Select Conference News

Program chairs Jesse Robbins and Steve Souders have just unveiled the schedule for the second edition of Velocity, the web performance and operations conference. Building on the very successful premiere of the event last year, Velocity will feature some of the most talented experts in the business, giving all participants the skills and knowledge they need to raise their game and beef up the bottom line–critical functions in this down economy.

A sampling of the speakers and topics on the agenda include:

• Luke Kanies (Reductive Labs), Introduction to Managed Infrastructure with Puppet
• Mandi Walls (AOL), Migrating www.aol.com from a Proprietary Web Platform to Open Source
• John Allspaw and Paul Hammond (Flickr), 10+ Deploys Per Day: Dev and Ops Cooperation at Flickr
• Bill Scott (Netflix), Event Delegation: Speeding Up the Netflix Queue
• Douglas Crockford (Yahoo!), Ajax Performance
• Richard Campbell (Strangeloop Networks), Death of a Web Server: Crisis in Caching
• Jeremy Zawodny (Craigslist), MySQL Performance from Day #1
• John Adams (Twitter), Fixing Twitter: Improving Its Performance and Scalability
• Stoyan Stefanov (Yahoo!), YSlow 2.0
• Robert Johnson (Facebook), High Performance at Massive Scale - Lessons Learned at Facebook
• Nicole Sullivan, Nine Ways Engineering and Design Come Together to Make Your Site Slow
• Nicholas Zakas (Yahoo!), Writing Efficient JavaScript

New to Velocity 2009 is a full day of workshops, which will immerse participants more deeply into essential issues for making websites fast, scalable, efficient, and available.

Registration is also open; the early registration discount ends May 4.

Program Teaches How to Build a Better Internet

Sebastopol, CA, March 5, 2009—O’Reilly Media has opened early registration for Velocity, the Web Performance and Operations Conference on June 22-24, 2009, at the Fairmont in San Jose, CA. Program chairs Jesse Robbins and Steve Souders have revealed the program for this three-day event dedicated to helping people build better infrastructures. Early registration savings of up to $300 end May 3, 2009.

Velocity provides the place to learn how to build websites and services that raise the standards for fast, scalable, efficient, and reliable performance. Velocity 2009 focuses on accomplishing more with fewer resources, efficient design and scaling techniques, and the best ways to manage change. The program also highlights best practices in performance and operations that improve the user experience as well as the company’s bottom line.

Read the full press release.

Innovation Transforms How Readers Receive Content

Sebastopol, CA, March 2, 2009 - The O’Reilly Tools of Change for Publishing Conference, held February 9-11, 2009 in New York City, highlighted the many dynamic possibilities ahead for publishers who embrace a digital future. At the heart of the world’s publishing capital, TOC showcased the tools, the business models, and the knowledge that publishers need to succeed in a changing landscape. The conference deciphered trends and technologies that can keep the industry profitable and more connected to readers.

In a time when naysayers question publishing’s very survival, TOC showed the industry how to flourish.

Featured keynotes included one by Tim O’Reilly, CEO and founder of O’Reilly Media, who gave conference-goers reasons to stay excited and optimistic about the future of publishing. Nick Bilton, who explores technologies for The New York Times R&D Labs, talked about the future of news. Bob Stein, executive director of the Institute for the Future of the Book, said books are no longer objects but instead are becoming places where readers and authors congregate. Other keynote speakers included Chris Baty of NaNoWriMo, Peter Brantley of Digital Library Federation, Neelan Choksi of Lexcycle, Cory Doctorow of Happy Mutants LLC, Jason Epstein of On Demand Books, Jason Fried of 37signals, Jeff Jarvis of Buzzmachine.com, Sara Lloyd of Pan Macmillan, and Nina Paley of Nina Paley Productions.

Read the full press release.

O’Reilly contributing editor James Turner has been busy conducting a series of interviews with ETech speakers as the conference draws nigh. In addition to great insight about the wide-ranging topics ETech will cover this year, there have been some amazing, spirited discussions in the comments section of each post. Check ‘em out:

• Creating Biological Legos with Reshma Shetty of Ginkgo BioWorks; her ETech presentation is Real Hackers Program DNA
• Science Commons Wants Data to Be Free with Creative Commons’ John Wilbanks; his ETech presentation is Uncommon Knowledge and Open Innovation: Building a Science Commons
• Inside Factory China with Andrew “bunnie” Huang of Chumby Industries; his ETech presentation is Out of China: Manufacturing the Chumby
• Why LCD is the Cool New Technology All Over Again with Mary Lou Jepson of Pixel Qi; her ETech presentation is Low-Cost, Low-Power Computing

We’re looking forward to hearing from these and many other incisive, forward-thinking speakers in person at the event. Like the Radar comments, the in-person conversation is bound to be diverse and enlightening.

