Applied Minds is based in Los Angeles; a company founded on the idea of creating version 1.0 of a product and having other companies do the less interesting work of producing version 2.0 and beyond. Applied Minds mixes together various hardware and software technologies, along with design, art, and science, to develop projects from robotics to toys to reinventing how we interface with maps.

Developing robotics solutions for customers as diverse as Disney and NASA is a portion of the Applied Minds business, as is designing toys that Applied Minds then licenses to toy companies. They also work on projects like treatments for cancer: remixing chemistry, physics, and pattern matching to analyze cancer patients' blood to determine which treatments will work for which patients.

The Applied Minds staff includes a wide variety of technologists, as well as artists and musicians. This make-up allows them to work different angles of a project and see different possibilities. Hillis discusses some of the development processes used at Applied Minds as well as the business problems inherent in letting projects go at version 1.0. Hillis closes the talk by discussing what he thinks is Applied Minds's most important software work, centered around his vision of the Internet and publishers' ability to tap into the aggregate data on the web and to remix and render that public data.

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W. Daniel Hillis is Chairman and Chief Technology Officer of Applied Minds, Inc., a research and development company creating a range of new products and services in software, entertainment, electronics, biotechnology and mechanical design. Previously, Hillis was Vice President, Research and Development at Walt Disney Imagineering, and a Disney Fellow. He developed new technologies and business strategies for Disney's theme parks, television, motion pictures, Internet and consumer products businesses. He also designed new theme park rides, a full sized walking robot dinosaur and various micro mechanical devices.

He is an inventor, scientist, author, and engineer and pioneered the concept of parallel computers that is now the basis for most supercomputers, as well as the RAID disk array technology used to store large databases. He holds over 40 U.S. patents, covering parallel computers, disk arrays, forgery prevention methods, and various electronic and mechanical devices. Danny Hillis is also the designer of a 10,000-year mechanical clock.

Resources:

• The Long Now Foundation essays by Daniel Hillis
• The New York Times article on Applied Minds (registration required).

This presentation is one of a series from the O'Reilly Emerging Technology Conference held in San Diego, California, March 14-17, 2005.

For Team ITC:

• Description editor: Cori Schlegel
• Post-production audio engineer: Paul Figgiani