So I recently got wind that O'Reilly has discounted entry-fees for the Emerging Technologies Conference coming to Santa Clara, CA from April 22-25, to $696 for the main sessions, and $800 if you want to attend the tutorials. I'm on the conference committee for Emerging Tech, but it's been quite a while since we finalized the speaker roster. $700 is a hell of a lot of money, and seeing that figure made me go back to the conference site and have another look.
Jesus Christ! We've got some amazing speakers coming this year! I mean, mind-bogglingly amazing. Eric Bonabeau, the king of ant-colony optimization, who achieves amazing best-effort solutions to the Travelling Salesmen problem with parallel ant-colony simulations (a solution that made Southwest Airlines profitable); Eric Blossom, the inventor of GNU Radio, the first Free Software software-defined-radio, which will make regulating radio receivers into a First Amendment violations; Eric Drexler, who coined the term "nanotechnology" and created the theoretical basis for the most disruptive technology of all; Intel Research at Berkeley's Eric Paulos, a telerobotics researcher now working on immersive games for P2P sensor networks… That's just the Erics!
There're equally fine speakers on the theory, law and practice of WiFi; on next-gen blogging tools (and next-gen blogging businesses, if that's how you're kinked); next-gen P2P networking; next-gen massively multiplayer online role-playing games (and particularily the innovative thinking that's going into understanding how MMORPGs build novel forms of social interation); hardware hacking wherein Moore's Law makes messing with the metal as easy as writing code, und zo weiter.
I speak at a lot of conferences — two or three a month, sometimes — and the tech-bubble-collapse has really flensed away the fat from these shows. Gone are the empty suits with empty promises, leaving only really meaty technology, policy and business questions that are being addressed by smart, passionate, novel thinkers whose accomplishments speak for themselves.
I speak at a lot of conferences — great conferences — but the Emerging Tech conference is the nigh-perfect event. The range of subjects and the quality of the speakers (and the attendees) makes this event into the kind of show that is the equivalent of reading a hundred of the best science fiction novels of the past ten years while getting an MBA from a really good, tech-oriented B-school. In four days.
$700 is a lot of money — you can get a used iBook for that much. But ETCON's worth it, worth every penny, if you ask me, because the things you can learn at this conference are things that you simply can't get anywhere else.
