Celso Martinho - eTech2007

Bye bye San Diego & Presentations

nospam@example.com (Celso) — Wed, 04 Apr 2007 17:01:43 +0100

This is our last night in San Diego. Had a nice dinner at Buca Di Beppo with Nuno and Bee which came all the way from Orange County just for us (thanks). We still have a few notes left from eTech (and a wrap up) to post but no time now. Meanwhile here's some presentations I found online already:

Update: more presentations online:

From Pixels to Plastic
The Core of Fun (html)
CorpseTwitter's presentation from Half-Baked session

Update2: presentations still popping-up:

Update3: and one more:

Community Marketing

Update4

How to Innovate on Time

See you in Lisbon.

eTech 2007: Speaker's Blogs

nospam@example.com (Celso) — Sun, 01 Apr 2007 01:54:07 +0100

Attending eTech 2007 was enlightening but keeping the speakers's track can be just as interesting. During the conference I grabbed most of the speakers Weblogs for reference, and now I think I've completed the missing ones. So here's the list for you and the OPML file at the end. Enjoy:

Charles Amstrong, blog2 (Collective Intelligence)
Michael Bayne (Modestly Multiplayer Online Game Building)
Scott Berkun (How to Innovate on Time)
Paul Kedrosky (Investing in Data Center Construction)
Danah Boyd (Incantations for Muggles: The Role of Ubiquitous)
Avi Bryant (Applied Web Heresies)
Michael Buffington (Your Web App as a Text Adventure)
Jim Bumgardner (Advanced Flash: Exploiting Flash
Mike Chambers (Apollo: Engaging with Web 2.0 Outside the Browser)
Dick Costolo (1/2 Baked)
Doug Cutting (Introduction to Hadoop)
Jacob DeHart (From Manufacturing to The Attention Economy)
Chad Dickerson (Big Company Hacks at Yahoo!)
Cory Doctorow (The Magic Kingdom: Maximal Autonomy or Remote Control Creche?)
Rael Dornfest (Announcements)
James A. Duncan (JavaScript: It's Happening All Over Again! Zimki)
Esther Dyson (Metaweb: The Semantic Web Meets Web 2.0)
Lee Felsenstein (If Paper Could Talk, What Would It Say?)
Seth Goldstein (From Manufacturing to The Attention Economy)
Adam Greenfield (Toward a New Animism: Old Interaction Paradigms for an Everyware World)
Brad Greenlee (Super Ninja Privacy Techniques for Web App Developers)
John Hagel (The On-Demand Manufacturing Revolution)
Marc Hedlund blog2 (Entrepreneuring for Geeks)
Kevin Henrikson (Ajax Unplugged: Architecture and Tips for Taking Your Applications Offline)
Forrest Higgs (Building a 21st Century Industrial Base Via Open Source Technology)
David Hornik (1/2 Baked)
Andrew Huang (The On-Demand Manufacturing Revolution and Chumby)
Tara Hunt (Community Marketing: Your Customers in Charge)
Jeff Jonas (Advanced Analytics in the Anonymized Data Space)
Jeffrey Kalmikoff (From Manufacturing to The Attention Economy)
Bill Katz (Patient-Specific Cardiovascular Modeling)
Andy Kessler (Silicon is Invading Medicine)
Amy Jo Kim (Putting the Fun in Functional: Applying Game Mechanics to Social Software)
Raph Koster (The Core of Fun)
Mike Kuniavsky (The Coming Age of Magic)
Shuki Lehavi (Web Scale Computing)
Don MacAskill (Scalability: Set Amazon's Servers on Fire, Not Yours)
Matt MacLaurin (Cool Stuff from Microsoft Research & Live Labs)
Dave McClure (1/2 Baked)
Jane McGonigal (Creating Alternate Realities)
Rich Miller (Investing in Data Center Construction)
Tikva Morowati (Sonic Body Pong)
Duane Nickull (Web 20-20: Architectural Patterns and Models for the New Internet)
Quinn Norton (Body Hacking)
Tim O'Reilly (The O'Reilly Radar)
Chris Pendleton (Microsoft Virtual Earth)
Allison Randal (Energy Innovation)
Seth Raphael (Sufficiently Advanced Magic)
Pasha Sadri (Pipes: A Tool for Remixing the Web)
Mike Shaver (A Manifesto for Web Innovation?)
Kathy Sierra (Creating Addictive User Experiences)
Richard Sprague (Effective Integration of Speech for Interacting with Devices)
Mike Stenhouse (Collective Intelligence, Indeterminacy, and the Illusion of Control)
Bill Tancer (Backing Up Instinct with the Numbers)
Jonathan Trevor (Pipes: A Tool for Remixing the Web)
Werner Vogels (Amazon Web Services: Building a "Web-Scale Computing" Architecture to Meet the Variable Demands of Today's Business)
Matt Webb (From Pixels to Plastic)

