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March 15, 2005
ETech - Day one thoughts
Random take aways from the first day of the conference:- The BBC is cool. Young people really psyched to be working for a big company--unusual. Really allowing people to innovate seems to be the way to energize. OK, not a surprising insight. But it is surprising seeing it happen at a big company. Read the original session.
- The Salesforce.com session was made by a marketing chap. Nice enough guy but there was this air of suspicion surrounding his talk--a marketing guy can't be at the conference with good intentions! ;-) Original session.
- Macs are everywhere. Jfew mentioned that he never saw more people on Mac laptops than Windoz. Times are a change'n. Anecdotally I noticed lots of mac users using Firefox instead of Safari. Since Firefox launched with much fanfare, Safari doesn't look as critical of an app for Apple any longer. Wonder what they'll do long term?
- Coolest demo of the day was definitely Phonetags, from the BBC chaps. I must admit, I'm always impressed seeing companies share early technology like this. Yahoo's Tech Buzz game was a close second.
- Most disappointing talk was Google. Norvig just went over stuff already on the Google labs page. Strange given most of the type of people at this conference already know about all that stuff. His talk was equally uninteresting at Accelerating Change back in November. Wonder what's up? But the Yahoo talk was good. These talks here.
- Open source continues to amaze me. Today's related session was on adapting the open source model but for hardware. Another on open source TiVo. The main thing that impresses me about open source is how it's running rings around multi-billion companies and there's nothing they can do about it (including frivolous law suits). Love it.
- I heard a rumor that Ben bought a few Mini's. Maybe he might try to use iFrabricate to document that Mac Mini car hack? :-)
Posted by andrej at March 15, 2005 11:22 PM
Comments
Great writeups, Andrej. I'm enjoying reading your comments on the conference. Wish I could be there too!
Posted by: Greg Linden at March 16, 2005 6:35 AM