Emerging Technology Conference

In this presentation, Stefan Magdalinski talks about his experiences and motives for building the site theyworkforyou.com. This site has many details about the activities of the British MPs and their track records in the British House of Commons. This site enables the common man to understand how his representatives are serving their causes in parliament. [ETech 2005 audio from IT Conversations]

Ride with Jason Fried of 37signals as he takes us through the lessons learned while building Basecamp, a hosted project management tool that is extremely popular among its thousands of users. Jason shares his experiences about what works and what doesn't in web development and how the unconventional development methodologies followed by 37signals give it an edge. From the advantages of working as a team with members in different continents to getting the word about your product out effectively, Jason covers it all. [ETech 2005 audio from IT Conversations]

Jon Bostrom tells us how Nokia is moving mobile computing to the edge of the network. How are the different development platforms based on C++, Java and Python changing the mobile user experience? What are the different possibilities which multi-channel phones have opened up? [ETech 2005 audio from IT Conversations]

What does the military see in emerging technologies? The military wants to remix technologies to allow the soldiers on the edges to communicate with those in the center. J.C. Herz looks at two specific technologies that the military is attempting to remix into a viable reapplication of code for their benefit. It's not always easily accomplished. Four misunderstood lines of code destroyed a missile during launch to the tune of $1 billion. [Emerging Technology Conference 2005 audio from IT Conversations]

The Long Tail is a phrase coined by Chris Anderson, the Editor-in-Chief of Wired magazine, for the statistical distribution of sales observed by online businesses. In this talk he explores the economics of the long tail and shares his insight on the effects it might have on future business models. He discusses how distribution networks like Amazon, iTunes and Netflix have shown that the right side of the curve which forms millions of niches can be as big a market as the chart toppers. [ETech 2005 audio from IT Conversations]

How do you distribute large files, quickly and securely, to a large network audience without requiring expensive hardware or content based networks? Justin Chapweske, CTO and founder of Onion Networks, presents swarming as a combination of extended HTTP, commodity bandwidth, cheap hardware and software intelligence that addresses modern large file and data integrity problems without requiring expensive infrastructural services or commercial content networks. [ETech 2005 audio from IT Conversations]

The notion of folksonomy suggests that users can develop patterns of organization and classification that function without the need for rigid guidelines or top-down taxonomies. The founders of three outstanding folksonomy-based services come together to discuss the idea in this session from ETech 2005. [ETech 2005 audio from IT Conversations]

Just how do you go about ensuring that future colonists on Mars can get hold of the books they've ordered online? After all, when space research makes a break-through and space colonization becomes a reality, Amazon.com would like to be the preferred way to order retail products anywhere in the universe. Amazon.com's CTO Werner Vogels takes this lighthearted problem of interplanetary distribution as the starting point for his talk on the issues facing the builders of scalable and robust distributed systems. [ETech 2005 audio from IT Conversations]

A few foundations are working on bringing back the original dream of the web: people sharing and collaborating enormous amounts of information. One of these has to be the Wikimedia Foundation, the organization behind the phenomenal Wikipedia. With over 500,000 articles and 350,000 categories in approximately 200 languages, there's no doubt it's growing. Jimmy Wales, President, explains the nitty-gritty of social computing in this short presentation from ETech 2005. [ETech 2005 audio from IT Conversations]

Isn't radio an old, dying medium? What's it doing in a conference on emerging technologies? Matt Biddulph, Paul Hammond, Tom Coates, and Matt Webb show us how radio is a reemerging technology experiencing a resurgence in popularity and relevance. They explore how radio can be improved by introducing feedback mechanisms and by ultimately making it a more social medium. Using principles of social software, the BBC becomes more of a peer than a broadcaster. [ETech 2005 audio from IT Conversations]