Last year's O'Reilly Emerging Technology conference was the best event of the year, hands down. Never have nerds of so many stripes had so many interesting conversations about so much wicked tech. This year's confernece is gonna be twice as good. If you can't afford to pay the door, why not submit a paper? The Call for Participation was just posted, and if you've got something interesting to present about, it's your ticket to free admission, and all the hot, geeky conversation you can eat. Don't freaking miss it!
Social Software
We are at the beginning of a Golden Age of social software, software designed to support the interactions of groups of people. After nearly a decade of exploring the Web's uses as a one-to-many medium, there is a growing awareness and excitement about both the problems posed in writing social software, and the potential benefits…Untethered
The history of networked computing from its very first days until the mid-1990s were all about balls and chains: computers and the wires that anchored them into useful aggregations of resources. As early as the 1970s, networks without wires have transformed the tethered user into a mobile swarm (having accelerating into a high-speed and widespread trend in the late 90s). Untethered users cluster like savannah beasts around a watering hole when they find high-speed wireless access; cellular telephone users disperse and gather dynamically as they transmit short notes billions of times a month.Biological Models of Computing
Despite the messiness inherent in natural systems, evolution has produced "machines of extreme perfection," to use Darwin's felicitous phrase. As our technological systems become more complex and planning for all cases becomes impossible, what can we learn from the biological world? In particular, what can we learn from the design of both organisms and systems that can adapt to a wide and unpredictable range of signals without collapsing?…Digital Rights
Digital Rights Management, copy-restriction, and rights-expression tools are potentially dangerous but often-innovative technologies. Some claim to be tools for safeguarding the public's privacy; others maintain that they add functionality to general-purpose hardware. Congress, the FCC, the European Parliament, and WIPO are all considering pro- and anti-DRM initiatives…Hardware
Moore's Law drives ease-of-hacks in hardware just as well as it does in software. Hardware hacks expand the machine in new and powerful ways, using cheap, off-the-shelf technology. At the tiniest end of the spectrum, miniaturization is showing the promise of a nano-world, where everything we take for granted about the physical universe is up for grabs.Are carbon nanotubules the next asbestos? Will MEMS graduate into "utility fog?" Your talk-proposals for the hardware track should tell us how we can change the world today with Radio Shack parts and simple schematics or how the world of tomorrow will be upended by clouds of tiny sub-micro devices.
Business Models
We feature a range of technologies that are growing just below the horizon of commercial viability, and place a spotlight on projects and people who are likely to become very important to the future of Internet computing. Equally important is a careful study of what the new business models will look like. Will they be a return to the traditional, times being as they are? Or is there still room to innovate? Who is putting a stake in the ground and attempting to build the new applications, network, and online culture?
