2005 O’Reilly ETech Call for Participation
27, 2004 Sebastopol, CA–Futurists, those high-tech fortune tellers (and fortunes are indeed at stake), often take the form of sought-after public speakers, expounding on a vision of the future gleaned from a variety of sources. While this synthesis and analysis can be instructive, ETech, the O’Reilly Emerging Technology Conference, also takes the empirical tack: by bringing together the hackers and lead users that futurists observe and consult, the conference puts ideas up for debate, allowing all participants to draw their own conclusions about–and perhaps take a hand in–the shape of the future.
ETech is able to spotlight important emerging trends in computing because, as conference program chair and O’Reilly CTO Rael Dornfest noted, “We are influenced in our building of the conference by the proposals we receive– that and a program committee of alpha geeks.” Preparations are underway for ETech 2005, taking place March 14-17, 2005 in San Diego, California. To that end, Dornfest encourages technologists and strategists, CTOs and CIOs, researchers, programmers, standards workers, business developers, and entrepreneurs to submit proposals for conference sessions and tutorials.
The theme for ETech 2005 is “Remix,” illustrating how technological components expand, contract, and recombine, encompassing new nexus points of iterative hacking and large ideas that have a way of transforming technology. Some of the faint signals, deeper trends, and current topics for the conference include:
– The phone as a platform, moving beyond mere voice to smart mobile sensor
– Geolocation, providing a sense of “there” and facilitating the formation of groups with feet in both the virtual and physical worlds
– Peer-to-peer, as it relates to the networked mobile devices in our pockets
– Web services, now that the B2B EDI replacement has given way to recombinant data services and syndicated e-commerce
– Hardware, examining what happens when geeks with screwdrivers “let the magic out” of their computers, game consoles, and other assorted gadgets
– Social software, such as weblogs, wikis, social networking, and wireless data networks
– Emerging topics, the not-yet-ready-for-primetime ideas and inventions
– Business models–what projects and people are likely to become crucial to the future of internet computing?
What alpha geeks do today can radically alter the future of technology for everyone else tomorrow, and transmitting the knowledge of these innovators to a wider audience is one way of getting important–and fun–products and services into our hands sooner rather than later. The O’Reilly Emerging Technology Conference frames the ideas, projects, and technologies that the alpha geeks are thinking about, hacking on, and inventing right now into a coherent picture from which to extrapolate and upon which to start building.
Additional Resources:
For complete conference details, visit:
http://conferences.oreilly.com/etech/
To submit a proposal, go to:
http://conferences.oreillynet.com/cs/et2005/create/e_sess
Press coverage, blogs, photos, and news from ETech 2004 can be found at:
http://www.oreillynet.com/et2004/
For information on exhibition and sponsorship opportunities at the convention, contact Andrew Calvo at (707) 827-7176, or andrewc@oreilly.com.
About O’Reilly
O’Reilly Media, Inc. is the premier information source for leading-edge computer technologies. The company’s books, conferences, and web sites bring to light the knowledge of technology innovators. O’Reilly books, known for the animals on their covers, occupy a treasured place on the shelves of the developers building the next generation of software. O’Reilly conferences and summits bring alpha geeks and forward-thinking business leaders together to shape the revolutionary ideas that spark new industries. From the Internet to XML, open source, .NET, Java, and web services, O’Reilly puts technologies on the map. For more information: http://www.oreilly.com