Conference season 2008
The March 2008 US conference season is nearly upon us. I'm just on my way back from representing Dopplr at Social Graph Foo Camp (find out more by listening to the Citizen Garden Podcast I participated in after the camp), but I'll be back here again in three weeks.
I'm spending a few days in New York, where I'll be hosted by the lovely Chris Shiflett, and then it's on down to San Diego for ETech. That'll be swiftly followed by SXSW Interactive where I'll be on a panel entitled "Creative Collaboration: Building Web Apps Together", about working in multidisciplinary teams. Finally, a week in San Francisco decompressing and having a few meetings.
I'm particularly excited by the trip to ETech. The last two years have brought smart people together to talk mostly Web 2.0 topics, but this year looks significantly more awesome. Full of genuinely emerging technology, the lineup looks like one Matt Jones and Tony Stark would appreciate.
Some highlights for me include a talk from Google's economics groups on Prediction Markets, Computing for Socio-economic Development, and the excitingly-titled Antigenic Cartography: Visualizing Viral Evolution for Influenza Vaccine Design. Hope I see you there.
Matt Biddulph, February 07, 2008 12:08 AM
Last call for XTech
It's that time of year again - today is your last chance to put in a proposal for XTech 2008 in Dublin. You can read all about it in the Call for Participation. This year, along with the traditional core Web and XML technologies of XTech, we're focusing on "The Web on the Move" - the emerging portability of data, applications and identity on the internet.
I'm writing my proposal today - I'm planning on pulling the very loose ramble I presented at Barcamp London on messaging architectures into a proper talk. For 2008 I'm very excited about Erlang, XMPP, message brokers such as ActiveMQ and clientside messaging with Comet. The future's asynchronous and highly concurrent.
I'm looking forward to the face-to-face conversations of the upcoming conference season. Working on Dopplr didn't leave much time for writing in 2007, and that's not going to change in the near future. Right now my online tech output is most confined to tiny fragments of ideas on Twitter and random pictures on Flickr (Nokia N810 unboxing; Jawbone unboxing).
Matt Biddulph, January 25, 2008 11:56 AM
Hardcore Hardware Hacking Weekend
If you've seen me talk at a conference recently (perhaps XTech or ApacheCon Europe) you'll know that I'm very interested in what happens when the coders who made the web get to script the real world. Cheap and powerful hardware prototyping is now within the reach of anyone who can code a webapp or configure a Unix box.
If you've taken the first steps in tinkering with an Arduino or similar kit, why not take it up a gear and sign up for the Hardcore Hardware Hacking Weekend in London on July 21st and 22nd? Massimo Banzi, co-creator of Arduino, will be teaching advanced hardware skills and I'll be there to explain how to plug it all into software and the internet. I'm especially looking forward to hearing from guest speaker Moritz Waldemeyer. Places are limited and going fast.
Matt Biddulph, July 09, 2007 10:27 PM
20:20 talk on hardware hacking for software people
I just got back from XTech 2007 in Paris. It was an excellent conference this year and I'm really proud of having contributed in a small way by being on the programme committee. Every year the speaker lineup gets better and better.
The theme this year was 'The Ubiquitous Web'. HTTP isn't just for computers any more, and I'm particularly interested in how developers like me can learn to make their own network-connected objects in the real world. To spread the word, I gave a lightning talk on my experiences with the Arduino hardware hacking boards and other toys from tinker.it.
I put the slides on SlideShare.
Matt Biddulph, May 19, 2007 01:34 PM
ApacheCon Europe 2007 keynote
Last Friday I had the great privilege of giving a keynote talk at the ApacheCon Europe conference in Amsterdam. My topic was the new possibilities for software hackers coming from cheap, scriptable hardware prototyping. I illustrated the path from the desktop via my work in Second Life, and showed how it translates into physical computing.
I made a recording of the audio from the talk on my laptop's microphone, and I've synchronised it with video of the slides in this Flash movie:
If you prefer, there's also the audio-only MP3.
Matt Biddulph, May 07, 2007 06:00 PM
Serendipity 2.0: going fulltime on Dopplr
For the last couple of months I've been working on a new project in my spare time. Dopplr is a social network for frequent travellers, designed to increase the amount of serendipity in the world. It lets you share your travel plans with your trusted fellow travellers, and uses them to find the coincidences, near-misses and surprises. Maps, mobile, timelines, feeds, calendars: you can have the information pretty much any way you want it.
Dopplr's still invite only, but there's a good chance you know someone with an account by now. We'll be issuing new invite tokens from time to time, so keep an eye out. There are some screenshots on Flickr, and alpha travellers Stowe Boyd and Roo Reynolds have written some illuminating reviews. I'll be at XTech in Paris in May (don't forget, online registration closes soon) so track me down and I'll give you a demo.
I'm having a great time making something of my own and collaborating with people whose skills and opinions I trust and respect. I showed the alpha release around ETech and SXSW and got some great reactions. We started inviting people in to test the app, a few at a time, and their feedback has been very encouraging.
Because I'm having so much fun and I want Dopplr to be as good as it can possibly be, I've taken the decision to suspend my freelancing and work on it full time. It seems they'll let anyone be a CTO these days.
If you want to follow our day-to-day progress, I'm collecting dopplr-related links and coverage on del.icio.us.
Matt Biddulph, April 27, 2007 03:29 PM