Call it a Davos for geeks.
But unlike the exclusive economic forum held each year in Switzerland, the O'Reilly Emerging Technology Conference is open to anyone who can pony up the considerable price of admission.
Those who do make it to the confab in Santa Clara, California, which starts Wednesday, will participate in wide-ranging discussions about the future of technology with the likes of Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos and futurist Howard Rheingold.
"It's a three-day jam session for geeks," said Cory Doctorow, a sci-fi writer and blogger who helped organize the conference. "It's a brainstorm. It's all the really exciting, novel ideas and approaches to technology."
Organized by the tech publishing house O'Reilly and Associates, the conference runs through April 25 at the Westin Hotel in Santa Clara, California.
Now in its second year, the conference is an umbrella symposium for all the brand-new, up-and-coming technologies that may or may not make a dent on the future. It is one of the primary gatherings of all the geeks and nerds busy inventing tomorrow, and those seeking to make a buck off their ideas.
Never mind if you're nowhere near Northern California: It is probably the most blogged event on the planet. Befitting a gathering of nerds, everyone is huddled over their laptops all day, furiously reporting the event to the masses in cyberspace.
Thanks to "trackback" links, most of what is published online about the various sessions can be found on the Conference News page.
The conference is based on the notion by Tim O'Reilly, O'Reilly's founder and CEO, that the future is best predicted by watching what the "alpha geeks" are up to. O'Reilly believes that technological innovation comes from people toiling in the trenches, not the CEOs of big corporations.
"It's what the people at O'Reilly are following," said Rael Dornfest, the conference chair. "It's what we find cool and fascinating and interesting.… It's what the whippersnappers are up to."
In that vein, most of the conference's 70 or more talks, seminars and tutorials are given by people who aren't yet household names. A mind-boggling array of topics are under discussion, from competitive coding to virtual worlds as testing grounds for "real life."
But the household names are there. Bezos, for example, can be seen wandering from session to session. He's not there to talk up Amazon, but to find out which future technologies may have an impact on his business.
Also in attendance are tech luminaries like Stewart Brand, Ray Ozzie, Larry Wall, Esther Dyson and lots of executives and technologists from most of Silicon Valley's big name companies.
"We'll see who turns up," said Dornfest. "It's always a surprise."
Unlike Comdex or Macworld, there's no schilling of the latest wares. No cavernous, cacophonous exhibit halls full of companies shrieking for attention. It's all about ideas.
The conference is divided into tracks: rich Internet applications (formerly known as Web services), social software like blogs and RSS feeds, nanotechnology and hardware, and a couple of loose buckets called "untethered" and "emerging topics."
Keynote speeches come from the likes of Rheingold, author of Smart Mobs, who will talk about the social implications of millions of cell phones and peer-to-peer connected PCs.
Personal computing pioneer Alan Kay will discuss why computers won't take off until kids have mastered them. And Eric Bonabeau, an expert in swarm intelligence, will talk about social insects and their lessons for the business world.
Those unable to attend can check out a conference Wiki page, an interactive document that anyone can add to or edit. Interested parties can also try a real-time IRC channel (irc://irc.freenode.net/etcon) and check a log of the conversation online. Various panopticon-type instant messaging tools are also available, like Confab, which helps attendees find each other in a virtual version of the Westin Hotel and converse over the airwaves.
All the blogging, instant messaging, e-mailing and plain old face-to-face conversation means a lot to keep track of.
"There are lots of different levels of conversation," said Dornfest. "It's fun, but it's also hard to keep up with."
