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Apr
1
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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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Feb
9
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Yahoo Pipes' servers have recovered so I just had a quick play and created my first pipe. The feeling I came away with was that the whole environment is a bit constrained - I found myself constantly wanting to do things that the environment wouldn't allow - like creating a new element and populating it with data from an existing feed. I'd really like to see an XSLT operator that would allow you do muck about with the feed a bit more.
The editor is something else - I think Yahoo have really set the bar for browser based UIs - the whole concept of connecting sources and input fields to operators just seems natural though the iterators did seem a little odd at first glance.
I'm guessing that the current palette of operators is just a start and that new operators will be introduced allowing for some pretty interesting applications - for now I think what we'll see is a couple of hundred iterations on the same "get a feed and run it through Flickr" (ie. like mine). Of course - I'd be happy to see human ingenuity prove me wrong.
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Feb
8
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I saw some rumours about Yahoo Pipes last week - it went live last night.
Though I haven't had time for more than a cursory look, I have a feeling that this could be pretty important. And I think it has relevance way beyond creating custom news feeds.
If you're familiar with Unix Pipes (eg. "who | sort") you'll grok Yahoo Pipes. Just replace processes with URLs, Feeds, Applications on the Web.
I did have a quick play with the browser-based tool (which is pretty sweet) but I didn't get very far - looks like Yahoo's servers are getting hit hard. They clearly need some of these
As an example (trivial) use-case, a while back - I wanted to create a unified feed of the build / news feeds from a bunch of java.net projects. Pipes would let you create this pipe in a couple of minutes. When Yahoo servers catch-up - I'll give it a try.
Read more about Pipes on Dave Johnson's blog, Tech Crunch and O'Reilly Radar.
Update - I just tried hitting the service again and get "Our Pipes are clogged! We've called the plumbers!" - too funny. Seriously guys - get some of these.
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Aug
31
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Image from Sharum's photostream
It seems that the consumer VOIP market is turning into a land-grab (or a subscriber grab). Three recent events really warm things up. The first was that Yahoo IM now includes VOIP, providing free IM to IM voice and voice mail and with their recent DialPad possibly a future premium (paid) service for calling land lines and cell phones. Basically that means that all the major Instant Messenger products (MSN, AIM and now Yahoo) support some form of voice service; though Yahoo's IM is different because it implements a standard protocol - SIP (Session Initiation Protocol) - this means adding additional future services (such as conference calling, video, etc.) should be easier in the future as should interoperability with existing phone network infrastructure.
The second event is that Google have also launched their Google talk beta - so Google are trying to get their share of the IM market *and* VOIP - quite how Google will attempt that (and how sucessful they'll be) remains to be seen. They are trying to enter two markets that already have some leadership - AIM in the IM market and Skype in the VOIP market. I'm not sure what will draw people to Google talk - maybe they'll leverage their GMail market share ?
The next piece of related news is that Microsoft have announced the acquisition of Teleo - this will give them the ability to take on Skype (from a feature perspective) - allowing PC -> land line or wireless handset VoIP - something that Google, and Yahoo don't offer today. To be fair though this was just a press release - Microsoft probably aren't releasing anything any time soon.
I should add, while writing this, I'm at home dialed into a 3 hour business review meeting using Skype.
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Jun
16
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The competition for IP based services got a little hotter, with Yahoo annoucing the acquisition of Dialpad on Tuesday. You can read what Dialpad are saying here and eweek has a pretty in-depth article here
While it is good to see a strong established brand like Yahoo! joining the fray I don't think this will change the market much - VOIP will continue to thrive in the niche PC-PC market - typically catering for the tech. savvy. I think the broad consumer introduction of VOIP will only happen when established phone companies roll out the infrastructure for all and make it completely transparent to the consumer. Geeks care about VOIP, SIP, IMS - consumers care about cheap, reliable phone calls.
Other IP Services related news this week (for Skype fans at least) is the beta release of VSkype. I haven't had a real play with it yet so can't compare it to Video4Skype but it looks like you can have multi-way video conferences and desktop sharing so that's possibly a hint at targetting the Enterprise market (consumers don't need to share desktops ?)