In other ETech news, we’re offering a new incentive to attend the conference: a 40% “Friends & Family” discount–that translates into savings of over $500. We know times are tough and many people who want to and should be at ETech simply can’t afford it. We hope this offer will help! To take advantage of this discount, use et09ffd in the discount code field when you register.

We are giving all of the attendees at ETech RFID tags that can be linked to their conference profiles (opt-in). With these tags you can interact with several projects we’ll have at the conference. BTW, ETech is happening March 9-12 in San Jose. Use et09pd30 at checkout for 30% off.

We were inspired to do this after I attended PICNIC in 2008 (Radar post) and got to experience first-hand the many, many uses of an RFID badge. Mediamatic linked your profile to it and that information was used to record your experiences. We got help from Mediamatic on our implementation and even used the same vendor.

If you make it to ETech here are the projects you can play with:

Lensley’s Photobooth: Leonard Lin’s new project is Lensley, a high-end photobooth with online photo-services integration. He’s creating a special version just for ETech that will tag photos with your name and tweet that you’ve just had one taken.

Personal Calendar: Radar’s own Edd Dumbill is the fellow behind the profile APIs. He is going to create a project that will show attendees their personal calendar at a public kiosk.

ETech Prophet: Josh and Tarikh of Uncommon Projects (they made the cool Yahoo! geo-bike) are adding an element of play to their project. They sent me a mail describing it as: “Essentially, we’d like to make an “Etech Prophet” a kind of mechanical turk idea (perhaps in another form factor)–you wave your RFID fob, it gesticulates, makes a noise and sends you your pithy fortune via twitter”

People Collector: This is a favorite of mine. Business cards are a waste of time and paper. I just want the person’s email address. Nothing else. The People Collector will be a mobile device that people can use to exchange contact information with other attendees. When you meet someone just wave your fob over their People Collector and a message will be sent to both of you. The People Collector will be built in Tom Igoe and Brian Jepson’s Hands-On RFID Workshop on 3/9.

Pulse: Attendees will be able to check-in to locations (this is all voluntary!). Overtime the system will build up information about attendees through their actions and will be able to generate a heatmap for the hotel. This project is being built by Alexander Biscelgie and Nick Sears.

Do you have something that you want to make? Let me know in the comments or find me on Twitter. We are still looking for projects.

Governmental policy and regulation can be tech’s Achilles heal. It can also create a business model. Love it or hate it if you want to get big you can’t ignore the government. With a new administration (and financial crash) there’s a change happening and we need to pay attention.

At ETech we have a number of talks that focus on policy and what you can expect. ETech is happening March 9-12 in San Jose. Use et09pd30 at checkout for 30% off. Here are just some of the policy-oriented talks:

I Just Don’t Trust You: How the Tech Community Can Reinvent Risk Ratings

Toby Segaran (Metaweb), Jesper Andersen (Open Data Group)

Financial technology - something we all thought was complete - has been upended. Fundamental assumptions have been exposed as faulty. And now we have the opportunity to recreate our finance industry from the bottom up. We have a choice: a path of openness and information sharing, or more opacity and secrecy.

Your Energy Identity and Why You Should Care

Gavin Starks (AMEE)

As we progress to a post-scarcity society, either you’ll measure your consumption or someone else will. More data is becoming accessible than has ever existed. Whether driven by climate change, peak oil or economic change, sustainability is now a fundamental factor of your business and your life. We’ll unpack and map the dramatic changes coming to industry, markets, politics - and you.

Building a New Biology

Drew Endy (Stanford & The BioBricks Foundation (BBF)), David Grewal (Harvard & BBF), Jason Schultz (Samuelson Law, Technology & Public Policy Clinic, UC Berkeley School of Law)

Three leaders in the technology and law of synthetic biology will present a crisp and accessible briefing on new cooperative efforts to make tens of thousands of open source standardized DNA parts. Discussion to follow.

Mr. Hacker Goes to Washington

Greg Elin (Sunlight Foundation)

Want to help fix democracy? Hackers, those crazy Utopian dreamers with DIY attitudes, have begun a sustained assault on government with projects like the Sunlight Foundation, OpenCongress, GovTrack, Watchdog.net, FedSpending, MySociety, and Public.Resource. The goal?

