Home Eating ETech

Eating ETech

Plenty to chew on in coverage of the recent ETech
conference
. Here are some ETech tidbits that I snacked on over the past week and
found to be rather tasty…

Ideas and Products

– the whole Remix theme. For Silicon Valley
legend Danny Hillis
, the remix theme begins at the breakfast table: “For him, it had
begun experimenting with combinations of oatmeal, Rice Crispies, and Froot Loops.
Remixing, at its core, is this combination of artistic design and problem solving. It’s
taking products that are fine on their own and considering the possibilities if you don’t
use them according to the pictures on the side of the box.”

– Yahoo’s new Tech Buzz Game sounds
yum: “a fantasy prediction market for high-tech products, concepts, and trends.” NB: I
haven’t had time to sign-up yet, but sounds like the kind of thing I’d relish…

– Amazon’s new OpenSearch aims “to do for
search what RSS has done for content.” Ambitious and the first innovative RSS thing
Amazon has announced for a while (just to remind us they’re still one of the Web 2.0
bigco’s). BusinessWeek
describes it
as “eliciting the denizens of the Web to contribute their own sources of
specialized information that searchers can subscribe to much like they can subscribe to
blogs.” 

OpenSearch seems to be in the same game as PubSub, Feedster, et al – future
search
. Interesting… I must devour all the details later.

– Firefox as a Remix Vehicle. I hadn’t really considered this before, but it’s a
viable way to market Firefox as the Web 2.0 browser of choice. As Robert Kaye described it: “Firefox
by itself is a fairly bare-bones browser and when the user installs extensions, the user
remixes the browser by plugging in the various add-ons that they would like to use.
Instead of shipping a huge browser that does everything, the Firefox team chose to keep
things simple by shipping a stripped down browser that is expected to be remixed by the
user.”

ETech sessions – my picks from the menu

Web Services
Mash-up
(p.s. check out the
fantastic resources page
compiled by Alan
Taylor
)

HOWTO make
a VC pitch in PowerPoint
(see also Mark Taylor’s
notes
)

Mark Fletcher: Lessons
Learned Birthing and Building Web Start-ups
(see
also
)

 – Danny Hillis, Applied Minds. ZDNet quote: “He sees the world of
publishing (blogs, wikis, APIs) evolving into the MetaWeb where information is contained
in sharable public databases, ushering in the era of remix culture.”

O’Reilly
radar speech
. Here’s one delicious piece of advice from Tim O’Reilly and Rael
Dornfest: “architect your software or service in such a way as to be used easily as a
component of a larger system: keep it modular, document your interfaces, and use a
license that doesn’t hinder recombination.”

– Salesforce.com and utility computing. As reported by
Ian Pringle
: “Salesforce.com’s view is for continued abstraction and a
separation of the definition and deployment of applications to create utility
computing.” 

And a little further on… “In effect utility computing is here already in the style
of the ‘Website as a platform’. It was suggested that the next step would
‘On demand Application Development’. At a stretch it is possible to see the
personalisation capabilities of ‘My Yahoo’ as a nascent example of this
idea.”

Summary

Lots of ideas to digest. I’ll leave you with this excellent quote from Tim O’Reilly,
as reported
by reemer.com
: “Remix: when content is digital, it lends itself to being broken down
and remixed. Build your business model so as to make your living from the smallest atomic
unit. e.g. SafariU”.

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