At O’Reilly, we like to think we’re focused on early adopters. But two New York Times articles yesterday, Tech Barons Take on Energy Policy and Silicon Valley Rebounds, Led by Green Technology, suggest we’re right in the middle of a tidal wave with our new Energy Innovation Conference. I’m a bit nervous with all this investor focus that some of the worldchanging approaches to energy generation, storage, distribution, conservation, and use that might emerge from non-commercial players might be overshadowed by hype and hungry VCs.
But this topic is so important that we want to get into the middle of it. It seems to me that many of the energy innovations we’re looking for are also computer innovations. Hybrid autos, for example, are as much a software innovation as they are an energy innovation.
We like to think that our audience has a lot to offer — and in fact we were inspired to launch this conference because we were seeing more and more people we run into turning from internet-enabled social media to the question of where the power to operate those Web 2.0 sites is going to come from. At a recent internal developer conference at a major Web 2.0 company, a surprising amount of time was spent discussing where to site new data centers for the cheapest power.
But while energy got our attention because of the dependency of our industry on it, we aren’t just looking for innovations that directly affect the computer industry or create new opportunities for it. My hope is that we’ll uncover people with surprising new approaches, people who will wake up “the usual suspects.” My model is our Where 2.0 Conference, which brought together old-timers from the GIS industry and people from the world of mashups, open source geo, and the like. One attendee made my day when he said, “I’ve been going to these kinds of conferences for years, and it’s always like old home week. But here, I’m saying, ‘Who are all these people?'” We managed to bring together people who’d not otherwise have had a chance to meet and cross-fertilize ideas.