Sensors tell us about the physical world and allow us (or machines) to make informed decisions. As sensors become more ubiquitous what will we be able to learn from them? What will we be able to do with them?

At ETech we have a number of talks that demonstrate sensors effect on news, sports, office environments, cities and art. ETech is happening March 9-12 in San Jose. Use et09pd30 at checkout for 30% off. Here are just some of the sensor-oriented talks:

Sensors, Smart Content and The Future of News

Nick Bilton (The New York Times R&D Labs)

We are currently in a time when sharing and social networks are changing the way we consume editorialized media and the definition of ‘content’ is increasingly blurred. In the R&D Labs at The New York Times we are exploring some of the questions around how we will consume information in the next 2 to 20 years.

Building the Programmable Environment: Co-Design and Physical/Digital Space Making

Jennifer Magnolfi (Herman Miller)

The design and production of physical/digital spaces is at the heart of what we call the Programmable Environment. Instead of environments complete and fixed in time, subject to renovation or demolition when their purpose is no longer relevant, the result is a spatial system designed to evolve over time, in interaction with the users who inhabit it.

Urban Futures

Chris Luebkeman (Arup)

When we look at the world around us we see many examples of places and spaces that we both love and hate. What would you ‘cut and paste’ from different parts of your city to create the ideal sustainable urban environment? Arup have spent a number of years discussing what the eco-city would need to look like if we are going to move towards an Ecological Age.

Making Art with Lasers, Sensors and the Net

Aaron Koblin (Google)

Aaron Koblin will discuss the process of turning data into visual expression. As Director of Technology on Radiohead’s latest music video for “House of Cards,” he worked with sensor technologies as an alternative to traditional video. Aaron will also discuss his role at Google’s Creative Lab in San Francisco, and discuss some of his other data-visualization software.

The Greatest Virtual Marathon: Computing and Materials in Sports

Michael Tchao (Nike Techlab)

The greatest sports athletes’ records live and die by their hi-tech gear. They use new swimsuits like the razor to shave seconds off their laps and sensors like the Nike+ to record their training. Michael Tchao of Nike Labs and will share with us the process behind these creations and the new materials and technology that make them happen.

Mobile Phones Reveal the Behavior of Places and People

Tony Jebara (Columbia University & Sense Networks)

As more of us generate GPS data with our mobile phones, how can this aggregated information give us an unprecedented new understanding of the people, places, and rhythms that make up our cities? Location data combined with learning algorithms lets us cluster different places and people into social categories and tribes.

Who wants to be stuck just working in software? At ETech we’re going to discuss domestic and overseas manufacturing, the latest materials and open-source electronics for creating the physical computing device of your dreams. Here are some of the talks:

Holistic Service Prototyping: Sketching Hardware and Software

Matt Cottam (Tellart, Rhode Island School of Design and Umeå Institute of Design), Maia Garau (Dynamic Diagrams), Jasper Speicher (Tellart LLC), Brian Hinch (Tellart)

The Economist has defined services as “products of economic activity that you can’t drop on your foot.” Where businesses once viewed services as a necessary but inconvenient accompaniment to their product offerings, they now increasingly look to designers to develop holistic, human-centered and innovative service solutions that can help expand profits and cement brand loyalty. Read more.

LilyPad Electronic Fashion

Leah Buechley (MIT Media Lab)

Come build a shirt that sings when you’re squeezed, a purse that sounds an alarm when someone touches it or a jacket that shines and sparkles at your command. This workshop will guide you through the process of building an interactive garment that incorporates touch sensors, light, and sound

Printing in 3D

Zach Smith (RepRap Research Foundation)

An exciting 3 hour workshop led by Zach Smith featuring RepRap, the open source self-replicating 3D printer. The workshop will consist of discussions of the RepRap technology, 3D printing and digital fabrication techniques, and 3D modeling. We’ll also have the RepRap fired up and making your creations real.

High-Low Tech: Democratizing Engineering and Design

Leah Buechley (MIT Media Lab)

People knit scarves and solder radios together in their homes and garages. In contrast, companies produce high-tech things by high-tech processes. A host of new tools is making many of the resources previously available only to companies accessible to individuals, empowering people to design, engineer, and build devices that integrate high and low technology

Socializing Stuff: a Wireless Objects Workshop

Rob Faludi (NYU)

Objects are beginning to socialize. A new era of low-bandwidth, low-power wireless networks is enabling a revolution in device communications. In this DIY session we’ll insert you into those conversations and introduce you to device communications technology that could change our homes, cars and clothes.

