So its Friday and Xtech finished half a day ago. Overall, Xtech 2007 was excellent and I enjoyed every minute of it.
The conference was quite diverse in nature this year. A quick scan of a room revealed people from enterprise, academia, public sector and of smaller startups. The theme for the conference was ubiquity and most presentations were actually loosely connected. And what a range of topics this time around. Everything from debates about XHTML 2.0 and HTML 5 to the abstract nature of ubiquitous technology and products.
Once again choosing the sessions was always going to be very difficult with 4 tracks running side by side. Edd added Personal schedule just before the conference last week which helped a lot but I ended up adding more that one per slot into my personal schedule. In the end I went to these sessions.
- Web-app access to “sensors” on mobile devices (video)
Michael(tm) Smith (W3C)
Making Web apps interact with common “sensor” hardware on mobile devices requires scripting APIs to that hardware — APIs that haven't been standardized yet. This session looks at what's needed. - Practical ubiquity with mobile phones (video) (video)Claus Dahl (Imity.com) Imity is a live experiment piggybacking mobile identity and a social web on the ubiquitous world of bluetooth cell phones.
- Ceci n'est pas seulement une pipe: semantic meaning of everyday objects in a connected world (video) (video)Alexandra Deschamps-Sonsino (designswarm) Using examples of applications to illustrate the semantic disturbance that takes place when then web hacks objects of everyday lives and when it makes them disappear.
- Barcamping and Co-working, Parisian styleOri Pekelman (AF83) How much do cultural differences affect the transposition of models born in the US? Join those who have organized and promoting Barcamps in Paris and jumpstarted the first Parisian co-working space.
- Everyware: Expectation, emergence, realityAdam Greenfield (Studies and Observations) As late as 2006, the assertion that ubiquitous computing was in the process of transforming everyday life was controversial. A single year later, it's become inarguable.
- Keynote (video)Gavin Starks (d::gen network)
- Jabber: Social Software for RobotsBlaine Cook (Obvious Corp.), Kellan Elliott-McCrea (Flickr (Yahoo)) Jabber (XMPP) as enabling technology of bots and web services to participate in ubiquitous networks. Now! Made easy! With Ruby!
- Jaiku – rich presence (video)Ralph Meijer (Jaiku) The contacts list on your phone should tell you what your friends are doing, where they are, and what they're planning next. We're working to make this happen.
- RSS RemixingIan Davis (Talis) I'll demonstrate and explain a new ultra-simple protocol for augmenting search results with related content. We send the search results, asking the providers to add what they know about the items.
- Open Data in HTML: GRDDL, eRDF and RDFaElias Torres (IBM), Lee Feigenbaum (IBM) We will present technical approaches addressing the explosion of online information hidden in HTML pages today. This example-filled presentation will focus on the latest examples and implementations.
- Nabaztag and the Emergence of the Internet of Things (video)Rafi Haladjian (Violet) In the coming years, computers, phones and game consoles will no longer be the only devices in our environment deemed worthy to be intelligent and connected.
- Pipelines: Plumbing for the next webIan Forrester (BBC) The next web will be about flow, this flow will be user generated pipelines through applications and services. Unlike before these Pipelines will be definable, non-proprietary and shareable by anyone
- XForms, REST, XQuery…and skimmingMark Birbeck (x-port.net Ltd., W3C Invited Expert) 'skimming' is an approach to building loosely-coupled applications that can run on any server. Combining XForms, REST and XQuery, application development and deployment becomes extremely fast.
- Google Base, a mashups database for the REST of usJeffrey Scudder (Google) Google Base, a public data warehouse, is free to use and it has an API based on GData. I'll cover querying and inserting new items and discuss how Base can serve as a back end for mashups.
- Making Massive Datasets Universally Accessible and UsefulJon Trowbridge (Google, Inc.) A project is underway at Google to collect and distribute large scientific datasets using a 21st century “Sneakernet”: multi-terabyte disk arrays shipped via FedEx and other common carriers.
- Putting SVG and CDF to Use in an Internet Desktop ApplicationAntoine Quint (Joost) A look at how various client-side XML technologies, such as SVG and Compound Documents, are being put to use to build The Venice Project internet television application.
- Opening the Silos: sustainable models for open dataPaul Miller (Talis) Open Data is more than a religious debate. Increasingly, it makes good business sense. Come along to hear how.
- A proposal for a real revolution in 'user-generated content' and newsKevin Anderson (Guardian Unlimited) The media is fascinated with 'user-generated content', but the revolution starts if you use geo-tagging & tools like Twitter to allow 'citizen-journalists' to network for real-time reporting
- Security and REST Web Services Richard Mooney (Vordel) This session answers two questions: Are REST Web Services inherently insecure? How can a security model apply to both SOAP and REST Web Services?
- The Web EverywhereCharles McCathieNevile (Opera), Geir Pedersen (Opera), Håkon Wium Lie (Opera) This talk will look at innovations in making the Web available everywhere, and some of the changes that this can bring.
- 20:20 Lightning TalksMichael(tm) Smith (W3C), Deb Bassett (Urbanwide), Rob Lee (Kodefoo) A fast and fun session of talks of 20 slides, each presented for 20 seconds.
- Closing keynoteMatt Webb (Schulze and Webb) Closing keynote address.
I missed a few slots because of the late night drinking and talking with Molly, Gavin and others more that once. Most of the sessions I went to, I did video but its taking forever to upload all 2+ gigs of videos up to Blip.tv via FTP. I got a feeling the hotel might actually be crippling all ports except 80 and 443 because skype sounds like crap and my VPN to the house feels slower that it should be.
The hotel is a pretty nice hotel, a little pricey but its right on the river and just within walking distance from the Eiffel Tower. The conference felt a lot more tighter that the previous one I had been at (2005). Rooms all had plenty of power but wireless was a problem. It wasn't free which seems to be a theme for most conferences now, For the presenters a special code was given out.so they could get online without too much problem
Great work Edd and the other people who were involved. I look forward to Xtech next yeaar. I'm already thinking about a couple of new proposals.
