Drew Blas posts this excellent, in-depth summation of Friday night at RailsConf. Blas reports on Charles Nutter’s talk “The Sun you don’t know,” the winners of the Ruby Hero awards, and contributes a thoughtful, detailed exploration of David Heinemeier Hansson’s thought-provoking keynote.
Paul Krill reports on Microsoft’s demonstration of their new Silveright browser plug-in technology at RailsConf this year.
Scott M. Fulton, III examines the ramifications and implications of Twitters recent technical problems.
Two weeks ago, following the rapid spread of rumors that the Twitter service — recently besieged with technical troubles — may be abandoning the Ruby on Rails development platform in building a replacement platform for itself, the company’s co-founder Biz Stone flat out refuted those rumors in a comment to BetaNews.
Savio Rodrigues reports on Engin Yard’s Rubinius project which previewed at RailsConf.
What’s interesting is that since Ruby doesn’t really have a specification, it’s difficult to say that platform xyz is not a compatible implementation of a Ruby runtime. In response, Rubinius decided to create a test suite that could help standardize Ruby as a language across the growing number of VM implementations for Ruby.
Henry Work reports on the FiveRuns launch– TuneUp, a “social debugging tool for Rails applications.”
Glenn Latham reports on his experiences and observations at Where 2.0, including some of his favorite job titles.
Sheeri K. Cabral has posted extensive photoes, video, slides, and notes from last April’s conference.
TechCrunch picked up on Frank Taylor’s post about the coolest things he saw at Where 2.0, including this demo from Gold sponsor Earthscape:
Where 2.0 happened May 12-14 at the San Francisco Airport Marriot just south of the city. This annual event, now in its 4th year, is a strange mix of grassroots geo-enthusiasts and entrepreneurial geo-hackers. Where 2.0 is primarily a developer’s conference, so the majority of time and certainly the focus was on tools and how they function and less on how these tools are being used. (Or not being used. For the most part, location apps are in beta.) There was definitely the Field of Dream feeling “build it and they will come.” The exceptions were the tools and apps in the social activism thread.
We’re starting the preparations to launch the 2009 edition of Money:Tech, and to that end we’ve started posting select video from the inaugural 2008 event, including this VC panel led by program chair Paul Kedrosky:
Michael Bauer provides a thoughtful and detailed summary on this year’s conference:
A number of other notable presentations included Sam Altman at Loopt, the provider of a mobile location client for different devices and carriers noted their growth, focus on privacy, and the move towards subscription models for mobile location. Sean Gorman from FortiusOne provided an update on the GeoCommons and how its interacting with FreeBase, OpenLocation, and MapMixer. Mok Oh from Everyscape presented looking at the inside of spaces like malls as well using different anonymous individual tracking techniques.
Don Jewell contributes these posts on his experience at Where 2.0, noting the unique and effective format that this conference follows:
It does not matter whether you are the president of Microsoft, the CEO of ESRI, or the president of a two man start-up, you only get 15 minutes and indeed this year some have only 10 and some as little as five minutes to tell their story. But you know it works, because it cuts out all the fluff. In the Marketing Business, one of the first things you learn is that you have to have your elevator speech or your five-minute spiel down pat and that is what we are hearing at Where 2.0 and it is refreshing. None of the fluff, just the Joe Friday facts, ma’am.
Great coverage from Frank Taylor at Google Earth Blog:
Where 2.0 - Day 1
Google Geo Search API, ESRI and Google Collaborate
Where 2.0 2008 - Day 2 - Tuesday
Where 2.0 2008 - Day 3 - Wednesday
Select sessions from GSP West are going up on blip.tv. Check out Charlene Li’s kick-off presentation:
If you’re thinking of heading over to GSP East, this footage should give you a pretty good idea of the kinds of content and people you’ll encounter.
Last Friday, BW posted this excerpt from BW columnist Sarah Lacy’s book, describing how the co-founder of Netscape backs a social networking site named Ning.
Rodney Rumford (on FaceReviews.com, a GSP East Media Partner) posts this enthusiastic preview of the conference: “If you have not had a chance to attend these events because you did not want to travel all the way to the west coast now is your chance to hit GSP in DC. These events bring together the sharpest minds in the industry for 3 days.”
