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Emerging Tech Keynote Videos Are Online

Lisa Rein posted videos of the keynotes Howard Rheingold and Alan Kay gave at this year's O'Reilly Emerging Technology conference. I should have posted a link to Lisa's site last week, but I'm slow.

Howard Rheingold's talk centered on whether we will be users or consumers - active participants or passive recipients - of the latest wave of technologies and media. He urged us to build software and act in ways that further the open standards and connectivity that have gotten us to where we are. Good talk, and some good questions at the end. I would post the irc commentary that was going on during the session, but I haven't got the time-matched irc and presentation pages done yet.

Alan Kaye's session, titled "Daddy, Are We There Yet?" The Computer Revolution Hasn't Happened Yet" was a review of copmputing history that many of us have forgotten. We had "modern" software (graphic interfaces, mice, functional videoconferencing, OOP, handwriting recognition) in the mid 1960's. We just forgot about it.

Kay's salient points are that the last 20 years personal computing have been boring. PC and software vendors target development toward businesses, who aren't creative in their use of technology. As technology seeps into the consumer space we should look to a vastly different future. He asserts that the printing revolution didn't happen in
Gutenberg's lifetime; it happened a hundred years later when nobody remembered a time before the printing press. The session included video of those 1960's demos and had a terrific Squeak (smalltalk) demo of a 3-D collaborative space demonstrating some great software concepts. Worth watching.

Posted by Mark Thursday, May 08, 2003 2:10:00 PM | permalink |