Hands-On RFID for Makers

Tom Igoe (Interactive Telecommunications Program, NYU), Brian Jepson (O’Reilly Media, Inc.)

Ever wanted to get a real understanding of how RFID works? In this workshop, you’ll learn about the different classes of RFID devices. We’ll discuss what RFID can and can’t do, what devices are already on the market, and what kinds of future applications are possible. $70 materials fee required.

Out of China: Manufacturing the Chumby

Andrew “bunnie” Huang (Chumby Industries)

China is one of the US’s biggest trading partners, and is one of the premier regions for manufacturing electronic goods of all types. When startup Chumby Industries needed to migrate their US-built chumby device prototypes to production, they sent bunnie to China to build the chumby supply chain.

New Materials

Andrew Dent (Material ConneXion, Inc.)

True innovation in materials takes on many forms, and for 80% of the worlds population means the effective use of often scarce resources. ‘Technology Transfer’, a term used to refer to the process of converting academic research into useable products, is just as important when between the developing and the developed world or between two disparate industries.

Sebastopol, CA, February 3, 2009 - You can’t go anywhere or do anything these days without finding one map or another, but location technology continues to grow far beyond those tools. See all the other directions location tech might take at the O’Reilly Where 2.0 Conference, May 19-21, 2009 in San Jose, CA. Program chair Brady Forrest has revealed the program, and registration has opened. An early registration discount remains available until March 31.

Now in its fifth year, the Where 2.0 Conference claims the space where developers building location-aware technology intersect with the businesses and entrepreneurs looking for location apps, platforms, and hardware to give them a competitive edge. Where 2.0 delves into the emerging technologies surrounding the geospatial industry and asks the crucial questions.

Read the full press release.

Tim O’Reilly with O’Reilly Insights in Forbes.com:

Don’t look for the gilded road to fortune. Look for passion.

Forget Silicon Valley. Traditional wisdom is that it represents the model for American innovation: a hotbed of young entrepreneurs with easy access to capital from a large pool of savvy investors.

Read more.

Mobile is alive at ETech this year. We’re featuring talks on location, sensors, multi-screen worlds and developing markets. Here are some of them:

txteagle: Crowd-Sourcing on Mobile Phones in the Developing World

Nathan Eagle (MIT)

txteagle is a mobile crowd-sourcing application that will be launching in Kenya on the Safaricom network. It enables people to earn and save small amounts of money by completing simple tasks on their phones for companies who pay them either in airtime or cash. https://txteagle.com

Mobile Phones Reveal the Behavior of Places and People

Tony Jebara (Columbia University & Sense Networks)

As more of us generate GPS data with our mobile phones, how can this aggregated information give us an unprecedented new understanding of the people, places, and rhythms that make up our cities? Location data combined with learning algorithms lets us cluster different places and people into social categories and tribes.

Sustainable Design for a Multiscreen, Info-Overloaded World

Kevin Lynch (Adobe Systems Incorporated)

Understanding how humans can better interact with and consume information is critical as we work to solve the increasingly complex challenges before us. Adobe CTO Kevin Lynch will explore three aspects that will shape the next generation of computing applications.

Enabling Citizen Science

Eric Paulos (Carnegie Mellon University)

From communication tool to “networked mobile personal measurement instrument”. Mobile phones as “personal measurement instruments” enable an entirely novel and empowering genre of computing usage called citizen science. Through the use of sensors paired with personal mobile phones, citizens are invited to participate in collecting and sharing measurements of their environment that matter most

Shared and Sometimes Stealthy: Urban India’s Mobile Phone

Molly Steenson (Princeton University School of Architecture)

We typically think of the mobile phone as a device belonging to and used by an individual. Yet in urban India, people share their mobile phones in unique ways, regardless of class and depending on where they are in the city

The schedule for the 2009 edition of Where 2.0 went up late last week. Yes, I’m biased, but for the fifth year in a row it’s shaping up to be another stellar experience.

One of the best things about Where 2.0 is that it’s a mix of the practical (cartography, local search, data management) and inspirational (augmented reality, 3D imagery, crowdsourcing). It’s not easy to meld the skill building with the visionary, particularly in a single-track conference, so props to program chair Brady Forrest and his program committee for making that happen.

