardware. Make sure you download the latest patch and upgrade to the newest operating system. That, in so many words, is the fate of humankind described by David Pescovitz, co-editor of the BoingBoing.net blog and research director with the Institute for the Future.

Mitch Wagner posted this piece on one of my favorite ETech topics, life hacking:

Gina Trapani, the queen of Internet productivity, shared her tips for getting things done at ETech 2008, spilling the beans on best practices for maximizing results and efficiency. Trapani, editor of the blog Lifehacker and a book of the same name about to go into second edition, said that her whole career stems from a presentation at ETech 2004 — one she didn’t even attend.

Another Wired article on ETech from Ryan Singel, covering a session called The Cute Cat Theory of Digital Activism:

It’s not the governments who censor keywords that worries Ethan Zuckerman, whose job it is to help dissidents around the world. He fears that governments will simply decide to go after the Web 2.0 tools that activists are using to publish. Increasingly dissidents in the Middle East, China and places like Belarus are turning to server-based tools like Facebook, Twitter, and LiveJournal — the communication tools at hand — to get their message out, according to Zuckerman, who works for Global Voices - a group dedicated to spreading online conversation.

Nathan Halverson focused on Saul Griffith’s ETech presentation on Energy Literacy for this article in our hometown newspaper:

Saul Griffith drives a hybrid car and thought he was practicing a sustainable lifestyle at his home in San Francisco. But then he decided to calculate his carbon footprint, a measurement of greenhouse gases generated to support his lifestyle. He was distraught to discover how unsustainable his life was.

“My head hurts from a full day of geeky wonkery in San Diego, at O’Reilly Media’s overlapping conferences, Graphing Social Patterns West and its ETech or Emerging Technology Conference,” writes Kara Swisher. Her article includes a video she shot during the conferences featuring GSP program chair Dave McClure and O’Reilly Media CEO Tim O’Reilly.

“Conference in S.D. all about the future,” writes San Diego local reporter Jonathan Sidener in this ETech overview.”At the seventh annual ETech, there’s less worry about what sticks to the wall and more focus on having something cool to throw.”

This afternoon I had the pleasure to listen to Ethan Zuckermann’s presentation on the “Cute Cat Theory of Web Activism”, which opened my eyes to a side of Web 2.0 technologies I’d never seen before. Ethan started his presentation with this thesis:

Sufficiently usable read/write platforms will attract porn and activists.

If there is no porn, the tool does not work.

If there are no activists, it doesn’t work well.

Veronica Belmont roams the hallways at ETech to hear what attendees think is the most interesting emerging technology being discussed at the conference.

Cory Doctorow posts about a session he attended at ETech:

I just attended Elan Lee’s presentation “Designing Magnets: Connecting with Audiences in the Wired Age,” a talk on Alternate Reality Game design at the O’Reilly Emerging Technology conference in San Diego. Lee helped invent the genre of ARGs — working on AI, I Love Bees, Tombstone Poker, and the other defining moments in its history.

Writes Ryan Singel on Wired, “Saul Griffith, the founder of the legendary geek innovation workshop known as Squid Labs, has crunched the global warming numbers and they are grim.”

Fritz Nelson reports and shoots from ETech, including some footage from GSP’s AppNite and Tim O’Reilly’s keynote presentation:

O’Reilly’s ETech (Emerging Technology) Conference features a smaller conference called Graphing Social Patterns (GSP) which dives deeply into the social networking phenomenon. GSP runs straight through to AppNite, a demo contest for developers. AppNite featured both educational and silly games, but a few gems emerged, both on the purely personal side and the business side.

ETech and GSP West sponsor Yahoo! is participating in both conferences in a number of ways, as this post points out. They’ve already posted video of Ian Kennedy’s presentation announcing MyBlogLog’s APIs at GSP.

Its time for my favorite conference of the year! ETech kicked off this morning to some awesome keynotes and moved straight into some killer sessions. The first session I attended was Peter Norvig’s “How billions of examples lead to better models of images and text” presentation.

Before I tell you about what Peter shared with us, its important to mention that Peter works for Google and thus has access to massive amounts of data and images that most of us can’t even conceive. And having access to these vast data stores is the premise for his presentation.

