nextthing.org

Some highlights from the first day of the Etech conference in San Diego:

• I got stuck in an elevator with Doc Searls, Steve Gillmor, and 7 other people after breakfast.
• The Applied Minds presentation was awesome. Danny Hillis started by showing some videos of robots and moved on to a video of a live projection map table and a Myst-like deforming map surface. The projection map table was basically a large touch screen table which allowed people to manipulate a globe-like map by touch, zooming in and out and overlaying different satellite and topographical data sets. There’s a video (local mirror) and press blurb available from Northrop Grumman. Apparently this table uses ArcGlobe and runs about $300,000 (ouch). The deforming map surface was a table which deformed to match the elevation of the topographical map being projected onto it. I cannot express how cool this looks. I want one.
• Sam Ruby’s “Just Use HTTP” talk did a good job of explaining some of the complexities in making RESTful web services. Slides are up.
• Werner Vogels’ talk on Interplanetary Scale services was good. He touched on a few things I’ve been thinking about for awhile now relating to epidemics and scalability.
• Later, I walked around a bit downtown:
  
• And went to the vendor reception:
  

This entry was posted on Wednesday, March 16th, 2005 at 6:16 PM and is filed under General, Travel. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.