Some highlights:

• Workshops are a little shorter this year (75 minutes vs. 3 hours in 2008) and more plentiful, giving attendees more topics to choose from
• Local Search: Funding Geo–Danny Sullivan (Search Engine Land) will share his thinking on the latest advances across all of the search engines
• Indigenous Mappers–Rebecca Moore (Google) has been working closely with indigenous tribes to put their data online, a difficult but rewarding experience
• Maps in Space–the always entertaining Chris Spurgeon (spurgeonworld.com) gives a fun-filled overview of some of the techniques we use to find our way in space
• Mobiles Around the World–Nokia’s Michael Halbherr shares the latest news on geo-aware web apps
• The Shape of Alpha–Aaron Cope (Flickr) answers the question: If all of Flickr’s 100+ million geotagged photos were plotted on a map would there be enough data to generate a mostly accurate contour of that place?

More is on the way as Brady and company continue their work on the agenda. For those interested in attending, the early registration discount is currently in effect.

Sebastopol, CA, January 26, 2009 - Want to see Rails 3 roll out? O’Reilly Media and Ruby Central have opened registration for RailsConf 2009, happening May 4-7, 2009, at the Las Vegas Hilton. RailsConf, the official event for the Ruby on Rails community, will showcase the latest developments in the merger of Rails and Merb into Rails 3.

RailsConf, co-presented by Ruby Central, Inc. and O’Reilly Media, Inc., is the largest official conference dedicated to everything Rails. Innovative and successful Rails experts and companies interact at RailsConf through keynotes, sessions, tutorials, panels, and events. The conference provides attendees with examples of business models, development paradigms, and design strategies which enable new arrivals to the Web and Rails to take advantage of this new generation of services and opportunities.

Read the full press release.

ETech is a technologist’s playground. We specifically design the conference to expose new ideas and learn from the people behind them. This year the focus is on how the way we live is changing — through policy, technology and ideas. The proliferation of sensors, advances in materials and manufacturing, the changes in government and the financial market will all have a profound effect on our industry.

ETech is a four-day conference that runs from March 9-12 in San Jose, CA. Early registration ends on Monday. Use et09rad at checkout for an additional 10% off (this will work even after early registration pricing ends).

ETech is a broad conference. The first day is filled with three-hour tutorials that range in topics from Refactoring Your Wetware (by Andy Hunt), Lilypad Arduino (was sold-out, but we were able to free up some new spots), an RFID-Arduino project, mapping with Stamen Design, 3D printing with the Reprap, and programming with MIT’s Scratch. The following three days will be mix of plenary and breakout sessions. Here’s a listing of all the talks and speakers. They’ll be focused on:

• One of the major focuses is on the changing tech of cities - how sensors can track the real time city to how mobile phones can reveal habits of its citizens to Dubai’s new location-aware playground.
• It’s not just cities exploring the use of sensors, companies like the New York Times will share how they have been exploring their use in content delivery, Herman Miller is examining worker controlled sensors in the workplace, and Nike Techlab’s has already selling sensor-laiden fitness equipment. Wired’s Gary Wolf will expand on the Quantified Self and how personal sensors can teach us about ourselves.
• Many entrepreneurs are moving from virtual goods to physical ones. Bunnie Huang is going to lead a session on manufacturing in China, in another we’ll learn about a new high-tech system for manufacturing chocolate. On Monday there is a workshop on 3D printing at home with the Reprap. Tom Igoe will examine where items go at the end of their lifecycle.
• New materials are being developed that will change what products can be built, what biomaterials can be sourced and how flexible screens will be developed in the coming years.
• We’re not turning a blind eye to politics and finances this year. We’re taking a geeks-eye view at credit risk and the financial markets, at the money in politics, and synthetic biology policy.
• We can’t ignore engergy this year. There’s a chance for America to become sustainable, for an electric grid to change the tech industry, for each of us to own our energy identity and how we can crowdsource energy-awareness.
• Constraints drive innovation and we can look to developing markets to find progress in action (such as the Playpower 8-bit computer from India). We’ll learn about healthcare clinics and mobile versions of Mechanical Turk in Africa. Julian Bleecker of Nokia will share how fictional worlds can help us create new designs.

I hope to see you there.