Graeme Thickins has started posting about his conversations and impressions from GSP West and ETech.

Janko Rottgers posted a preview of ETech:

The seventh O’Reilly Emerging Technology Conference opened on Monday evening in San Diego, California. The motto for this year’s conference is “Question Perspective” and the conference, which runs until Thursday, aims to illuminate technical innovations and the new insights that arise from them. The programme includes speeches and presentations from productivity guru Timothy Ferriss, editor in chief of Wired magazine Chris Anderson and blogger Violet Blue.

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).

As concern for the world heats up the need for Clean tech/Green tech also rises.ETech this year will feature several Clean Tech talks. Here are some of them:

Energy Literacy - Saul Griffith (Makani Power/Squid Labs)
The world has known, calculable amounts of energy available. We’ll take a science look at all of the earth’s energy resources, both stored and renewable.

Building a Bright Green Future - Alex Steffen (Worldchanging)
If everyone lived like a typical prosperous American, we’d need ten planets to sustain our way of life. What might a sustainable future look like? How do we use ingenuity to design a future that’s both bright and green?

Green Nano and the Holy Grail - Stan Williams (Hewlett-Packard Labs)
Green Nano is a breakthrough and Stan Williams, Senior HP Fellow, will give a state of the world from his perspective on nanotechnology with a focus on HP’s four most significant streams of work in the Green Nano arena.

AMEE: The World’s Energy Meter - Gavin Starks (d::gen network )
If all the energy data in the world were accessible, what would you build? The Climate Change agenda measures the energy profile of everything. AMEE is an open aggregation platform aimed to dramatically accelerate change, because we need to.

Register for ETech with the following code: et08rdr for a 35% discount. ETech is March 3rd to the 6th in San Diego, CA.

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.

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.

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.

Registration is now open for ETech 2008, here is the official press release:

Keynote Speakers Include: Saul Griffith, Kathy Sierra, Lawrence Lessig, Tim O’Reilly, and Alex Steffen

This is a nice plug for ETech (past and present):

The social web of today pretty much had its gestation at Etech gatherings in the early 2000s.

We are very excited to let you know that AdaptiveBlue is going to be one of the sponsors and exhibitors of the next year’s ETech conference. If you are not familiar with this conference, it is really one of the best emerging technology conferences that draws a fantastic crowd of prominent tech people.

The audience of this blog is marketing folks who are deciding which conference is right for them. O’Reilly’s Web 2.0 Summit and ETech are both mentioned…

So which conference should we sponsor?
I went to ETech this year and regretted that we did not sign up for a sponsorship (silver or bronze).

Here is the official “call for participation” press release:

Press Release

The call for participation is getting a nice hit on Wired:

Nowadays, you could probably just *hang out on the ETech wiki* and still end up dripping big gooey video-streaming gouts of alphageek.

Leave it to Brady Forrest to have his finger on the pulse of what’s cool:

Seattle’s McLeod Residence currently has photomosaic mirrors in the bathrooms.

Blogger March had this to say about the value of exhibiting at ETech:

Why are these two men smiling? Because a partnership that increases the value

Joshua Schachter just finished peppering us with little nuggets of wisdom in his “Lessons Learned in Scaling and Building Social Systems” session. His talk was not focused on the technical aspects of scaling social systems, but on the human/social aspects. He focused on the little bits of knowledge that are easy to dismiss as unimportant details but in the end can have large consequences.

Computerworld’s Eric Lai reports on a new device designed to power the $100 laptop from the One Laptop per Child project. The new generator is powered by a pull string instead of the crank in the original design, which ended up having major drawbacks. The pull string device can generate enough power to run the laptop for about 40 minutes after being pulled by an adult for 10 minutes.

ETech attendees had the opportunity to view this innovative generator at the O’Reilly Radar Executive Briefing earlier this week.

To read Lai’s interview with Brian Warshawsky, vice-president of manufacturing for Potenco, the manufacturer of the device, visit Computerworld.com.

Ewan Spence points us to the latest ETech Podcasts:

Our second show from O’Reilly’s Emerging Technology Conference 2007 and the good and the bad of the future are here. The dangers of RFID, the progressive carbon offsetting of Java libraries, and the wonder of Heirarchial Brain functions. It’s all here in your daily round up of some of the more interesting talks and speakers from San Diego.

