Fifteen minute presentations on what’s going on in labs…

Rick Rashid, Microsoft Labs. “SenseCam” is a wearable recorder, presumably part of MyLifeBits, the Gordon Bell project. He takes us under the hood. E.g., they wait for stability to take a photo in order to avoid blurriness. “The ultimate blogging tool,” he says [if you’ve confused blogging with living]. He says there are 12 operational units so far. They’re building a new generation: Smaller, GPS, continuous audio.

He also talks about “surface computing” that lets you manipuate images on a surface. [It’s very similar to a concept video Bruce Tognazzini did for Sun at least ten years ago. But this is an actual implementation.]

Gary Flake, Yahoo. He talks about Y!Q that does contextual searching. He also talks about aggregating opinions into markets. He announces a joint project between Yahoo Labs and O’Really. It’s an artificial market on questions related to emerging tech trends. It’s a contest. E.g., you purchase shares in OS X Panther vs. OS X Tiger — when will the search queries for Tiger overtake Panther?

They’re also introducing today a new type of auction called a Dynamic Pari-mutuel Auction. “If this doesn’t revolutionize auctions, it will revolutionize gambling.” He doesn’t have time to give us any details.

Peter Norviq, Google. He points to Google Suggests. It was done by a single engineer as his one-day-a-week project. It looks like autocomplete but it’s not: Every keystroke is a request to Google which is then put into a box drawn by javascript.

He also talks about Google Maps. They use iframes because there’s a history object you can go back to. [Hmm. I thought I knew what an iframe is, but I don’t understand that sentence.]

He shows a personalization slider . [I’m just not as impressed by sliders as I’m supposed to be.] And Google Sets. [Technorati tags: oreilly etech]

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Bezos shows a new feature of A9 search that lets you do vertical searches, i.e., within sources (content and search engines?) within particular domains Amazon has access to. And, through an RSS extension, you can syndicate your search. [Technorati tags: oreilly etech]

Werner Vogels in the comments corrects the above:

actually the OpenSearch RSS is to allow *any* content provider to be integrated with the search engine to do domain-specific searches. It is not limited to content providers Amazon has access to but to any content provider. Other search portals could adapt to consume OpenSearch RSS and they get instant access to all the domain search available.

Thanks for the correction. And a note to readers: One of the things I most like about etech is that I don’t understand much of it. So, keep those corrections coming!

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Danny Hillis talks about Applied Minds, his lab for making experimental stuff. There are about 40 different projects going on at any time, with a focus on hardware but including sw. He shows photos of the workshops and movies of little walking devices that get oohs and ahhs. [Humans are such softies.]

He shows a techno-pimped out car with every possible gadget in it. Lots of blinking lights and screens.

And to make sure we don’t think it’s all toys and gadgets, the talks about a cancer research project that puts a drop of blood through a mass spectrometer that gives a signature for every protein. “If you could find the chemical signature of what made a chemical treatment worked…”

He shows video of a mapping table that lets you use hand gestures to move around the world, zoom in, swipe in new images/data by time. The next table he shows raises mountains in 3D…physical 3D, not blue-and-red goggles 3D simulation. Oohs and applause. [Technorati tags: oreilly etech]

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Firefox’s Brendan Eich’s theme is that the “app is the api.” He talks about the extension techniques, but I lose him at contract-id ends in ?type=foo. People here seem quite happy about it, though. He says the new version will have better graphics capabilities and platform improvements. [Technorati tags: oreilly etech]

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Stewart Butterfield, co-founder of Flickr, says he has an announcement about the rumored acquisition of Flickr by Yahoo. The announcement is that the next person who asks will get popped in the chin.

He says Flickr makes 62 methods available to developers. He shows some of what people have built on top of the flickr API. Very cool. The site gets 250,000 API requests a day, and 3M pageviews a day, so about 5% of their traffic consists of API requests. [Technorati tags: oreilly etech]

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Breakfast was a gathering of the tribes around great oranges and bad bagels.

Rael Dornfest kicks it off by reviewing all the ways we’re remixing our stuff. (Well, not all of it is strictly speaking ours.) Remixing content, services, applications, IT. It’s a good metaphor: Hacking takes things apart and puts them together in new ways, including with new components.