OPML file with all subscriptions.

eTech 2007: More media: Videos

nospam@example.com (Celso) — Thu, 29 Mar 2007 20:27:30 +0100

Here's some videos that we took from the conference sessions and keynotes. Sorry about the Portuguese wrap.

eTech 2007: Session: Microsoft Virtual Earth

nospam@example.com (Celso) — Thu, 29 Mar 2007 20:20:59 +0100

John Curlander, general manager of Microsoft Boulder talks about The Making of Virtual Earth Microsoft Vision (envisioned by Bill Gates)

Create realistic, global 3D framework
Foundation for the 3D web
Core of entertainment, commerce, information

In the future all website will move to a 3D experience he says. Virtual Earth 3D was born. Microsoft approaches Vexcel in late summer 2005 and wants to do 3000 cities in 5 years (and I saw Portugal in one of the slides). Wide area coverage with automated processing was the only solution. Shows a making-of video of some sort. Microsoft and Vexcel built a special 220 Megapixel camera for the process, the Ultracam. Shows the "Syntopic" technique they're using to do aerial photos of the land: Position of the four camera cones at identical positions (Syntopic exposure) Requirements for the solution were: High information

Capable of >400MB/sec
Equivalent of 10 ikonos of Quickbird satellites
Focus on VE AOIs

Key to automation in sensor and collection methodology

Multi-spectral imaging
Hight overlap images, many looks at target
Hight dynamic range, 12+ bits

Typically on a city they get 90% forward overlap with this camera. Shows the color film and the dynamic range they get with a lot of detail: 5-6 bits. Microsoft only collects and processes data, they hire commissioned flyers to do the shooting. Virtual Earth adds live services to the imagery data like live traffic, etc. Workflow:

Raw image ingest
Initial classification
Image orientation
Dense matching
Orthorectification
Refined classification
Bare earth topography
Building extraction and texturing

Shows up detailed explanations on each of these bullet points and a live-demo on some of the cities. Challenges with automation:

World is 3D (Multiple z values for earch x,y)
Trees: Tree detection
Too manu facets

Look to the future

Shift emphasis to streetside processing: true 3D
Tree rendering
Improved community tools
Interiors

Labs: Photosynt, Tree detection and Image-on close range photogrammetry were mentioned. Wraps it up with a video of New York with the obligatory Frank Sinatra soundtrack. Lots of questions after, many concerning privacy issues due to the increasing detail in photos we're having.

eTech 2007: Keynote: Google Solar Project

nospam@example.com (Celso) — Thu, 29 Mar 2007 18:37:15 +0100

Anthony Ravitz talks about the Google Solar project. Starts by showing off Google's workplace with their fancy offices, free food, free transportation (and canoeing) and the fact that everything is organic and nature friendly. Moves on to "Greeing Google's Campus" and all the work, modifications and recycling they did on the campus to make it greener. Thinking about off-site power was the natural move. Shows some toys including: A SpaceShipOne mockup and a fullsize replica of T-Rex in the garden. Why Solar ?

Technology & innovation
Scale
Our Brand
Our Culture

Due to tax rebates and incentives, it was a very easy business decision, it will pay off in 7,5 years and provide free clean energy for decades to come. Project Initiation

Secured rebates from PG&E
Issued a request for proposal
Competitive selection process for design build contracto
Hired solar integration El Solutions
Spent a lot of time on roofs
Design
Perming

Facts:

Largest commercial is US
1.6 MW
9.212 Sharp photovoltaic modules
Covering Googlespace and surrounding building
Solar carspots in two parking lors
30% peak electricity demand
Enough to power about 1000 california homes

Shows a video and some cool photos, and project diagrams including the parking lot solution while explaining several details on the implementation and the whole building process. Lessons learned:

Real solution available now
Makes financial sense
Installation relatively straightforward
Working over Google engineers is challenging
Boost employee morale
Taking action drives market