Marc Orchant interviews Mike Shaver, one of the founders of the Mozilla Organization, about the newly created Mozilla Manifesto–a document describing the company’s vision of the internet as a global resource and Mozilla’s role within it.

Listen to the podcast and read Marc’s report on ZDNet’s Talkback.

The good folks over at the EFF held their Pioneer Awards fundraiser ceremony in conjunction with ETech this year. Ars Technica’s Nate Anderson covered the event, which not only recognized the efforts of award winners Bruce Schneier, Yochai Benkler, and Cory Doctorow, but also featured a debate between the EFF’s Fred von Lohmann and HDNet Chairman Mark Cuban on YouTube and the
future of copyright:

Wearing jeans, sneakers, and a T-shirt that read “I’d rather be fighting the man,” Dallas Mavericks owner Mark Cuban last night defended his view that YouTube is eroding support for copyrights and that its actions should not qualify for “safe harbor” under the Digital Millenium Copyright Act (DMCA). Calling it the “cockroach in the kitchen,” Cuban argued forcefully that YouTube, like Napster before it, is training up an entire generation to think that “anything goes” in the realm of copyright, and that Google’s recent purchase of the company only gives their actions more legitimacy.

Hear Cory’s acceptance speech over on the USC Center on Public Diplomacy site.

Today I attended two more presentations that focused on Amazon’s EC2 and S3 services. I also spoke with the Amazon Web services team at length yesterday to find out more about their offering and how I might be able to use it. After asking many more questions and sleeping on their offerings I have a few more thoughts to share about how to use these promising services.

For those of you who read German, journalist Janko Rottgers has posted several ETech articles on Heise.de. You can find these here:

–ETech: Wikia als meinungsstarke Schwester der Wikipedia

–ETech: Mark Cuban im Copyright-Streitgespräch

–ETech: Grenzenlose Ressourcen mit Amazons Webservices

–ETech: Magie und Morddrohungen

He also wrote a fun piece in English about the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s EFF Awards, which took place Tuesday night in conjunction with ETech.

–EFF Awards: YouTube Celebrity Deathmatch

The Wired team has been covering a number of sessions and events here at ETech this week. Here are several of their most recent posts:

–ETech 2007: Don MacAskill Saved $922,000 Using Amazon for Storage

–ETech Community?

–Magic is in the eye of the beholder, not the creator, danah boyd says.

–Words of wisdom from the Electronic Frontier Foundation Pioneer Awards

–ETech Keynotes: Jeff Jonas on Enterprise Intelligence

Eric Lai reports on Seth Goldstein’s presentation about Atten.tv at ETech. This software takes voyeurism to new extremes, allowing others to view a webcast of the sites that a particular user is visiting.

“Not only will Attent.TV users eventually be able to sell their clickstreams to marketers, they will also be able to sell them to fans. For instance, groupies might pay to view the clickstream of their favorite singer or actor. Or investors might pay to view the clickstream of a superstar stock picker like CNBC’s James Cramer, sifting for clues to his next investment decision.”

To read the complete article, visit Computerworld.com.

Chad Dickerson’s keynote speech this morning talked about how he hacked Yahoo!. Hacked Yahoo! the company itself and not code, mind you. In his speech, “Big Company Hacks at Yahoo!, Chad talked about the Hack Day that Yahoo! hosted last year.

Phil Windley continues his excellent coverage of ETech, posting summaries of Wednesday’s keynote sessions that you won’t want to miss:

–The Core of Fun: Ralph Koster

–Danah Boyd’s Learning from Muggles

–Mike Kuniavsky’s The Coming Age of Magic: Ubiquitous Computing User Experiences

Read all about it on Technometria.

“I do think we need some code of conduct around what is acceptable behaviour, I would hope that it doesn’t come through any kind of [legal/government] regulation it would come through self-regulation,” Tim O’Reilly said in an interview with BBC Radio Five Live yesterday.

In town to cover ETech, BBC was able to participate in the conversation happening about how to prevent the kind of incident which happened to Kathy Sierra and which has made many others victims of blogging harrassment as well.