Tim O’Reilly wonders how design patterns (Christopher Alexander, A Pattern Language) might affect Internet applications. He is going to find prescriptions based on situations. E.g., “A successful open source software projects consists of ‘small pieces loosely joined.'” Therefore, architect your software or service in such a way that it can be easily incorporated in multiple projects. Here are some others:

You don’t have to own all the components of your application. Therefore, glue together pieces from others, and keep it open.

Net applications are never done. Therefore, release features incrementally. Perpetual beta.

Let users add value to shared data. But only a small percentage of users will add value. Therefore, make participation the default, aggregating user data as a side-effect of their using your application. (E.g., Flickr’s default is make your photos public.)

PCs are not the only networked device. Therefore, design your app from the get-go to integrate across multiple platforms.

Social networks are a by-product of social apps. Therefore, fapture and share the social fabric under your app.

Standard size packets is key. Therefore, understand the optimum “packet size” for your app domain — up a level up from IP packets. E.g., web pages or books.

Other things on Tim’s radar:

Ajax (Asynchronous JavaScript + XML)…the return of Javascript. They use it for Google Maps.

Hardware hacking, including collaborative hardware hacking — shared hw development to mirror open source sw dev.

Ruby on Rails.

Visualization — Fllickr color wheel, IBM’s history flow, tree maps, baby name visualizer …[Sorry, they’re going very quikcly and not giving urls or much explanation]

VoIP

People

[Technorati tags: oreilly etech]

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If you want to join the chat: irc.freenode.net #etech [Technorati tag: etech]

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A whole bunch of people I like and admire are at sxsw. I went to that conference the previous two years, but this year it overlaps with O’Reilly’s Emerging Technology conference. I’m currently in a Days Inn in San Diego, ready to go to etech tomorrow. I’ve been going to etech for the past couple of years because it’s over my head, so I learn a lot.

After talking with some women, I considered skipping etech this year because it’s too much of a boy’s club: Only 9% of the speakers are women, by my count. That sucks.

So, I checked with O’Reilly. They say that 5% of the submitted paper topics came from women. That sucks even more because it’s harder to fix. And it’s hard to determine why: Fewer women techies? Fewer women who feel welcome at etech? As far as I can tell, though, O’Reilly is behaving honorably, and the O’Reilly organization itself seems to be a good place for women to work.

So, I’m here.

(BTW, O’Reilly rejected my own proposal for a talk on the social effects of taxonomies.) [Technorati tags: oreilly etech]

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Bob Filipczak was browsing AdCritic.ccom and came across a couple of commercials for a body spray for men called Tag. I don’t subscribe to AdCritic ($100/yr), but here’s the stub of an article from AdWeek:

* The budget was not disclosed, but sources said initial ad spending would be at least $50 million.

* The campaign employs broad humor and sexual innuendo in an effort to appeal to teens and young adult males, the key target market for the product.

* Commercial scenarios include advances from the mother of a prospective date and reactions to the product’s scent in public venues including a drugstore and a sports arena.

AdWeek also requires a subscription. As does Marketing magazine. Jeez, these marketing folks make it hard to get any stinking information about products!

At least Time lets you read an article about it.

Anyway, Bob suggests a tag line:

Tag: Makes Geeks Tolerable.

Bogus Contest: Tag lines for Tag.

My contribution:

Tag: Removes the Stink of Hierarchy…From Your Bottom Up

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Hiawatha Bray has an excellent column in the Boston Globe today explaining just what’s wrong with Apple’s suit against a fan who blogged about an upcoming product. Nicholas Ciarelli published information given to him by Apple employees. Hiawatha asks:

“What would happen if Apple employees sent their secrets to me, and I made them the subject of next week’s column. Would Apple sue The Boston Globe? We should be so lucky. No, Apple decided to tee off on a 19-tear-old kid, hoping to make an example of him. It’s a bonehead play…

Maybe Apple has forgotten how much of its extraordinary rebirth is due to fans like Ciarelli…”

So, if you have a Mac, how are you letting Apple know what you think of its bullying behavior?

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