Registration is open for the Emerging Technology Conference 2007

I’m thrilled to announce that registration is now open for the 2007 edition of the O’Reilly Emerging Technology Conference. ETech is being held once again in beautiful San Diego, California on March 26-29, 2007.

This year’s theme is “Sufficiently advanced technology”, in reference of course to Arthur C. Clarke’s third law of prediction: “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.”

In 2007, we expect Internet access to be instant, music collections to fit into our pockets, and communication to be constant no matter where we are. Technology is tightly woven into our lives; so well-integrated at times we scarcely notice it. And yet, there are innovators, hackers, and thinkers in our midst plotting revolutions — in some cases, simply by reexamining the assumptions underlying the technology we take for granted today. We’ll be examining those technologies that have silently slipped into the realm of magic (Did anyone notice that the dream of ubiquitous wifi access actually happened?) as well as those on the verge of doing so (Wii, anyone?).

We’ve already lined up an exceptional set of tutorials including a Community Marketing workshop with Tara Hunt; MMO game-building with the creators of Puzzle Pirates; Applied Web Heresies with my favorite heretic, Avi Bryant; Scott Berkin’s Innovating on Time; Amy Jo Kim’s application of gaming mechanics to social software (a stellar session last year, now a tutorial); and the return of Kathy Sierra with more on creating passionate users and Marc Hedlund on entrepreneuring for geeks.

And our speaker’s list ranges from Mental Math (just because it’s solvable doesn’t mean it isn’t any less magical) with mathemagician Arthur Benjamin to the coming age of magic with user-experience expert Mike Kuniavsky; Lee Felsenstein’s talking paper to BBC New Media’s Tom Loosemore’s work on a 7-day record-everything DVR.

We’re still building the program — and will be until the last possible moment to bring you the freshest, most up-to-date and interesting people, projects, and technologies we can — so please do drop me a line with any suggestions you might have about what you’d like to see in the program.

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