ETech Keynote: Tim O’Reilly
Tim has just taken the stage, sporting a beard.
He proposes a title for his talk: “Watching the Alpha Geeks.” O’Reilly’s mission, he says, is to find interesting people and spread their innovations by passing along information through books, conferences, and online.
“People forget that the PC industry and all these giant companies that we take for granted start with the Homebrew Computer Club and all these hackers.” (shows picture of Wozniak and Jobs with an Apple I, in wooden case)
Filters Tim uses to figure out what to focus on:
- The technology is on track with a long term trend
- is disruptive (therefore interesting)
- uptake is accelerating
- has grassroots support
- inspires passion
- has deeper social implications
- where better information really can make a difference
Applications we rely on are not just machines — they’re cyborgs, which rely on the users who are so passionate about them. Shows a slide he borrowed from Craig Newmark at craigslist, showing the value of user involvement. Tim’s term for this phenomenon: the “mechanical Turk” — after a hoax robot from the 19th century.
Flickr “tag cloud” is another example. “Here is a major user interface design element that is derived interactively from the activity of all the users of the application. If you are a user of Flickr, you are a component of the application.”
New concept: “Bionic software” (concept borrowed from You Mon Tsang of Boxxet, a startup company). Participation is a key element of the software itself.
Intelligence Augmentation, or IA, instead of Artificial Intelligence
“We’re making our computers smarter because we’re part of them, and we’re connected to them.”
Tim moves on to a new topic: Hacking the physical world. Gives some examples from his new magazine, Make.
Some examples are just fun: “Blendie 2000″ - voice actuated blender.
Instructables: annoted step-by-step instructions for how to make things.
Now Tim is talking about “he Internet as platform.” What he means by this seems to be integrating Net applications with non-Net apps. He cites some examples:
Last.fm - puts together custom radio stations based on what you actually listen to in ITunes or Rhapsody.
Philip Torrone’s webcam that takes pictures in response to IM notes.
Party that happened simultaneously in Second Life and in real life, with people in each “place” watching the others on a big screen.
A guy from Zimbra takes the stage to talk about his company’s product. They had a competition to create plugins for their software, which they call “Zimlets.” He demonstrates how it works, with an app that recognizes phone numbers in email messages; you click on the phone number and it places a call from your cell phone to that number.
Tim retakes the stage: “We’re moving into a world where devices and applications are going to interacts in new and interesting ways.”
“We have to pay attention to interoperability, because if we don’t do it well, we’ll open the door to another monopoly player who will say, ‘We’ll make it all work together, just give all your freedom to us.’”