I’ve been involved in the MySQL Conference & Expo ever since O’Reilly partnered with MySQL for the event in 2005. I *heart* this event for many reasons:

• it’s a tightly focused, deep dive into a very specific technology, but still feels connected to the bigger open source community.
• MySQL folks take their tasks and goals very seriously–they really work on stuff that matters as Tim O’Reilly would say, and what they accomplish has a very real effect on the bottom line of many a company. It’s rewarding to play a small part in facilitating that.
• MySQL is a particularly global community, and the event brings together people who don’t see each other very often or who have only known each other virtually. Watching the attendees connect in person is a joy to behold.
• An incredible cross section of the MySQL ecosystem comes. Recent adopters, gurus, grizzled programmers–it’s a place to meet the “who’s who” while making the new folks feel welcome.
• MySQL technology gets people really, really psyched and that enthusiasm is infectious. It’s obvious people care about making it a better technology.
• The conference has a lot of traditions (the Quiz Show!) and that consistency is comforting–you know what you’re gonna get when you head to the CE year after year.
• As a Virgo, I appreciate the MySQL dedication to order and getting things right; it’s wonderful to work with such a thoughtful crew.

The MySQL Conference program team has rotated over the years, giving O’Reilly folks a chance to work with new people, which has been a wonderful experience. They’re mindful of maintaining the traditions I mentioned, but they also are up for trying new things.

For instance, one of the biggest additions to the CE in 2009 is MySQL Camp. Colin Charles, Giuseppe Maxia, and the rest of the program team really wanted to make a place for community members at the conference. They came up with this “unconference” component, headed up by Sheeri K. Cabral. Definitely a “uniter” in the MySQL community, Sheeri is a great choice to organize the event.

We’ll be posting more details soon about this and other interesting extracurricular stuff happening in the very near future. In the meantime, check out the formal program.

In addition to the formal program that includes the likes of Leah Buechley (MIT), Greg Elin (Sunlight Foundation), and Eric Rasmussen (InSTEDD), Brady and the ETech team have also been busy lining up extracurricular events that add a new dimension to the ways we’ll be able to connect during the conference:

MAKE Room: Brian Jepson and some of his fellow Makers will have their own room during ETech to spread out and help you get your DIY on.

FreeTech: an unconference, ETech style.

Zoe Keating: a cellist and composer, Zoe fuses layers of music into an incredible sound using her cello and her Mac.

LateTech: This is still in the noodling phase, but we’re thinking of an after-hours open-mike-meets-lightning-talks kind of event

Ignite will be back, too.

And news for the pocketbook: we’ve also moved the early registration discount deadline for ETech to January 26. We know times are tough and unpredictable, and we hope keeping the discount active longer will help more people attend what’s shaping up to be an amazing event this year.

Sebastopol, CA, Dec 18 2008—Sun Microsystems and O’Reilly Media have now opened registration and unveiled the program for the seventh annual MySQL Conference & Expo, April 20-23, at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, CA. The world’s largest open source database event unites over 2,000 MySQL enthusiasts to harness the power of MySQL and celebrate the huge MySQL community.

Read the full press release.

Registration Now Open

SAN FRANCISCO, Dec. 16 — O’Reilly Media, Inc. and TechWeb, producers of Web 2.0 Expo and Web 2.0 Summit, today announced the return of Web 2.0 Expo San Francisco, the annual event for developers, designers, marketers, and business professionals building the next generation Web. This year, Web 2.0 Expo centers on the idea of “the Power of Less,” exploring how the principles of Web 2.0 can turn constraints into opportunities. Web 2.0 Expo San Francisco is March 31 - April 3, 2009 at Moscone West.

Web 2.0 events have consistently inspired and educated this industry through memorable and market-moving programs. “The Web is serving as the innovation engine for an economy in peril,” said Jennifer Pahlka, co-chair of Web 2.0 Expo, “and the recent slate of Web 2.0 programs, including the sold- out Web 2.0 Summit in November, attest to the energy and excitement of the community. There is enormous opportunity available to those willing to embrace the Web as a platform.”

Read the full press release.

11:59 p.m. Jan. 12 is the deadline to submit speaking proposals for Velocity, the O’Reilly conference on web performance and operations. The program committee is interested in presentations for a variety of skill levels around the following topics:

• How to tie web performance and operations to the bottom line
• Real-world incident management - getting “tight like a pit crew”
• Making websites as fast and reliable as desktop apps
• Networking, DNS, and load balancing
• Profiling’s not just on the backend: JavaScript, CSS, and the network
• Managing web services - flaming disasters you survived and lessons learned
• The intersection between performance and design
• Wicked cool (and actionable) metrics
• Ads, ads, ads - the performance killer?
• Troubleshooting in production
• How to scale and be fast on the social web
• Capacity planning and load testing
• Establishing performance and operations best practices within your organization
• Configuration management best (and worst) tools and practices
• Monitoring and instrumentation: Open Source, as a service, commercially supported solutions
• Using multiple CDNs to improve customer experience and reduce cost

A limited number of speaking opportunities are also available through conference sponsorship. Contact Sharon Cordesse at scordesse@oreilly.com for more information.