For the complete story, visit BBC News.

Ewan Spence from the Podcast Network pointed me to the his first podcast covering ETech 2007:

——-

The first ETech podcast is up. Our opening show sees Tim O’Reilly talk about the themes of the 2007 Conference, along with a great start up blogsearch company, a mathemagician (just listen…) and a discussion on the ramifications of the Kathy Sierra situation.

Amazon.com has a history of making good presentations at O’Reilly Conferences. Today’s “Amazon Web Services: Building a “Web-Scale Computing” Architecture to Meet the Variable Demands of Today’s Business” keynote by Werner Vogels from Amazon was another eye opening keynote speech.

I really enjoy going to O’Reilly conferences — you always meet new and interesting people, while at the same time catching up with cool people you met in the years prior. And this ETech promises to be no different — I’m excited to see that Jeff Hawkins from Numenta is giving a keynote and a session about his new venture today.

I have a lot of respect for Jeff Hawkins and his business partner Donna Dubinsky. Jeff is the creator of the original Palm Pilot in the 90’s and the Treo Smartphone when he founded Handspring. To hear him talk about Numenta excites me, since Jeff has proven that he can take his lofty ideas and turn them into usable and successful products in short order.

Enterprise reporter Chris Boulton offers a provocative look at BEA’s new enterprise products that will be demonstrated at ETech this week. Interviewing Jay Simons, senior director of product marketing at BEA, Boulton describes the implications the three new social computing products are designed to have in the corporate workplace. To find out more about AquaLogic Ensemble, AquaLogic Pages and AquaLogic Pathways, visit Internetnews.com.

“Open-source, object-oriented development, personalization, even hacking, are presaging and inspiring new manufacturing methods that will overhaul today’s plodding techniques born during the Industrial Revolution, according to panelists speaking Monday at the O’Reilly Emerging Technology Conference in San Diego,” writes Eric Lai of Computerworld.

Lai gives an excellent assessment of the amazing strides being made in manufacturing that were discussed in the O’Reilly Radar Executive Briefing yesterday. Find out more on Computerworld.com.

Brady Forrest caught Bill Tancer’s presentation at the O’Reilly Radar Executive Briefing yesterday, where he revealed his picks for the next four up and coming Web 2.0 sites. Bill works for Hitwise, a research firm that is able to measure the web activity of millions of internet users.

You can review Bill’s predictions on Brady’s O’Reilly Radar post: http://radar.oreilly.com/archives/2007/03/etech_hitwise_s.html

“Technology is so embedded in many people’s lives that it can be hard to step back and recognize the small shifts in the world brought about by adoption of new applications or gadgets,” writes Stefanie Olsen of CNET.

Stefanie’s report highlights some of the ideas and technologies that are being presented at ETech this week, along with a few of the unusual events for attendees to enjoy in the evenings. For her full report, visit:
CNET News.com

Dan Farber writes about BEA’s new enterprise products which are being announced at ETech today. AquaLogic Ensemble and AquaLogic Pages are Web 2.0 revisions of BEA’s enterprise software formerly known as Project Runner and Project Builder, respectively.

Read more on ZDNet’s Between the Lines or check out BEA’s complete announcement, “BEA Systems Showcases New Web 2.0 Products for Enterprise Users at the O’Reilly Emerging Technology Conference” : http://biz.yahoo.com/prnews/070327/cltu113.html?.v=18

“I never thought Microsoft would lose the email war, but now I’m starting to wonder….Zimbra is an exceptional piece of software,” reports Matt Asay of Infoworld. “And now that it’s fully usable offline as well as online…why not switch from Exchange to Zimbra?”

Zimbra is demonstrating the latest version of its internet-based email program this week at ETech. Read Asay’s review in his “Open Sources” column and find out why he’s ready to switch:
http://weblog.infoworld.com/openresource/archives/2007/03/having_your_zim.html

Brady posted this message on the O’Reilly Radar blog today:

Kathy Sierra, a Foo and speaker at many of our conferences, has had to cancel her appearance at ETech today. Unfortunately, it’s not the usual travel or calendar mishap that typically befalls speakers. Kathy has been threatened and is handling the situation from her home. I have some trepidation about giving the offenders in Kathy’s post any more attention — but I have no trepidation about supporting Kathy in this. She absolutely deserves to never be treated this way. She has posted her story on her blog.