Looking ahead

More companies will go solar
Larger installations
Financing models make solar more accessible
Will congress renew federal investment tax credit beyond 2007 ?
More states providing financial incentives
Increased manufacturing production - lower costs ?
Newly emerging low cost technologies

Expected lifetime of the panels is 20-25 years. Looses only 1% efficiency per year. Did not say how much the project costed. The company is preparing public information and footage. It will be revealed real soon.

eTech 2007: Keynote: Apollo

nospam@example.com (Celso) — Thu, 29 Mar 2007 18:29:44 +0100

Ed Rowe keynotes about Apollo : Bringing Rich Internet Applications to the Desktop Starts by showing what we see as a desktop application a web experience and moves on to an Apollo application for eBay bidding. Takes a few photos from the audience, places a bid online. Apollo provides:

Local disk access
Desktop integration: drag'an'drop, clip board, file extenstions, etc.
Background processing
System notifications
Network status
Complete control over application chrome

Why build on Apollo ?

Complementes browser -based applications
More engaging application
Sustained customer relationships
Branded desktop experience
Keep working offline
Works in the background
Extends reach os web developers

Apollo sits between the operating system and de the application and provides APIs to communicate with both ends. You can use HTML, Ajax, Javascript, Flash, Flex, PDF and remixed versions of all of these. It uses Webkit as the HTML rendering engine both for OSX, Win32 and Linux. Apollo Developer Workflow

Write Code
Test Debug
Package
Deploy

Hands-on demo on build an Apollo application. Shows a small HTML Ajax application running in the browser which interacts with backpack. Does a little editing on the metadata XML file for it's new app and runs it inside Apollo. Shows off offline capabilities and pulls out the network cable. Changes some data on the app, connects the cable, the app detects the network back and submits the queued data. Pretty cool. Moves on and shows how to build an application using Flex, now making use of some actionscript to interact with the OS and with Apollo's APIs, using system VCards and Google maps. Demos a few other samples. I must say I understated Apollo when it first appeared a week or so ago, so in a attempt to redeem myself I'm promising another post on this. I admit it's looking very exciting, I think Adobe may have hit the spot.

eTech 2007: Keynote: From pixels to plastic

nospam@example.com (Celso) — Thu, 29 Mar 2007 18:07:07 +0100

Matt Webb, co-author of Mind Hacks and Availbot talks about From Pixels to Plastic The presentation is all around the so called Generation C. Shows the japanese refolding t-shirts video. Products are people too. Focus on happiness and engagement when designing products. Experience counts! Experiences while designing products:

Experimental observation
Autonomous things (predictable automation)
Lost luggage

Experience hooks:

Design
Manufacture
Discovery
Being wished-for
Selection
Purchase
Being shown-off
Discussion/review
Re-sale

Talks about the Chumby as an exciting good example of all of this.

Generation C are networked, creative and capable of building the ir own product.
We should treat experience as a d design surface, and as product inspiration.
There are manu experimental approaches.

Socialize the Web! This was a great presentation, one of the best, I hope I get a hand of the slides online.

eTech 2007: Session: Hacking Yahoo

nospam@example.com (Celso) — Thu, 29 Mar 2007 18:04:42 +0100

Chad Dickerson on Big Company Hacks at Yahoo!. This was a presentation on Yahoo's Hack Day event. Starts by showing off Yahoo's developer network and defining what is a hacker. Key principles of the HackDay @yahoo:

Build something in 24 hours
Present it to everyone at the end of the day
No prior review of projects
Thats it

Result: Hundreds os prototypes build. Shows internal E-Mail from Rob McCool on Yahoo's hack day and how excited the whole company was about the event. Why we wanted to do Open Hack Day: we wanted to do something big. Shows Hackday cycle of innovation and developers helping developers, an highly collaborative environment. Invited Beck, the hacker musician, to do a concert on the event. Explains the invitation process, how open it was, people were coming from all over the world, including people from the competition, which was totally OK. Open "request for invite". Asked only ONE question before acceptance: Are you going to build something ? Something special happened at Yahoo many press writers said. Hackday website

eTech 2007: Ajax Unplugged

nospam@example.com (Celso) — Thu, 29 Mar 2007 06:08:17 +0100

Kevin Henrikson, Director of Engineering from Zimbra talks about Ajax Unplugged: Architecture and Tips for Taking Your Applications Offline. Why is offline important?

