Geodog

Impressions and links from opening day ETech 2006 Keynotes

Rael Dornfest gave his welcome to ETech speech. Lots of little bon mots and name dropping, but not really a talk. ETech is a radar conference, for amplifying weak signals. To put together small pieces yet to be loosely joined. Rael said that the conference was bigger than before, and sold out. He promised some big announcements. Funny how ETech has become a place to launch products / companies, after the success of Flickr and Delicious at being acquired after being launched at Etech. Themes that Rael says we will cover: the data web, the attention economy, wisdom of crowds as applied to software. Some nice quotes about the problems we are creating with our data streams:

We are downloading files we will never have a chance to look at.

We are accumulating stuff with Tivo that we will never see.

I feel thin, like butter spread over too much bread
-- Bilbo Baggins.

The first and third are certainly true of me, and do seem like a problem worth working on. We have solutions for aggregation, now we need Attenuation, he says -- less stuff, not more. He sees great businesses coming down the road. The promise of Ajax is atomic level access to your data (more important than flashy design). Groups are not normalized -- we still can't make ourselves visible to some people and not visible to others on IM. Rael also plugged his wife's site, Parent hacks, which he described as lifehacking for those who no longer have lives.

Next Tim O'Reilly got up and gave his O'Reilly Radar speech, which I have heard a number of times. so I won't try to summarize it here (but Christine Herron has a nice summary). What was new? First of all, I hadn't seen the bearded mustached Tim O'Reilly. I'm not sure I would have recognized him. Looks good. Second, he had a new slide from Craig Newmark, showing how Craigslist is the number 7 site on the internet, but has only 18 employees (as compared to the other megacorps). The difference? Craigslist's users really do almost all the work of creating the value (and policing the system). Third, he talked a great deal about computing becoming cybernetic, a blending of people and computers "Intelligence augmentation, not artificial intelligence. We are making computers intelligent because we are part of them." He talked up a site called boxxet. Lastly, he talked about hardware hacking. He showed a great movie of a voice controlled blender, that looked like every kids dream. A brilliant work. He proudly discussed MAKE, "Martha Stewart for geeks," as he called it, which has now become an O'Reilly flagship product. He also pointed at www.instructables.com, Last.fm and talked about the need for better version control for hardware design. He also promoted their upcoming Maker Faire, which sounded great -- local and affordable. Finally, Tim closed by turning over the stage to folks from Zimbra, who did a demo of their product. While I like Zimbra a lot, and saw a great demo of it last week at Niall Kennedy's SF Tech session, I thought it was kind of a strange thing to do -- and the demo wasn't as smooth as the one I saw.

Last up was Bruce Sterling, who started off brilliantly with a speech about what kind of world it will be when our things have become spimes, manufactured objects whose information is so dense that they become virtual objects first, actual objects second.
Why we would do such a thing? So we can engage with objects better, he said. The speech was a fascinating riff until about halfway through, when I got lost in Sterling's meta-meta discussion, and distracted by the thinly veiled contempt he affects to have for his audience. Scot Rosenberg has a much more detailed (and friendly) writeup of Sterling's speech.