Best of luck Kathy. You have our support. We all hope that you post again, that we’ll see you soon and that you’ll be able to make next year’s ETech.

Martin LaMonica reports that Zimbra has released an early version of Zimbra Deskrop, it’s Web-based email program that can run both online and offline.

Zimbra Desktop is an open-source program that uses Ajax and runs on any browser and operating system. It offers a viable, web-based alternative to traditional email programs such as Microsoft Outlook and Microsoft Exchange. Zimbra Desktop will be demoed this week at the O’Reilly Emerging Technology Conference.

Read more about Zimbra Desktop on CNET News:

Attensa will be previewing a new attention driven RSS reader - Attensa for Outlook 2.5 Beta 2 - that automatically pulls articles from RSS feeds that are most important to users to the forefront of their attention.

This is the first attention driven enterprise RSS reader that automatically and intelligently prioritizes articles, not just feeds, for a user. Attensa’s unique AttentionStream Learning Engine observes and learns from the user’s feed and article reading behaviors and works on the principle that past and present actions predict future behavior.

But wait. There’s more…

The word is out. Just Google “Outlook 2007 is slow” and you’ll see what I mean. The new version of Attensa for Outlook also significantly improves Microsoft Outlook 2007 speed by bypassing the Outlook 2007 RSS bottleneck.

Get the details on Attensa.com:

Though Richard MacManus is unfortunately unable to attend ETech this year, he held a popular photo caption contest, with the grand prize a ticket to ETech. Out of the many hilarious captions submitted, Kevin Jones’ reigned supreme. Congrats, Kevin, see you in San Diego!

Can’t wait until the conference to find out what Avi Bryant’s “Applied Heresies” session is all about? Read Conference Chair Brady Forrest’s preview of Avi’s theory and why cooking up your next creation without onions may give you a more delicious experience!

Give yourself the gift of geekiness this holiday season–a pass to our Emerging Technology Conference. The 2007 theme is “sufficiently advanced technology” and tech magic will abound, from the infrastructure supporting mass-market players, the promise of mass computing, and alternative energy sources to personalized medicine, movie magic, web heresies, talking paper,and the return of the Make Fest.

Sign up before the early discount deadline expires on February 5 to save some ducats. It might also save you some regret, too–we sold every seat last time and expect to do the same for 2007.

Our pals over at IT Conversations have just posted audio of author Peter Morville’s presentation, made at ETech earlier this year.

A reminder that the Call for Participation for ETech 2007 is still open, but only until October 9…

Program chair Rael Dornfest was inspired by Arthur C. Clarke’s wonderful quotation, “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic” as the theme for ETech 2007.

Are you making complex things simple or makes the impossible possible? Cleverly routing around a problem, subtly integrating technologies, or streamlining user interfaces? If the technology you’re working on–be it bionics, swarming, nanotechnology, energy, gaming, accessiblity–could be mistaken for magic, we want to hear from you.

Proposal deadline: October 9!

Over on his Between the Lines blog, Phil Windley mentions something he observed at last March’s ETech:

This discussion is related to the whole attention and intension discussion that happened at ETech last spring. How much control should you have over the data companies collect about you? After ETech, I concluded that most people want a lot of control over that data and that achieving that end will be much harder than we think-technically, legally, economically, and politically.

ETech 2007 teaser: we’re putting the final touches on the Call for Participation now and will release all the details next week.

ETech 2006’s theme of “attention economy” is still resonating, as this article By Teresa Williams notes:

…Linda Stone, a former Microsoft executive, warned us as far back as the late 1990s that we were becoming victims of what she called “continuous partial attention.” She reiterated this theme as recently as March at the Emerging Technology Conference, insisting that by “staying tuned” to so many technologies at once we aren’t giving our full attention to anything.

Another new one from ITC, this time Tim’s ETech keynote presentation.

Sam Williams writes that “measuring exactly who’s looking at what and for how long, some experts say, is the Web’s new gold.” He cites several examples of how new companies and projects, many featured at ETech, are addressing attention.

