Plenty to chew on in coverage of the recent ETech conference. Here are some ETech tidbits that I snacked on over the past week and found to be rather tasty…
Ideas and Products
– the whole Remix theme. For Silicon Valley legend Danny Hillis, the remix theme begins at the breakfast table: “For him, it had begun experimenting with combinations of oatmeal, Rice Crispies, and Froot Loops. Remixing, at its core, is this combination of artistic design and problem solving. It’s taking products that are fine on their own and considering the possibilities if you don’t use them according to the pictures on the side of the box.”
– Yahoo’s new Tech Buzz Game sounds yum: “a fantasy prediction market for high-tech products, concepts, and trends.” NB: I haven’t had time to sign-up yet, but sounds like the kind of thing I’d relish…
– Amazon’s new OpenSearch aims “to do for search what RSS has done for content.” Ambitious and the first innovative RSS thing Amazon has announced for a while (just to remind us they’re still one of the Web 2.0 bigco’s). BusinessWeek describes it as “eliciting the denizens of the Web to contribute their own sources of specialized information that searchers can subscribe to much like they can subscribe to blogs.”
OpenSearch seems to be in the same game as PubSub, Feedster, et al – future search. Interesting… I must devour all the details later.
– Firefox as a Remix Vehicle. I hadn’t really considered this before, but it’s a viable way to market Firefox as the Web 2.0 browser of choice. As Robert Kaye described it: “Firefox by itself is a fairly bare-bones browser and when the user installs extensions, the user remixes the browser by plugging in the various add-ons that they would like to use. Instead of shipping a huge browser that does everything, the Firefox team chose to keep things simple by shipping a stripped down browser that is expected to be remixed by the user.”
ETech sessions – my picks from the menu
– Web Services Mash-up (p.s. check out the fantastic resources page compiled by Alan Taylor)
– HOWTO make a VC pitch in PowerPoint (see also Mark Taylor’s notes)
– Mark Fletcher: Lessons Learned Birthing and Building Web Start-ups (see also)
– Danny Hillis, Applied Minds. ZDNet quote: “He sees the world of publishing (blogs, wikis, APIs) evolving into the MetaWeb where information is contained in sharable public databases, ushering in the era of remix culture.”
– O’Reilly radar speech. Here’s one delicious piece of advice from Tim O’Reilly and Rael Dornfest: “architect your software or service in such a way as to be used easily as a component of a larger system: keep it modular, document your interfaces, and use a license that doesn’t hinder recombination.”
– Salesforce.com and utility computing. As reported by Ian Pringle: “Salesforce.com’s view is for continued abstraction and a separation of the definition and deployment of applications to create utility computing.”
And a little further on… “In effect utility computing is here already in the style of the ‘Website as a platform’. It was suggested that the next step would ‘On demand Application Development’. At a stretch it is possible to see the personalisation capabilities of ‘My Yahoo’ as a nascent example of this idea.”
Summary
Lots of ideas to digest. I’ll leave you with this excellent quote from Tim O’Reilly, as reported by reemer.com: “Remix: when content is digital, it lends itself to being broken down and remixed. Build your business model so as to make your living from the smallest atomic unit. e.g. SafariU”.
Originally published on ReadWriteWeb (archived copy)