The O'Reilly Emerging Technology Conference — coming this March 26-29 in San Diego — is open for talk-proposals, but closing soon! October 9th is the deadline for proposals — this year's theme is "Sufficiently advanced technology":
This year's Emerging Technology Conference is about magic and the sufficiently advanced technology behind it. Some magical effects are made by big technology, others by judicious selection and integration of existing subtle technologies.
* The iPod can almost be seen as step backward in terms of the technology behind its user-interface, yet is found simple and usable by everyone from your kids to your grandparents.
* TiVo took a commodity, slow-as-molasses Linux box, imbued it with a smidgeon of magic in the form of a television hook-up, recorder, and decent user-interface. Was the TiVo really that much more advanced than the VCR? After all, you could indeed time-shift with tape–it just wasn't quite so simple and you spent far more of your time fiddling with storage than watching your shows.
* Google scored web pages not only by the words in them, but also by the number of times those pages were linked to by other web pages. From this simple idea came the incredible magic that let the Web scale. Was this the sufficiently advanced technology, or was it the combination of GFS and map-reduce that let Google's servers scale as the Web grew?
* BitTorrent pumps files into your hard drive at the capacity of your network connection. The technology of resource locators and fragmented files were sufficiently advanced together to create this magic and make the movie and television industry see the Internet as opportunity and not purely threat.
(Disclosure: I am a proud member of the conference jury for the Emerging Technology conference)