Tim O’Reilly has some thoughts on Sam’s article over on the O’Reilly Radar, too: “‘Attention’ is one of the important vectors for thinking about ‘collective intelligence,’ which is really the lynchpin of Web 2.0.”

Poking around on Flickr today, thought I’d check out how many photos had been tagged “etech06.” Guess! Nope, higher…3099 photos to be exact.

Just about every person and company mentioned in John Markoff’s excellent article–Salesforce.com, Tim Bray, Flickr, Bruce Sterling, Adobe, Amazon’s Mechanical Turk, and, as he notes, Microsoft’s Ray Ozzie–were participants at ETech this year. (Confidential to John: The name of the conference is Emerging Technology, not Technologies. PR Gal’s nightmare! But getting her conference mentioned in the NYT and IHT–dreamy.)

AjaxWorld picked up ETech sponsor Laszlo’s announcement on the planned extension of its advanced Ajax application development platform, OpenLaszlo, to support the delivery of applications in browsers with or without a Flash plug-in.

Mitch Ratcliffe mentions Danah Boyd’s ETech presentation in this post.

In case you missed it at ETech, Simon’s posted info on his presentation, complete with slides and notes.

Just received word from Doug Kaye over at IT Conversations: Rael Dornfest’s conference opener is up and ready for listening. (Four stars, way to go Rael!) More from the 2006 conference will be added to the ETech series soon–audio from ETechs past are there now.

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.

Daniel Steinberg devotes this week’s podcast to Bruce Sterling’s ETech presentation.

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:

• Controlling our data
• Mashing up the enterprise, wiring the web
• An argument against standards
• Microsoft builds bridges with Live Clipboard
• Making simple things simple
• Shaping the boundaries of self-projection

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.

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.

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:

• Der Stand der Blogosphäre
• Der kollektive Wunschkalender

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:

• ETech Highlights
• ETech Wrapup

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.

Robert Kaye writes:

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.

Robert Kaye writes:

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.

• What’s Hot in Emerging Tech, Part 1
• What’s Hot in Emerging Tech, Part 2

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.

MAKE Fest: Roomba Fighting

A great time was had by all last night at the MAKE Fest.

Tim Appnel writes:

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.

Robert Kaye writes:

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):

• ETech: Eine Frage der Aufmerksamkeit
• ETech: Universität New York entwickelt Multi-Touchscreen
• ETech: Das Clipboard fürs Web

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.

Robert Kaye writes:

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.

Tim Appnel writes:

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.

Nat Torkington writes:

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 the morning sessions today was from Jeff Han of New York University. Han wowed the crowd this morning with his session, “The Future of Interfaces Is Multi-Touch.” While OS X users like to think that we have the best computer interface out there, Han demoed a computer interface much more closely resembling something from science fiction.

More on Yahoo!’s APIs, from Juan Carlos Perez:

Yahoo Inc. will release new and enhanced application programming interfaces (APIs) for four of its online services in the coming months, the Sunnyvale, California, company plans to announce on Tuesday at the O’Reilly Emerging Technology Conference in San Diego. The move is part of Yahoo’s ongoing effort to open up its online services to Web developers, said Ash Patel, Yahoo’s chief product officer.

Marc Hedlund writes:

I gave a talk at ETech on Monday called “Entrepreneuring for Geeks.” I’ve given this general talk a few times now: how can the more technically minded among us move into making companies of our own? I really enjoy the talks because I really enjoy entrepreneurs; at least, I enjoy the ones who are really excited about making something fantastic through their efforts. “Do you want to sell sugar water for the rest of your life, or do you want to change the world?” Right.

Robert Kaye writes:

Are you wondering what the Attention buzzwords at ETech are all about? I certainly did and wasn’t able to make heads or tails of it until I had a chance to talk to someone immersed in the field. I think I understand the basic concepts and am now ready to take in more ideas on this topic. Read on for my initial take on the attention buzz.

Amazon wants to employ people to do menial Web tasks that computers can’t handle, posits Sam Williams.

Speaking to a room filled with Internet developers at the O’Reilly Emerging Technology Conference in San Diego this week, Luis Felipe Cabrera, Amazon’s vice president of software development, outlined a project to harness human intelligence for tasks that computers can’t handle well, such as recognizing objects in images.

