"etech08" entries
@ETech: Wednesday Morning Keynotes
Another day, another set of expansive keynotes. John McCarthy, father of LISP, a giant in artificial intelligence, gave a sit-down high-level talk about Elephant 2000, a proposed programming language intended for transaction processing and electronic data interchange. He described Elephant in terms of its ability to capture "speech acts," which I'll define roughly as words that lead to actions. (One…
@ETech: fire eagle Launches
Most of the Yahoo news these days is about its possible absorption by Microsoft, but there are still new projects coming out of the company. Right now Tom Coates is onstage at ETech, launching fire eagle, an open location information-brokering service. You can share your location online with sundry sites and services. It's liberal with what it takes in, but…
Today's ETech Hack is Tomorrow's Critical Infrastructure…
My friend Jordan Schwartz just gave me the perfect example of how quickly a cool hack can turn into Critical Infrastructure. Jordan wrote "How to build an SMS Service" and created SwaggleSMS as a demonstration of how to do group chat with SMS. It's a hack that he created as an experiment (it's super-useful for conference afterparty coordination). Jordan…
@ETech: Tuesday Morning Keynotes
Saul Griffith started the day with a sober, but ultimately hopeful, talk about energy literacy. The subtitle of the talk was "know what you can do, do what you can," and the core of his talk (we'll point to the slides when we get 'em) was the steps we need to take, individually and collectively, to be able to have…