It's almost time... this is the final stretch before our site launch, and Dave and I quickly determined the best way for us to support the engineering team in this effort was to get out of the office.*
So last night we headed down to San Diego, for the O'Reilly Emerging Technology (ETech) Conference. There are plenty of bloggers out there covering the conference in detail, so here are a few of the highlights and more memorable presentations from today (all photos courtesy of oreilly):
The theme of the conference is Remix, and Tim O'Reilly and Rael Dornfest kicked off today by presenting examples of how innovative software and technology allows itself to be broken-down into basic components, and remixed into a completely new offering or service.
I have been a fan of flickr for some time now, so I was especially interested on hearing Stewart Butterfield present flickr's API strategy. Exposing an API is definitely part of our product plan, so it was great to hear a balanced presentation from someone who has already been there. While aware of the benefits, it was revealing to hear about issues such as bugs in other people’s code affecting your server load.
Danny Hillis convinced me that he had the coolest job in the crowd. He runs the "maketank" Applied Minds, where he gets to build geek toys, such as robots that move like snakes and an interactive map that made the host of a mapmaker's convention practically cry with joy. Seriously. More over at Dave's blog, but I have to agree with him: wow.
Jeff Bezos introduced a new update to A9: syndicated search. They have developed an open platform that uses RSS to deliver search results to A9 users from other content providers. This latest move by A9 seems to acknowledge the growing interest in vertical search, while trying to continue to provide a single destination for users.
Von Neumann lives. George Dyson proved to have the most fascinating and engaging presentation of the day... and it wasn’t about new technology. George's presentation, a slide-show of photographs and documents, was a rapid-fire history lesson on John von Neumann, Kurt Godel and the geeks behind the development of the IAS. But it was also a hilarious look at our geek ancestors. Highlight: a letter from the Princeton administration condemning the geeks for consuming too much tea, especially sugar.
* they tend to throw things at us otherwise.
