ETech Recap

Fraser and I spent time earlier this week at ETech at San Diego. This is one of the best tech conferences that draws diverse tech crowd from startups to industry. The handful of days that we spent their just flew by despite the fact that we did not have a chance to attend sessions.

On Monday night when we landed we called up one of our passionate users - Steffan Antonas. Steffan lives in San Diego area and is really passionate about blogging and the Wordpress community. A few months back he discovered BlueOrganizer and our widgets and ever since has been not only following us, but actively helping us improve the products. Thanks to Steffan the widget configuration and install screens are now so simple.

We met up with Steffan and headed over to La Jolla - a beautiful neighborhood of San Diego where Steffan lives. He took us to one of the best sushi restaurants ever. Seriously, it was fantastic. (Steffan what was the name of that place?). The conversation flow smoothly over awesome fish and sake, as we discussed topics ranging from web 2.0 to future of blogging. We learned a lot of interesting facts from Steffan, as he is very plugged into Wordpress community. Today, he sees a growing number of custom themes around Wordpress, and in the future, he believes that Wordpress will become a powerful, customizable platform for content and bits of personal identity from around the web.

Tuesday was a very busy day for us - we were presenting BlueOrganizer and SmartLinks at the ETech exhibit hall and I gave a 45 minute talk about Smart Browsing and Semantic Web. We had some great conversations and very positive feedback on the latest BlueOrganizer Indigo. The story about contextual browsing powered by Semantic Web is very compelling. People appreciate the fact that BlueOrganizer leverages existing information in pages, links and text, recognizes everyday things and connects the user to relevant, personalized information around the web. People particularly liked the ability to interact with information in text - highlighting addresses, people names and events.

For my talk I had a tough completion going against Wired’s Chris Anderson, Violet from Fleshbot and Bo Cowgill from Google Economics Group. Needless to say I figured no one will show up (I wouldn’t!), but I was wrong. A (small) presentation room in the hotel was packed with people who wanted to know just how is it that we make the browser smarter. After the presentation there was a lively discussion. The topics ranged from opening up BlueOrganizer to privacy to how we store information to architecture and the future of top-down semantic web. You can get the slides here.

After the full day of action we went out for dinner with Greg Cohn from Yahoo!, Robert Reich from Me.dium and Lew Tucker from Radar Networks/Twine. Lucky for all of us we bumped into a good Indian Food place where we shared the good stuff, indian beer and mused about, what else, but Semantic Web! We agreed that all startups in the space face common challenges ranging from information processing to complex algorithms to user adoption. In these early days of pragmatic semantic technologies we are all excited to connect, to share ideas and to genuinely help each other succeed and define new, exciting space.

Wednesday and Thursday were much quieter days so Fraser and I were able to get some work done in addition to taking to people about AdaptiveBlue. Also on Wednesday, the news came about that Microsoft launched IE8 with features that mimic text shortcuts in BlueOrganizer. We blogged our thoughts on the subject here. On Thursday Fraser met up for breakfast with another passionate user of our tools - Lance from Mystery Books.

In the mean time I spent over an hour talking to Terry Jones from Fluid Info. Terry is an interesting character to say the least and a super smart guy. He has been working on a very interesting project that he wanted my feedback on. At first glance I did not see the point, but after a few more insults and convincing arguments I have to admit that I was intrigued. If you have the chance browse around Terry’s blog and check up on him - interesting things are brewing in his head.

To wrap up, both Fraser and I noted once again that the weather in San Diego is just so damn perfect! Whether we went for a run in a morning and when we walked around the city late at night, the temperature was always just right. We are openly jealous and surely are coming back next year!