ETECH06: Emerged Technologies

Posted on by lhl

Heading into the last day of ETECH06, I’ve been a bit underwhelmed compared to previous years. There seems to be a focus on lots of decidedly not-emerging topics. Product pitches have always been part of ETECH, but rarely have they been so boring and generic (here’s another AJAX widget!). Even dependable sessions like Sifry’s Data Dump has been corrupted (half product pitches, none of the other stats presented actually said anything insightful about the larger net). Whither the deep insights, the new research data, or the plain gee whiz factor?

Maybe not completely fair, since the hallways have still been fun, and there have been some highlights:

  • Getting to the airport
  • Simon eating live shrimp
  • Bruce Sterling on the Internet of Things (spimes and blogjects) – his point on ordinating is well taken, the physical as instantiation and interwoven with data is definitely very etech
  • Ray Ozzie presenting Live clipboard – an actual useful feature, given as a “gift to the Internet” – desktop clipboard integration is one of the webapp holy grails – it’s compatible with Firefox and Safari — if this gets built into IE7 and FF2, this will change the face of the web
  • Multi-touch display – sure, the video’s been floating around for months, but omg, want. I wish it was set up for people to play with. Physical interfaces like this (or Matt Webb’s awesome accelerometer presentation tool hack) are the future.
  • SXIP 2.0 – removing federated trusts between identity providers and requestors, abstracting and allowing pluggable certifying authorities, and moving privacy management, just in time and into the client – SXIP 2.0 looks like an open identity standard I can wholeheartedly get behind. toreview: sxip.org
  • IBM reveals worlds ugliest AJAX app (an enterprise mashup RAD tool which actually might have some potential. One of the less embarassing shills actually compared to the race to the bottom this morning)
  • Amy Jo Kim’s overview of applying game mechanics to communities had some insights and new examples even for someone who’s a practitioner in the field who keeps up on the area (that’s how you do it, go Amy Jo!)
  • playsh is mad science. I loved it, and it really set my mind off into some wild tangents that I’m hoping to follow up on… in my copious spare time
  • Clay Shirky reminding us why we got into this in the first place
  • George Dyson’s continued-from-last-year presentation on the personal history of computation

Lows so far:

  • Standard O’Reilly completely-crap wifi (sure you can’t help the number of retarded Windows laptops with computer-to-computer networks, but just once, I like to get some traffic shaping so I can have a decent SSH connection – I suspect 1 or 2Kbps of low latency bandwidth would be fine)
  • Completely uninteresting product pitches. Can one really get nostalgic for the days of swarming autonomous killbots?
  • Hyping of 3yo web technology w/ aforementioned crap products. Also, continued discussion of emerged tech w/o further insight
  • Not getting to the f’n point. Inverted pyramid, people
  • Not having a f’n point.

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