Rafe Needleman contributes a great run-down on “the Webware takeaway on the most interesting of the dozen apps” at Monday night’s Launchpad.
Stephen Lawson posts this on “Nokia’s next generation of mobile-phone navigation technology, Nokia Maps 2.0″ launched Monday, at the Where 2.0 Conference.
Adam Jacob joins Velocity program co-chair Jesse Robbins for a discussion around automated infrastructure, iClassify, and Puppet on IT Conversations’ Technometria series with Phil Windley.
Chris Nuttall posts this, detailing Adrian Holovaty’s presentation, “EveryBlock: A News Feed for Your Block,” and John Hanke and Jack Dangermond’s “The State of the Geoweb.”
OMX, the first-ever O’Reilly Open Mobile Exchange, is for everyone involved in building out the open source mobile space, including platforms, standards, applications, hardware, integration, browsers, location, and services. This full day of insightful conversations, demos, technical presentations, and panel discussions brings together innovators from a broad swath of perspectives and backgrounds to share ideas and foster new thinking across technologies. Mobile guru Jeff Waugh is the OMX program chair–he’s putting together an agenda that will thoroughly explore the nexus of mobile and open source.
We’re looking forward to the Frank Taylor’s coverage at Where this year, he posts this on Seero:
Seero is a new service which offers geo-spatially aware video content in either Google Maps or Google Earth. You can even watch the position of a video broadcast change during the playback of the content, or you can do your own broadcasts.
Up Next, who participated in last years Launch Pad, are at Where again:
This year we going as observers and look forward to hearing from a great roster of speakers and seeing some interesting demos.
“We’ve covered Whrrl, and several of its competitors, already on Webware,” writes Rafe Needleman, “but with the Where 2.0 conference coming up next week, I thought it’d be interesting to dive into this product just a bit more, since it represents some very interesting trends that are central to the creation of location-aware apps.”
Mashable posts this on Seero’s upcoming debut, “Seero is hoping to stand out from the growing realm of live-streaming widgets by being among the first to launch a GPS-enabled widget stream.”
Nicole Ferraro reported on conference highlights:
Vysr Beats Yahoo to the Punch With RoamAbout
What’s Next for Social Platforms?
Tim O’Reilly: Web 2.0 Is Not Over
Yahoo: Social Is Dimension, Not Destination
MySpace Talks Apps & Facebook (But Not Yahoo)
Fake Steve Jobs Invades Web 2.0 Expo
Searching for the Next Search Engine
Slideshow: Web 2.0 Expo
The prolific Juan Carlos Perez reports that “Marc Andreessen had no idea that the Mosaic browser he co-developed would kick off the Web revolution and become such an enduring and important piece of software.”
Juan Carlos Perez reports on Expo, starting with the great opening line:
D. Mark Hornung is attending this week’s Web 2.0 Expo because he doesn’t want to get hit by a tsunami.
Where 2.0 program chair Brady Forrest rounds up geo activities: “Where 2.0 starts next week on May 12th, but that’s not evening the beginning of the geo-related activities that some people are calling ‘Where Week.’”
Bernardo Parrella reports on the conference: Prosegue l’abbraccio tra socialità online e mondo high-tech, mentre al Web 2.0 Expo di San Francisco Tim O’Reilly mette in guardia contro il “lato oscuro” della Rete…
More international coverage of several conference highlights in FayerWayer, Dosis diarias de tecnología en español.™
Velocity conference co-chair Steve Souders recently participated in a webcast on “Even Faster Web Sites”:
Caroline McCarthy contrasts the revelry of Web Expo parties with the more cautious tone of the conference itself in this post:
The economic attitude of the Web 2.0 Expo hangs in an awkward limbo: The tech industry relies on innovation, but no one can deny that these economic times demand caution. What’s a geek to do?
Mitch Wagner, on FriendFeed:
So I took a break from Web 2.0 Expo to get some alone time with my laptop and FriendFeed. Yes, I am aware of the irony: I have traveled all this way to a conference saturated with social networks, and I left the conference to connect with a social network.
Therese Polleti contributes this article on the shaky future for Web startups:
Comments from savvy executives like Andreessen and a pep talk given by Web 2.0’s Tim O’Reilly, are signals of the tough road awaiting Internet companies looking for venture funding…
