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.