This Friday, January 16 at 10:00 a.m. Pacific time, join us for a free, live webcast with Money:Tech co-chair Robert Passarella. Rob’s topic is “Equity Research in the Age of Web,” an eclectic yet practical look at Wall Street, equity research, technology and the Internet. Hear how new ideas of finding and getting information are supercharging the research process for companies and industries. Because this is a live event, you’ll have the chance to ask questions and interact during the hour-long presentation.

One particularly sweet and surprising piece of tech news happened just before Christmas, traditionally a pretty slow time of year for most important announcements: Rails and Merb will be merged into Rails 3.

Judging from the wealth of comments on both David Heinemeier Hansson’s and Yehuda Katz’s blog posts about it, the news was enthusiastically received by both communities. As one of the nearly 200 commenters on DHH’s blog post announcing the merger wrote, “Rails 3 FTW!”

Over on the Eden Development blog, Chris wrote

Now, the best bits of merb will become Rails 3, and some of the best ruby coders in the business will be working on the framework we use every day. That’s a great thing for Rails users everywhere. Despite the claims of some, it’s not about one set of people ‘winning’ and one ‘losing’. Ultimately the combined codebase is the real winner, and therefore the people that use it, such as companies like ourselves. We’ll certainly do all we can to support the move here.

While tentatively scheduled to release during RailsConf May 4-7 in Las Vegas (an admittedly ambitious timeframe), DHH recently noted that the flow of Merb ideas into Rails 3 is already under way.

The Call for Participation for RailsConf is open until February 17–a much longer period than usual, precisely to accommodate new developments like this.

Invitation Requests Now Being Accepted

SAN FRANCISCO, Dec. 18 — Web 2.0 Summit, which took place Nov. 5-7, 2008, focused on how the Web can help solve the world’s most pressing problems, creating interest that sold the event out for the fifth consecutive year. The theme “Web Meets World” explored how the Web is changing the world — touching healthcare, finance, global warming — while simultaneously engaging those outside the industry to look to the Web for solutions. Scores of speakers challenged the current economic malaise with their revolutionary ideas for Web 2.0 innovation, business growth and problem solving. Due to the positive response, conference organizers have begun accepting invitation requests for Web 2.0 Summit 2009 taking place in San Francisco October 20-22.

The invitation-only Web 2.0 Summit featured a lineup of notable speakers including former U.S. Vice President and Nobel Laureate Al Gore, Elon Musk of Tesla Motors, Arianna Huffington of the Huffington Post, Shai Agassi with a Better Place and Lance Armstrong. Program chair John Battelle, chairman and publisher of Federated Media, and co-moderator Tim O’Reilly, founder and CEO of O’Reilly Media, presented a program in which more than 70 extraordinary thinkers and leaders in healthcare, genetics, energy, the environment, finance, global business, and politics spoke. An intimate setting capped at 1,000 attendees gave everyone a chance to participate and engage with these thought leaders through incisive plenary sessions, cut-through-the-hype conversations, rapid-fire “high order bits,” “show me” presentations and in-depth workshops. All keynote videos and presentations from the conference can be found at https://www.web2summit.com.

Read the full press release.

O’Reilly Open Source Convention Calls for Innovation
OSCON Proposals Invited

Sebastopol, CA—Dec 15 2008—Now that big business has grasped the principles of open source, the open source community can get down to business. New times demand new ideas, and OSCON, the O’Reilly Open Source Convention, has opened its call for innovation. O’Reilly Media and program chairs Allison Randal and Edd Dumbill invite proposals for tutorials, sessions, and panels for OSCON, happening July 20 - 24, 2009, in San Jose, CA.

“Accomplishing great things with limited resources is the open source way of life,” says Allison. “We hope you’ll join us and share your solutions. We live in a time of enormous challenges: economic, environmental, political, and social. Open source software and the open source community have much to offer as we work to solve the world’s problems, to keep moving toward a better future.”

Read the full press release.

Not so long ago, conventional wisdom was that the publishing industry was somehow immune to many of the developments that have transformed every other form of media over the past few years. Book publishers held a deep and abiding faith in the power of the printed volume to withstand the insurgency of digital media.