ETech regular Peter Coffee writes:

Early in the opening keynotes came Microsoft’s Ray Ozzie, with a talk entitled “Simple Bridge-Building” that demonstrated early work on “Live Clipboard” — a facility for copying and pasting to and from the Web, not merely doing that with static stuff like text and images but doing it with underlying metadata. The clipboard, as Ozzie showed, automagically learns about new data types as it encounters them: things like linking an RSS feed into a personal mashup page become copy/paste convenient.

Another cockle-warmer (hm, that came out funny): having so many announcements here at ETech. The latest is from sponsor Laszlo Systems. The press release begins, “At the O’Reilly Emerging Technology Conference, Laszlo Systems today announced the planned extension of its advanced Ajax application development platform, OpenLaszlo, to support the delivery of applications in browsers with or without a Flash plug-in.”

“A multitouch system that reportedly ‘will change the way people interact with computers’ was demonstrated at the O’Reilly Emerging Technology conference,” writes Laurie Sullivan.

There’s many different ways to find something, and Peter Morville wants to help us improve our systems so this common task becomes easier for the user. Morville’s background in library science caused him to focus on findability issues in information architecture. Morville likes to think of the emerging discipline of information architecture as the balance of art and science.

Eric Auchard’s thoughts on Ray Ozzie’s morning presentation:

Microsoft Corp. (MSFT.O: Quote, Profile, Research) extended an olive branch to some of its harshest critics on Tuesday by proposing a way for Internet users to “cut and paste” live Web data across different sites, just as they can between computer programs. Ray Ozzie, Microsoft’s chief technical officer, told a conference of top Web developers here that his company wants to openly license a simple technology for sharing data between Web and computer programs — whether Microsoft-controlled or not.

But my favorite line from Eric’s article that warms the cockles of this PR Gal’s heart? His description of ETech as “an intellectual hothouse for Web developers.” Sigh.

Robert Kaye writes:

Day 2 of ETech started off with a powerful demonstration of future user interfaces. The Multi-Touch display screen demonstration showed how using touch screen displays with more than one finger opens up the the world of user interfaces. This exciting innovation will require us to reconsider our core assumptions of user interfaces.

Leslie Walker blogs about several presentations here at ETech. One of my favorite comments:

You’ve got to love a conference where the host invites a famous writer to deliver the opening speech, only to have the writer read the host’s own work aloud in mock ridicule.

Nat Torkington took copious notes during the morning plenaries:

• Ray Ozzie
• Jeff Han
• Felix Miller
• Seth Goldstein

Aw, look what the stork brought to ETech–Foldera!

Foldera(TM), Inc. (OTC Bulletin Board: FDRA), the only free, open and easy-to-use web-based Organizer and Messaging/Collaboration Service will be presented to a select group of technology professionals during the O’Reilly Emerging Technology Conference.

Coupla press releases with more details: Yahoo! Finance and PR Newswire.

eBay has announced the lucky and deserving laureates:

• Grand Prize Winner: Unwired Buyer developed by Eric Smith
• First Place Winner: ctxbay by Aleksandar Stankovic
• Honorable Mentions: Gumshoo by Craig Villamor, AuctionWatch GD by Ty Kroll, and Auction Monitor by Christopher Wong

Dylan Tweney posted notes on Tim O’Reilly’s talk from Monday night:

Tim has just taken the stage, sporting a beard. He proposes a title for his talk: “Watching the Alpha Geeks.” O’Reilly’s mission, he says, is to find interesting people and spread their innovations by passing along information through books, conferences, and online.

Phil Windley writes:

This morning SXIP CEO Dick Hardt is doing a sequel to his Identity 2.0 talk from OSCON, made famous by his style and humor. This morning’s talk is titled “Who’s the Dick on My Site?” The content was new, but the message was very much the same and the presentation is more tutorial in nature.

Nik Cubrilovic at TechCrunch reports on the SalesForce.com developer community that will be launched at ETech today:

I have had the privilege of getting an exclusive look at the new developer community and toolkits that Salesforce will be launching at the eTech conference tomorrow. Salesforce have been on the cutting edge of what we now call Web 2.0 in the business space for years…