I attended my first ETech conference in San Diego. ETech is the Emergent Technologies conference from O’Reilly that gathers latest innovations and innovators from around the web. I attended many keynotes and sessions and covered the conference for Read/WriteWeb. Here are the posts that I wrote:
- Numenta - has Artificial Intelligence Arrived? - A profound computing innovation from creator of Palm
- Amazon CTO on building Web Scale Services - A talk about Amazon Web Services
- Apollo - On A Collision Course with Web Browsers - A critical look at Apollo platform from Adobe
- Big Company Hacks @ Yahoo! - Chad Dickerson talked about Yahoo! internal innovation program
- Mozilla Manifesto - Mike Shaver discussed what Mozilla Organization stands for
- Cool Stuff from Microsoft Live Labs - the latest innovations from Microsoft research
In addition to sessions there was a lot of activity in the demo pavilion, hallways and dinners. I was fortunate to connect with a lot of people who I knew only virtually. First, I bumped into Chris Messina and Tara Hunt from CitizenAgency. Chris and I exchanged emails way back in the beginning of AdaptiveBlue, while Chris was @ Flock. It was good to finally meet him and Tara in person.
During the lunch on Tuesday I got together with Jason Fields from Snap and had a good discussion about Snap previews and previews on the web in general. He said that the latest iteration of the preview has been received much more positively than the one that worked straight off the links. At our table, among other people we had Simeon Simeonov from Polaris Ventures, Matt Mullenweg and Michael Adams of Wordpress fame. Simeon told us a story of a frozen dead deer that is just too bizarre to recount, but it was definitely nice to hear it during lunch.
After lunch I ran into Joshua Schachter, the founder of del.icio.us, who I wanted to meet for a while. He talked about issues and trade offs in using relational databases for large-scale social software. Shortly after the conversation started we were joined by Ben Trott from Six Apart. He said that unfortunately, he has not seen a fit-all solution to this problem and at Six Apart they always come up with the best architecture that suites the problem at hand.
In the evening, I went to Amazon Web Services get together. I talked to Werner Vogels, CTO of Amazon, about functions that we wish were part of S3. He said that he was sympathetic, and while nothing can be done right now, he promised that a solution was coming out soon. Then I ran into Don MacAskill, CEO and Chief Geek of SmugMug and we had a good chat about online photo market and Amazon Web Services. SmugMug is actually one of the better examples of AWS success stories and Don is a big advocate of AWS.
Finally, I got a real treat in the end of the evening, when I had a chance to shake hands with Jeff Bezos. He was at the AWS party and also was around for the duration of ETech. He is totally cool and completely approachable. People bumped into him all the time and he always took interest and was very friendly. I did not miss the chance to tell him that I worked for D.E.Shaw and that we shared a bunch of people in common (two of my former bosses from D.E.Shaw went to Amazon and did very well there). Jeff was kind enough to ask about AdaptiveBlue and was happy to hear that we were a big user of AWS. He wished me luck with the business, the whole conversation felt simple and natural - quite amazing.
So overall, I liked the conference and met a lot of interesting folks. I am likely to return next year.
Alex
