eTech05: Reinventing Radio

Random short notes … here’s a link to the reinventing radio presentation. 10 hours of listener’s choice radio broadcast by the BBC: Suggestions came in via SMS: 150K txt msgs, from over 100K users, resulting in 131 songs played over 10 hours. Tom Coates: his area of BBC R&D looks out ~18 months … the … Read more

eTech05: Endangered Gizmos

Wendy Seltzer and Jason Schultz from the EFF gave a great presentation at eTech this afternoon. Many electronic and software gizmos are being squashed by old dinosaur companies who haven’t figured out how yet to prosper in these modern times. Examples: MythTV: home-brew Tivo.HD-Myth threatened by the controversial FCC broadcast flag. No high-res output from … Read more

eTech05: von Neumann’s Universe

George Dyson presented a fascinating history regarding the early days of modern computing, starting in the 1930s when folks such as von Neumann and Godel moved to the United States. Lots of old images and anecdotes, but this was one of those “you had to be there” presentations. The story of the struggles Godel faced … Read more

eTech05: Microsoft, Yahoo and Google Labs

The second part of the first morning’s session at eTech includes lightning talks, 15 minutes each, by representatives of Microsoft, Yahoo and Google’s research labs. Microsoft Labs Unconventional, cross-disciplinary research. Example: tracking one’s entire life via images and sound. It’s close to being possible today, and the implications are stunning. Rick Rashid reviewed an active … Read more

eTech05: Bezos on Search

Bezos began his eTech talk by mentioning one of Danny Hillis’ phrases: global consciousness. Example: decaf coffee pots are all orange. I guess that bad anecdote had its own reward: as Jeff went to show us a video the controlling system decided it was time to perform a windows update. Much hilarity ensued. The talk … Read more

eTech05: Applied Minds

Danny Hillis, founder of Thinking Machines, spoke at eTech today, where he described his current company, Applied Minds, and the kinds of consulting and design work they perform. He showed some fascinating videos of some of the mobile robots they’ve worked on, but there wasn’t much real content beyond that. Still, the video of the … Read more

eTech05: Flickr

Flickr: if you haven’t looked at flickr, and you have any interest in viewing and sharing photos on the internet you must check it out! Stewart Butterfield, founder of Flickr, gave a fascinating talk at eTech demonstrating a number of very cool uses of flickr. I’ve played around with it a bit before, but after … Read more

eTech05: O’Reilly Keynote

The opening session at eTech 2005 was a fascinating overview of a wide variety of technologies and intriguing applications of those technologies. Based heavily on open-source concepts, the talk by Tim and Rael was all over the map in terms of the number of cool examples shown. Unfortunately, I couldn’t take detailed notes as I’m … Read more

eTech05: Building Contentcentric Apps

My next etech tutorial finds Ben Hammersley giving an overview of building contentcentric (his term) apps using RSS and Atom. Ben’s as enjoyable to listen to in person as he is to read online (better in some ways, given that whole real-life full fidelity thing). He begins with a brief history of the development of … Read more

eTech05: Web Services Mash-Up

My first tutorial at eTech is the Web Services mash-up. It’s an intro to the topic, with examples and an in-depth review of a variety of available web “APIs”. Among the sites that provide web APIs are Google, Amazon, Technorati and Flickr. Key point is that with the plethora of available web services, it’s an … Read more