Rubbing Elbows With The Alpha Geeks

Posted on 07 March 2008

I just spent a fantastic 4 days at ETech08 in San Diego. A special and heart-felt thank you goes out to Fraser and Alex at AdaptiveBlue, not only for their generosity and kindness for their help getting me in to the conference, but for the stellar sushi and conversation on Monday night. What an absolutely brilliant time.

The conference closed with a mind-bending keynote address from Tim Ferris, author of the 4 Hour Work Week - a totally appropriate choice by the OReilly staff, I thought. It’s a tough order to be tasked with wrapping up a 4 day event with speeches given by over 100 thought leaders like ETech, but I thought he did a bang-up job. Truth told, just listening to him speak was humbling…I don’t think there’s a more perfect way to describe it. At most of the keynotes this week, you’d see a virtual sea of laptops open, attendees blogging and chatting away. People sitting all around me were really paying attention to this guy. He just exuded genius (perhaps with a slight tendency towards OCD, which was self-admitted in his keynote). I was even inspired to re-visit his book now that I’ve seen him speak in person and I’m sure it’s going to add a lot of color to the way I experience it for the second time.

On the whole, five sessions really had a profound impact on me. Here are the links to the sessions on the OReilly site in order of “wow”factor. The actual videos should be posted with the presentations in the coming days - definitely worth checking out.

Futuretainment: The Asian Media Revolution  - I had the pleasure of having lunch with Michael Walsh, who’s book (same name as the title of the session) is coming out in the coming months. The presentation was chalk full of mind grenade-type insights about how asian tech culture is shaping the future of device design and how online behaviors are closely linked to the values and rules of ingrained cultures and societies.

Designing Magnets: Connecting with Audiences in the Wired Age  - Elan Lee (Fourth Wall Studios) shared a lot of personal experiences about what it was like bringing online fantasy to life for off-line communities, and how real-world interactivity can be built into online content.

The Case for Africa as a Mobile Development Hothouse - Made me want to pick up every single book I could about mobile web development. It’ll knock your socks off to actually see the statistics of the populations worldwide that are accessing the internet via mobile devices as their primary connection because of the digital divide.

Halo vs. Facebook: Emotion and the Fun of Games - Nicole Lazzaro, founder and president of XEODesign, Inc., is an award-winning interface designer and an authority on emotion and the player experience. Her passion for this stuff is infectious. I encourage anyone who designs interfaces to head over to the ETech site and download her presentation, which has got tons of intuitive grids and charts explaining the principals she uses when designing for the greats.

Computing for Socio-economic Development - It’s not often you get to hear one of the heads of the Microsoft Research  Team (Kentaro Toyama) wax intellectual about their personal experiences developing rural areas of India. Good stuff.

So all that said…Now I’ve got to figure out what to do with all the tech fodder I collected - like the seizure-inducing light up Google Pins and Yoyos sitting on the desk in my living room. What a week. Thanks Alex and Fraser!

:)