This is a hastily-assembled session about what Tim O’Reilly and his pals see coming over the horizon. The room is crowded.

Rob Frederick, Amazon Web Services. “We consider Amazon.com to be a technology platform. Developers can use Amazon’s backend systems, get product information and customer comments, and create and innovate. Available through their free SDK: search, browse, sales rank, etc. You can use XSLT to pass parameters and Amazon.com will return info as html snippets.

He points to www.simplest-shop.com by a 19-yr-old Rumanian developer who puts his innovations into the open source community. Using his code, you can develop a store front that has features not found on Amazon.com. (Tim points to this as an example of a long term trend: “decomposing” the Net so that we can get data through multiple interfaces.) Another example: Yes.net looks up any song currently playing on a radio station anywhere in the US.

A guy from Bay Area Wide Inernet Access is talking. The demand for wifi is being driven by the inability of the infrastructure to do the last mile. Wifi apparently works real good.

Bunnie Huang is a lonely hardware guy here. “It’s physics, solder and assembler.” A guy built a heart machine doing wave forms out of a Game Boy Advanced. Bunnie is also working with Field Programmable Gate Arrays.

Andrew Phelps (a prof at RIT) is talking about Phank. It inserts its own additions and hacks into massively multiplier online games. E.g., if you meet someone new in Everquest, you can see if anyone else in your guild has met them. A real-time paging system can let you know when, for example, a dragon is about to be slain.. Phank supports its development efforts by selling t-shirts online. They’ve built up characters in the game and sold them on eBay for a couple of thousand dollars.

Pretty interesting session although I was hoping to be more amazed.

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