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Mar
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Last week I was at O'Reilly ETech in San Diego; it was a good show, but not great - I'll get to that later.
Anyway, here are my day by day notes - I'm doing this mainly as an aid for my own memory but also for anyone else who cares. So, here's the first day's notes, also see Part 2 and Part 3.
Day one (Monday) was the O'Reilly Radar Executive Briefing. The focus of the morning was on-demand and user-driven manufacturing. Colin Bullhap, one of the designers of OLPC (One Laptop Per Child) explained the evolution of the hand charged power supply used in the OLPC - every week they get fully formed prototypes to play with. Think agile manufacturing.
Chumby is a web-enabled clock-radio that you can hack; the blueprints are freely downloadable from Chumby Industries - open source hardware and software. You can hack Chumby in a number of ways - with a compiler or with some fabric and a glue gun.
Threadless really pushes the custom manufacturing envelope; they make cool t-shirts as well. The idea is anyone can submit a t-shirt design (a GIF plus some words) - if yours is selected (by community vote) then they'll manufacture it and pay you. So thy only create what there is demand for and they only create enough to satisfy the demand - as a result - they've sold out of every single product they've produced - that's pretty lean. Who knows - maybe cars will be designed (OK, maybe options packages selected) like this one day.
Seth Goldstein talked about his new service attentv.com - basically people can watch what you are surfing. My immediate reaction was - Uh ? But when I think about it - there's huge demand for watching people go about their daily lives, reading about what they're doing - so hey, why not. Ultimately there could be real demand from marketers - ie. "Subscribing to Me" - imagine how much a marketer could learn by not only subscribing to your click-stream and your TV remote - but maybe tracking you physically - tracking where your eyes wander when your walking through the store. How much would you charge for people to subscribe to your "attention stream" ?
Jeff Jonas from IBM is an interesting character and a great presenter - but you have to keep up; he moves fast; skipping from subject to subject - "identity analytics", "enterprise amnesia", "anonymized data spaces". I made notes but will probably have to go do some additional research to make sense of them.
There we're a couple of talks on energy and data center economics - it's all about location - finding the balance between land availability, infrastructure, power costs and the source and consumers of the data.
There was an all too brief demo of FreeBase - a structured database (consolidation) that can be easily edited by anyone - a kind of semantic web meets crowd sourcing. The idea is that content can be tagged and categorized and additional structured data slurped in as a result of the categorization. This is an area I need to invest more time in and managed to tap the presenter (Robert Cook) for a demo account. Thanks, Robert - hopefully I'll have more to share when I get time to play.
There was a session on Wall Street and Web 2.0 but I completely zoned out - I've no recollection what it was about.
The closing keynote on Monday was pretty cool - I saw my first Mathemagician - a very irregular guy named Arthur Benjamin. He's America's foremost Math Whiz and pulls some pretty amazing Math stunts in real time; better yet he took time to explain how he does it so you can get some insight into how his brain works; suffice to say it doesn't work like mine.
After a break - I attended the EFF BOF - there was lively discussion and I learned a lot - so much I decided to lend my support to the cause and join.