Lack always-on internet access
Travel
ISP service interruptions
Remote; un-connected land and water.
More and more data lives in "the cloud"
You users are asking for it.

Why ajax ?

Data closer to the user (Akamai principle)
Performance (client and server)
Clear simple programming model
Same UI both online/offline

What solutins are out there today ?

Roll your own:

salesforce.com
tiddlywiki - big emphasis
zimbra desktop

Then mentions the advantages and disadvantages from each solution, one at a time (see photos). After this, Kevin does a Zimbra Desktop demo. Zimbra Offline has some key features that were mentioned:

Cross-platform: mac, linux and win
Cross-browser: ff, ie, safari
Identical AJAX interface to online version
Micro server for sync, persistence and search
Support for large dataserts multi-gb
License: MPL/ZPL Opensource
Availability: Zimbra Desktop Alpha

Challenges for the developer:

Selecting what to take offline
Sync is hard
End-user Desktop support
Upgrades and patches

I asked him if they see Zimbra running inside Apollo, the answer is they're still evaluating that possibility. Theoretically it would work but there are some issues with their local JRE agents and some thinking is required before a decision is made. This presentation is available on Zimbra's blog here

eTech 2007: Session: Web Scale Computing

nospam@example.com (Celso) — Thu, 29 Mar 2007 06:06:05 +0100

Mike Culver from Amazon Web Services and Shuki Lehavi talk about Web Scale Computing. Yet another Amazon session. Mike starts with some graphics from Alex with traffic from aol.com, flickr.com and fotolog.net and youtube.com, where the last two gain a tremendous market share on the whole web traffic as a basis for saying: If you an idea like these, you need to thing about the infrastructure to run this. Ideas cost Money. Amazon eliminates the fixed cost in the equation. Pay for what you get. Slide with a list of Amazon's customers. Moves on to S3: Amazon S3 is... simple.

Data storage in the cloud
Web-service interface
No set-up fee, no monthly minmum
Storage: 0.15 per GB/month
Data transfer: 0.20 GB to transfer data
Private and public storage
Each object up to 5GB in size

Then describes EC2, Amazon's computing platform. Shuki takes on to speak about gumiyo.com and their experience with EC2 and S3. First describes gumiyo.com's business and features. They provide RSS feeds and Webservices APIs. This is not a "Hello world" 3 pages application, it's a complex website. Decision factors to move to Amazon: Strategic

On-Deman capacity
Operational Noise Reduction
Complete data center outsourcing

Tactical

The world's best data center at $70 per machine per month
No fixed cost and total variable cost
Endless storage

They moved both the developing, staging & QA and production environments to Amazon. gumiyo.com also uses S3 for storage. Gumiyo's Arquitecture is then shown. Tomcar, apache, multi-node tomcat envs, mysql, Fedora core 6, s3 tools and Apache/Mysql. Java SE 6.0, Java EE 5.0, JSP 2.0 front-end and Spring 2.0 with Hibernate 3.2. Website page load time goes from 90ms to 450ms. Shuki finishes by saying that their experience with EC2 and S3 has been nothing but great and they to invest even further on it. Mike moves on and talks a bit about Mechanical Turk and shows somes examples.

eTech 2007: Session: Yahoo Pipes

nospam@example.com (Celso) — Thu, 29 Mar 2007 06:04:33 +0100

Pasha Sadri and Jonathan Trevor present Yahoo! Pipes YP is a "Tool for Remixing the Web" and targets Bloggers, Hackers and Developers, so less than 10% their audience. Starts with a practical example from Pasha: he wanted an apartment near the park, so he needed to do a mashup or some sort of perl scripting to combine data from several sources. Then moves on to hands-on demo session of their service. Not much else to say. I asked Jonathan later if they've inspired the editor on Apple's Quartz Composer to which he confessed yes, to some extent.

