ETech 2006

Siblings Esther and George Dyson (children of famed physicist Freeman, and both noted technology experts) await the opening keynotes at ETech 2006.

O'Reilly's Emerging Technologies conference kicked off today with a handful of intensive tutorials covering in-depth technical topics, ranging from AJAX to the ins and outs of building PHP applications to scale. With a day's worth of hard work done, the crowd seems ready to kick back and be entertained. On the bill: keynotes from O'Reilly uber-geek Rael Dornfest, O'Reilly founder/namesake Tim O'Reilly, and science fiction author / visionary Bruce Sterling. Followed, of course, by a party.

Hundreds of alpha geeks crowd the bar at the ETech opening party.

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Felipe Cabrera of Amazon.com's web services division talks about the 1769 invention, The Mechanical Turk, a chess playing automaton that actually concealed a human chess master. Similarly, web sites like Amazon use human intelligence to do things computers can't. Amazon has a web services API called Mechanical Turk, now in beta, that lets developers tap into collective human intelligence.

Dick Hardt, Sxip Identity, talks about identity management or, in his words, "Who is the Dick on my site?" Sxip 2.0 launched last night at sxip.org.

IBM's Rod Smith is going to talk about "Do It Yourself IT." Big companies have a hard time connecting up different computer systems, often with partner companies. IBM's answer: "situational" apps built quickly, for short term uses, with Web 2.0 approach and easy scripting.

Cory Doctorow, Mitch Kapor and George Dyson at ETech.

Jeffrey McManus heads up Yahoo's efforts to make its tools accessible to web developers via public APIs. Today at ETech the company announced version 2.0 of its shoppiing API, which lets developers collect commissions for sales that their apps produce. Later this week the company will open a gallery of Yahoo based mashups that use the site's APIs, at gallery.yahoo.com.

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Regine Debatty of the blog We-Make-Money-Not-Art.com gave a talk on the value of avant-garde techie art, replete with examples such as two-headed Aibos, walking cities, shy security cameras, and transgenic trees.

Kevin Lynch of Adobe announces a way to connect the Flash player and its underlying Flex framework with Ajax via the imaginatively named Flex Ajax Bridge.

Usability guru Joel Spolsky talks about "blue chip" brands (Brad Pitt, Julia Roberts, Apple iPod) versus "off brands" (Sandra Bullock, Creative Zen Micro). He gives grades to various brands and their products, such as reddit.com (A) and Motorola (B). The last brand Joel rates is "contemporary web design." All of it. He gives it an F: "Enough with the pastel Ariel already!"

Your correspondent Dylan Tweney shows how to use a PVC pipe mini-marshmallow shooter to achieve maximum range (30 feet or more) with just breath power. Later in evening several marshmallow shooter battles broke out. Among others, tech pundit Esther Dyson was seen gleefully firing off volleys of marshmallows at other attendees. At the end of the night, the hotel's carpet was dotted with sticky spots of squished sugar treats.

The California Fuel Cell Partnership is showing off some fuel cell powered cars. Here is a modified Chevy Silverado 2500 with two fuel cell stacks and an electric motor on each axle. It generates 188 kilowatts of power at 400 volts, making it a portable power plant.

This Opel runs on compressed H2 and can go up to 90 mph for 120-160 miles. It has 3 kg of H2 on board (1kg of hydrogen is equivalent to about 1 gallon of gas). GM has 600 engineers working on fuel cell vehicles.