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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.
