I just finished up a week at the
O'Reilly Emerging Technology conference in San Diego, CA. I came here hoping for a repeat of the rewards of ETech 2006 -- access to the pulse of the emerging tech sector, a six- to nine-month head start thinking about and planning for the technologies that will start to break into widespread public consciousness, an opportunity to talk to people who think deeply about innovation and the future, a refreshment of my own energy for the creation of the better. On these fronts, ETech 2007 delivered -- I'm going back to campus with a number of new technologies in hand, and I'm ready to engage and create and work to shape the emerging world.
Certainly I'm coming home with some practical, look-at-this-soon ideas --
Yahoo pipes as a framework for mashups, Amazon's EC2 hosting model startup projects, a
desktop version of Zimbra that can act as an IMAP client, and
Adobe's Apollo platform for offline html/flash applications. Further out on the edge of emerging technology, we listened to Peter Biddle and
Cory Doctorow debate the future role of Trusted Computing,
Melanie Rieback on the future of RFIDs,
Andy Kessler on the future of medicine, and perhaps the most viscerally provocative topic,
Quinn Norton on "body hacking" -- body enhancing technology
.
