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Apr
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This is Part 3 (of 3) of my notes from O'Reilly Emerging Technology Conference, 2007 in San Diego. (see Part 1 and Part 2)
The tag line for Etech 2007 was a quote from one of my all-time favourite authors -
“Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from Magic"
The quote is from Athur C. Clarke's Three Laws of Prediction. I'll add Sharples' fourth law - “Any sufficiently sucessful technology will become invisible quicker than an unattended toddler can paint the TV” - and that's the problem – technology often becomes invisible (ie. just part of people's every day lives) too quickly to be perceived as magic (at least for very long) – technology cycles are pretty short these days.
Wireless web-surfing used to be pretty magical – now it's common-place. Certainly in the western world – I think it's getting pretty hard to impress people with technology; especially the echo-boomer generation. Maybe Arthur C. Clarke needs to update his three laws ?
Segue back to Etech – basically, we're 2 days in and It's missing the Wow Factor – nothing (yet) has made me say Wow; and chatting with people over lunch – I don't think it's just me (and my super-high expectations) – I remember attending the Web 2.0 conference back in 2005 and nearly every session made me sit up and think and I've certainly been to my share of tech conferences and been suitably impressed.
Are conferences like this running out of steam or is it something more profound happening – maybe the fact that everyone has access to emerging technology projects – maybe high-tech conference have no exclusivity anymore.
Anway, Day three (Wednesday) started with Mike Kuniavesky (a user experience consultant and Co-founder of ThingM) – IMO he came closest to talking about “technology indistinguishable from magic”. He presented “enchanted objects” - basically embedding, inexpensive technology in familiar, everyday objects that don't look like computers (no screen, keyboard, etc.). Maybe my ubiquitous computing Widget idea would qualify ?
Chad Dickerson from Yahoo talked about “Big Company Hacks”; lucidly described through his experience of organizing Yahoo's Hack Day. The talk explained how to break the big company mold and do extraordinary things. Sun has a similar idea to the Hack Yahoo! Program - it's an unwritten rule that everyone is allowed to “Seek forgiveness vs. asking for permission”. Fundamentally – this is all about tapping into the whole company rather than only relying on small few to define the next big thing.
There was a pretty interesting session on “Super Ninja Privacy Techniques” by Marc Hedlund who runs a small on line personal finance service. Some of the techniques we're pretty interesting. No big message here – just a lot of good tips for anyone developing on-line services. Hopefully the slides will be posted soon.
I sat through some presentations by IBM & Microsoft Research Labs. Microsoft is developing a new mobile browser (DeepFish) which seems to work by rendering web pages as images then allowing you to do successive zooming until you're down to HTML that's clickable. This requires a special poxy to perform the rendering and the zooming.
Also from Microsoft was a very neat Childrens programming environnment (called Boku) – it's esentially logo on (3D) steroids. Soon any 5-year old with a high-end gaming rig will be able to create simple programs 
IBM showed SpinTronics – amazing stuff – but I'm just a software guy and wasn't able to appreciate it. IBM also demoed Koala – an enterprise web scripting / workflow system that allows you to program your intranet (I guess the web as well). While I was watching, I was thinking about the very real problem of on (and off) boarding employees. From the user provisioning aspect, Sun has an industry leading solution and you could imaging building all sorts of additional capabilities into it via something like Koala. For instance – you might want to order new business cards for new employees, create them a semi-populated wiki page, sign them up for various mai lists, etc.
After the show there was a mini Make Fest – some cool stuff.
Earlier in the day I managed to spend some to in the Exhibit hall. Sun labs were there with a host of technologies including SPOT powered Robots and there was a Thumper Chasis. The pod was pretty crowded which is always good to see. I chatted with Amit Sharma from RSS Bus – it's a technology I've been tracking for while and managed to get a quick demo. They're leveraging RSS's ubiquity as a form of integration technology – they have “connectors” for a whole range of enterprise data stores and can translate on the fly for consumption anywhere. It's like an enterprise FeeBurner. What wasn't clear is how workflows are created – maybe the concept doesn't exist – I'll get my hands on demo and find out more.
