Yesterday was the first day of ETech and the coverage is rolling in. Some of the notable posts that I have found are:
Phil Windley’s Applied Web Heresies: ETech 2007 – Phil gives a thorough synopsis of the talk and even includes some of his own code examples. As he puts it:
The basis for the talk is Seaside, a web framework for Smalltalk that Avi wrote several years ago. The problem with Seaside is you’re not going to use it! There are a lot of interesting ideas in Seaside that people should know, so this tutorial is way of spreading the ideas outside of Smalltalk.
Here are the slides.
Phil Windley’s Coder to Co-Founder: Etech Tutorial – Phil supplies another incredibly thorough synopsis (again with his own valuable commentary) of Marc Hedlund’s Coder to Co-Founder: Entrepreneuring for Geeks. Here are some snippets:
Something from Nothing: Marc makes the point that being employee number one for a company is easier than being the founder because being employee number one implies something’s already there—a name, an idea, money, and so on. You should work on the idea that won’t leave you alone.
Build what you know: Mark recently started wesabe, an online money management tool. He knew about the idea because he knew plenty of people, including himself, who needed help managing money—and knew what didn’t work.
Keeping secrets from the market: If you keep your secrets from the market, it will keep it’s secrets from you. Be inclined to be open about your idea. This doesn’t inoculate you from people stealing your ideas, but the benefits outweigh the downside. You certainly need to have secrets, but don’t keep secrets in areas you need feedback from people. [Brady’s note: This is one of my favorite things about working at O’Reilly. We’re a relatively open business; it’s one of my favorite changes from working at Microsoft.]
Competition: Entrepreneurs are unduly scared off by competition. All that matters is if you are better than the others.
Explain yourself: tell your idea to the taxi driver and other people you run into. Perfect your elevator pitch and you’ll perfect your idea. He tells the story of the founder of del.icio.us who found out from talking to people that most people don’t call bookmarks “bookmarks” but “favorites” because of IE’s influence.
Phil Windley’s O’Reilly Radar: ETech 2007 – Tim gave his annual talk last night about the things on his radar. One big thing is increasing speed and decreasing price of manufacturing. This enables Chumby to make their hardware as cheap as possible. It allows Threadless to start to move beyond t-shirts and expand into user created wallpaper and ties on Naked and Angry. Phil has more details.
Chris Lott’s Etech Tutorial: Innovating On Time – Chris provides us his notes. Here are some snippets:
It helps to define innovation (my thought: it’s like pornography- hard to define, but I know it when I see it). His simple definition: to begin or introduce something for the first time.
Innovation is always relative.
Being better, more efficient, different- even winning- can all be done without innovating.
Here is Scott’s own scoop on the topic.
Artific and Tech~Surf~Blog also have some coverage. Wired’s Epicenter is liveblogging (including a recapping of some of this morning’s keynotes). If there are other particularly good posts please leave them in the comments.