another post from ETech

Now speaking: Kevin Kealy of AT&T Labs. His speech, Remixing the Network, is outlining a new philosophy to fight spam, viruses, and other nuisances.

Kealy cut his speech short for lunch, but will be presenting more details later...and so will I.

another post from ETech

Researchers from Google, Yahoo and Microsoft are offering a peek at the technologies we may be using in the months and years to come.

Rick Rashid from Microsoft Research is talking about SenseCam, a "black box" for humans that collects visual and audio data about a person's day. The idea is to capture everything that happens to a person during the day. It uses a wide angle lense, audio recording, GPS and other technology. "You can imagine this as the ultimate blogging tool," Rashid said. Another application: a tool for people who suffer memory loss. Big question: what are the privacy implications? Rashid says Microsoft is studying the privacy questions.

Rashid is also talking about "Surface Computing." The idea is taking any kind of surface and turning it into a "computing environment." Very cool.

Microsoft is also attempting to apply principles of computer science to find a vaccine for HIV. Turns out that HIV shares some properties with spam. Lessons learned from the spam fight could help us understand how to fight HIV, says Rashid. Not much detail here. I'll have to look into this idea more.

Gary Flake from Yahoo Research Labs is talking about upcoming projects, including Y!Q, a "contextual search technology that delivers related search results on the page you're reading" and movie recommendations.

Flake is announcing a new project, the Tech Buzz Game, "a fantasy prediction market for high-tech products, concepts, and trends."

Peter Norvig from Google Labs is talking about Google Suggest, a service that suggests search topics as you type into Google's search box; Google Maps; and a personalized search tool.

another post from ETech

Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, dressed in faded jeans and an Oxford shirt, is having to overcome PC problems that are preventing his Powerpoint presentation from working. Conference attendees find it hilarious.

Bezos is talking about OpenSearch from Amazon's A9 search engine. It's designed to do for Web searching what RSS has done for Web content. From the A9 Web site:

"OpenSearch is a collection of technologies, all built on top of popular open standards, to allow content providers to publish their search results in a format suitable for syndication."

Unfortunately, Bezos did not talk about his wacky plan to colonize space.

Cory Doctorow blogs Bezos here.

another post from ETech

O'Reilly's Chief Technology Officer, Rael Dornfest, has just finished his opening keynote at ETech, in which he outlined the theme of the conference. Remixing, it seems, is another term for hacking. Hacking in the good sense: bending technology to our will.

Speaking now: a spokesman for Flickr, the chic photo-sharing site.

For the next few days, I'll be sending reports from the O'Reilly Emerging Technology Conference, on the radio and here on the Future Tense blog.

The theme at this year's uber-geek gathering is "Remix." What does it mean to remix software, hardware, and the Web? Yeah, I'm not sure either. Stay tuned.

Amazon's Jeff Bezos is a last-minute addition to the speaker schedule this morning. I hope he addresses his plan to colonize space from his Texas ranch.

Real Audio | How to Listen

New data from Technorati, a Weblog Weblog tracking company, shows explosive growth in the number of blogs and blog posts in the past five months.

Guest: David Sifry, founder and CEO of Technorati

Jon's daily tech news links:

New York Times: How the iPod ran circles around Sony Walkman

Wired: Paying tribute to Mac's daddy

BBC: Best blogs honored

USA Today: Tivo, Comcast close to deal