Day four - I missed due to a couple of conference calls and an early flight back home.
All in all a decent few days and plenty of technology leads to follow-up on.
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Apr
1
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This is Part 2 (of 3) of my notes from O'Reilly Emerging Technology Conference, 2007 in San Diego. (see Part 1)
Day two (Tuesday) was supposed to start with Kathy Sierra - but she was forced to cancel due to her online death-threat incident. That was a shame in many ways and means I still haven't had the pleasure of listening to Kathy Sierra talk. Instead of Kathy, Jeff Jonas was back talking about data and how to get the most out of it. A bit of a repeat but he did go into a little more detail.
Next up was Werner Vogels who talked about Amazon Web Services. This was really interesting - Amazon seem to be really leading the way in delivering a web platform vision. It's taken them a decade and $2 billion - if you were thinking of trying this at home. Their goals are to turn huge, fixed costs into lower variable costs, provide unlimited scalability all with datacenter reliability.
Rightscaling is the term Werner used to describe the cost-efective scaling - I heard an example of a startup laying down just $85 for their first 3 months of IT operations; yet could easily dip into the (virtually unlimited) pool to scale up as demand required.
Werner really only talked about the infrastructure layers, which (if you're not familiar with AWS) consists of EC2 (Elastic Computing Cloud), Messaging (Simple Queuing Service) and Storage (S3 - Simple Storage Service) - they use metered pricing for everything - eg. $0.15/Gb/Month for storage or $0.10/Instance/Hour for EC2).
The way they do provisioning for EC2 was pretty neat - you basically assign an AMI (Amazon Machine Image) to the physical units you want to provision; the AMI defines the OS and software you want installed (ie. you might choose Fedora, Apache and PHP or Fedora and Ruby on Rails). The AMIs are stored on S3 and you can either define your own or use pre-configured images.
The deployments can be tiered (for security) in the same way you might in your own DC - ie. only the Web or Proxy tier would be exposed to the public internet; whereas the database tier would be completely inaccessible.
I had to skip the rest of the morning due to a couple of meetings but Phil Windley has some great coverage of Jane McGonigal's talk on Creating Alternate Realities.
In the afternoon there was a pretty good demo from Apple showing how easy it is manipulate pictures and video. All you need is a moderately powered super-computer - ie. like the one you're reading this text on.
Jeff Hawkins (inventor of the Palm Pilot and Treo) talked about Hierarchical Temporal Memory - the idea of HTM is to replicate some of the human brains congnitive functions - they learn from exposure to sensory data, discover cause and make predictions based on the sensory data and inferences. Some of this seemed a bit far-fetched - but hey, this is Jeff Hawkins (the inventor of the Palm Pilot and Treo).
Note to self - I must give "On Intelligence" another try - I wasn't sufficiently motivated to get past the first hour.
Much later in the day I attended a couple of (related) BoFs. The first was lead by Joe Gregorio covering APP (Atom Publishing Protocol) - I was interested in knowing where APP was in terms of adoption - it seems there's a bit of a chicken and egg situation - there won't be many clients supporting APP until there are some services and the services won't support APP without clients. Apparently APP (even before the RFC is final). There was some interesting side-chat about APP / Atom / RSS over Jabber / XMPI - apparently IM services aren't censored any where near as much as HTTP and VOIP - so it may well be the only truly universal transport.
Matt Mullenweg of WordPress claimed that WordPress would be supporting APP real soon - so hopefuly the cycle will be broken and the Web will get it's universal publish button. Anyone know when Roller will support APP ?
Next (in the same room) was the Microformats BoF run by Kevin Marks; who, significantly, works at Google. Most of the people in the room (me included) were merely there to learn a bit more but there was one guy (sorry I'm lousy with names) who was using rel-tag extensively. There was some discussion about how well microformats fit with APP; how microformats could deliver some of the power that Metaweb promises. This is another area I need to investigate a little more.
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Mar
30
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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.
