Last week I was at xtech in Paris. It was a very fine week with some great talks and good people. Usually there was more than one talk I wanted to attend at anyone time, which is a good if frustrating position to be in.
The talks which caught my attention, amongst finishing my own talks and chairing some sessions were on a wide range of topics. From hardware hacking and real world to virtual world integration from Matt Biddulph through microformats from Jeremy Keith to scientific visualisation from Frank Marchese and back to somewhere near the real world with Adam Greenfield and Matt Webb. Kellan Elliott-McCrea and Blaine Cook made the world of Jabber finally make sense. The political angle was covered by Suw Charman, Rob McKinnon and Kevin Anderson. Lastly we had saving the world with Gavin Starks
More detailed comments on those in a moment. The hotel were unable to provide wifi for conference attendees, this was a bit frustrating for many people. Those staying in the conference hotel could use the €15 per day internet in your room, but this did not include use of the wifi in the conference rooms. One plus of this is that people attending the sessions actually paid attention to the speaker, but it meant that the blogging and other back channels from the conference were more restrained than they might have been. That said I'd be in favour of no wifi in conference rooms, as long as there was generally available internet access in common spaces. We did the usual and used an Airport Express and shared the one account we did have, thanks Suw.
Some brief notes on the conference sessions follow. The day prior to the conference was a focused day on the ubiquitous web or there were workshops to attend. I went to most of the ubiweb sessions. Alexandra Deschamps-Sonsino spoke on the tension in the design world coming from the internet world, the sense of iteration that is present on the internet and her hopes for a change in real world product design. Her talk (slides) was peppered with examples of novel cross over product design and was a great close to the day. Earlier Aaron Straup Cope spoke about the importance of paper in our lives and designing systems including markup to deal with information capture on paper, a nice thoughtful presentation (slides). Claus Dahl gave an interesting presentation about a live application Imity which scans the bluetooth space and then maps the social interactions happening within it, he raised some good points about identity. Matt Biddulph spoke about bridging the space between this physical world and the virtual, demoing some of the work he has done for Nature and showing the Arduino to more adoring fans.
More on the rest of the conference in a subsequent post.
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