That faith has fractured a bit over the past year as publishers have watched the surprising success of the Kindle and the emergence of the iPhone as a viable digital reading device.

Suddenly publishers are racing to come to terms with their digital future. In recent months we’ve seen publishers delivering iPhone apps, experiment with DRM-free content, and offering free downloads.

If any of this sounds familiar, it’s because we’ve seen this exact same transformation take place in nearly every other form of media. From past history we know that once the digital media ball starts rolling, the status quo can change very rapidly. It is, no doubt, an exciting time to watch the publishing industry, but a scary time to actually be part of that industry — unless, of course, you’re open to new business models and a complete reinvention of everything you do.

There’s no better place to watch the future of publishing unfold than at O’Reilly Media’s Tools of Change conference, the annual event that attracts industry professionals, visionaries, and thought leaders.

TOC 09 is scheduled to run from February 9 through 11th in New York City. This year’s event features a full slate of presentations and panel discussions from some of the industry’s leading thinkers, including Tim O’Reilly, Jeff Jarvis, Cory Doctorow, and our own Kassia Krozser, who will be leading the “Smart Women Read eBooks” panel.

Last year’s conference was sold out, and I have no doubt the same will be true this year. While the economy is bad and companies everywhere are looking to cut expenses, TOC is one of those events that’s just too important for publishers to miss.

Read the article.

The blogosphere continues to buzz about Gary Vaynerchuk’s presentation at Web 2.0 Expo New York back in September. “Gary is an outstanding speaker and a definite motivator,” wrote Ryan Leary just this week in his introduction to Gary’s presentation that he embedded on his blog.

This surprised me a little–I mean, Web 2.0 Expo New York wrapped a few months ago. Surely we’ve moved on to newer Web 2.0 topics by now? But the common thread in the references I’ve seen explains it, I think: Gary is very persuasively expressing his passion for what he does. His passion is inspiring and can be applied to just about any endeavor. (I should’ve watched the video frequently last month while I was doing NaNoWriMo, I might’ve put more words to paper…) He also uses his enthusiasm to prod us as well as encourage us–an engaging combination.

If you haven’t already, watch Gary’s presentation for yourself (heads-up: Gary uses adult language in his presentation):

Clay Shirky’s talk from Web 2.0 Expo SF back in April still rocks our video charts, too. And while Clay’s style is a bit more measured than Gary’s, the issues he raises around productivity and attention are equally compelling and vital.

A reminder that all of the Web 2.0 Expo keynote presentations from San Francisco, New York, and Europe are posted on blip.tv.

And if you still haven’t gotten enough Web 2.0 footage, all of the presentations from last month’s Web 2.0 Summit (yes, including Al Gore) plus selections from the 2007 edition.

Web 2.0 Expo co-chairs Jen Pahlka of Techweb and Brady Forrest of O’Reilly are busy putting together the program for the San Francisco edition of Web 2.0 Expo in April. Wonder who will be most-viewed this time next year…

O’Reilly Conference Opens Call for Participation

Sebastopol, CA, November 17—Want to make your websites fast, scalable, efficient, and reliable? O’Reilly’s Velocity, the Web Performance and Operations Conference on June 22-24, 2009, at the Fairmont in San Jose, CA, shows how to develop those traits. Dedicated to helping people build better infrastructures, Velocity offers developers and engineers the key for crossing over from cool Web 2.0 features to sustainable websites. Program chairs Jesse Robbins and Steve Souders have opened the call for participation and invite proposals for conference sessions, panels, and a newly added full day of tutorials at Velocity 2009.

“Velocity pulls together industry leaders covering the most important areas of web performance and operations. I’m looking forward to discussing how to get the most out of the latest browsers including Internet Explorer 8, Firefox 3, Safari 4, and Chrome. The competition is really strong in this area, especially with regard to JavaScript performance,” says Steve. “Another theme we’re highlighting is best practices in performance and operations that improve the user experience as well as the company’s bottom line. These are the best kind of win-win optimizations that everyone can rally behind.”

Read full press release.

Closing the summit is former U.S. Vice President Al Gore, who famously went from losing the 2000 presidential election to winning an Academy Award for the global-warming documentary An Inconvenient Truth and a Nobel Peace Prize. He came to the Web 2.0 Summit to talk, at least in part, about Current Media, a Web video company he co-founded that partnered up with Web darlings Digg and Twitter to cover the election last week.

Read more.