eTech 2007: Session: The Core of Fun

nospam@example.com (Celso) — Wed, 28 Mar 2007 20:31:06 +0100

Raph Koster President of Areae, Inc. presents The Core of Fun. "Areae, Inc. is a company dedicated to taking the tired old virtual world and making it into something fresh and new." (book) How Magic Works. Things that work are often structured. When something works, it works at many levels. Visual things are made of visual compositions. That's Deep structure. Games are made out of games. Shows Frogger, which consists itself of many games, hopping, crossing the road, crossing the river, etc. Games are designed to ekove FUN. Fun is a chemical response, comes from the same place as chocolate and orgasms. Mastering the way the model "input and reaction" works is what gives us the drug of "fun". There are 4 types of fun: Hard, Easy, Visceral, Social. Emphasis on social fun but most games focus on hard fun, leaving the others behind. Hard fun is about solving problems. Quotes Chris Crawford about Interactivity. Nested choices: Let's go to Amazon. Endless chain of operations to buy a book and not much feedback. Goes on to the magic ingredients:

Where
When
How
What
With
For
Few
Phooey

Also, enumerates the recipes for games, which may easily be applicable to anything on the Web:

The core VERB has to be repeatable.
Something that requires SKILL.
Something that can handle Statistical Variation
Something that is COMPETITIVE
Everything you did before must matter
Whatever the opponent last did to you should matter too
You must able to PREPARE for the encounter, in different WAYS.
The same challenge in different locales should be a fresh SCENARIO.
The TERRITORY and TOPOLOGY should affect the outcome
The same VERB must be applicable to many different CHALLENGES
You should present users with lots of kinds of Nails.
There are lost of kinds of hammers
Users should be able to solve the challenge with their choice of tools.
And you should reward them with different FEEDBACK for it.

A statistical interlude: All of the above are quantifiable. You can arrive at a rating for every challenge. Variable feedback keep things lively. Usually the best feedback is a greater challenger presented by the opponent. Sometimes its pleasant SURPRISE. Either way, it has to be HIGHLY VISIBLE (on feedback). BOTTOMFEEDING is bad for fun. In other words low-risk activity for high reward is bad for fun. You need to driver users to challenges at the edge of ability (even if all it costs you is TIME).

eTech 2007: More media

nospam@example.com (Celso) — Wed, 28 Mar 2007 16:37:49 +0100

On Flickr And twitter

eTech 2007: Session: Project Blackbox

nospam@example.com (Celso) — Wed, 28 Mar 2007 16:29:39 +0100

Maurice Cloutier from Sun presented Project Blackbox, The World's First Virtualized Datacenter. There's not much to add about it, much has been written by the IT press. Most of the info is also available online. This was mostly a marketing session. Some people from the auditory raised questions like physical security, law problems, eating, transportation, energy, etc. Maurice also explained that Sun plans to provide very flexible and modular scenarios for the product. Customers can customize the gear inside the box, Sun will have relationships with local dealers and may or may not provide end-to-end solutions from go from planning, shipping, deploying, maintenance, etc. It's really a datacenter out of the box, but in a box. Sun's still struggling with many aspects of the project, including cooling (which will be water based, very efficient), law and licenses, lack of water supply and catastrophic scenarios, etc. The product release is scheduled for July in 2007, there's 5 containers for early access customers being build. It's funny to attend this presentation just after the pay as you go computing session.

eTech 2007: Session: Commodization of IT

nospam@example.com (Celso) — Wed, 28 Mar 2007 16:27:41 +0100

Simon Wardley does a presentation on Commodization of IT. Simon gives special emphasis on the Open Source adoption for the enterprise. Opensource drives Commodization and innovation. There is not competitive advantage on having your IT infrastructure (Datacenters, servers, etc). What is needed is an environment where you can drop your applications. Simon uses EC2 as an example of this and follows on to Zimki (blog). James Duncan takes on from here. Zimki is an opensource pay as you go computing service. They envision an "open utility competing market" where you take your application an place in the best computing provider of your choice, including Zimki's. They also provide a framework for opensource development, staging and production environments, etc. Also, they're offering a ¬£10000 pound prize to the best application or business idea launched on their platform. Back to Simon. EC2 is a great platform but there is no competition, he points out. Now some insights about the future:

Printing: 3D printing. Printing circuits.
Factory -> One Thing -> Many Things -> Ubiquitous Distributed Manufacturer
Digital -> Physical
DRM is bad. Opensource is good.

The "Change" will be on hardware or software ? The future is you'll have compilers and "instructions" both for hardware and software. You have 3D printers today, that can print electronic games, or digital watches. "The empires of the future are the empires of the mind" -- quote from Churchill Distributed computing is nothing but balancing supply and demand in a better way that we do today. Less wasted energy, less waste.