MIT Emerging Technology Conference MITETC - Day One

Finally here are my highlight notes about this conference:

Last Wed and Thursday, Sept 27 and 28, 2006, I attended the MIT Emerging Technology Conference on the MIT campus in Cambridge, MA. This two-day event brought speakers from around the world to discuss the key technologies that will impact our world. It's scope was broad, and the speakers were varied. The one thing they all had in common was a passion for key technologies of the day. Here are my recollections from Day One:

MIT Emerging Technologies Conference
Wednesday, Sept 27, 2006
Cambridge, MA

Keynote - Jeff Bezos - Chairman and Founder, Amazon

You can view the Jeff's entire keynote on video here.

Jeff talked about how Amazon is providing web services to developers. They are "eating their own dog food", by developing web services that they are using internally for the Amazon web site, and offering these services to developers for their own web applications. The fee structures are very appealing, with zero startup cost, and usage fees that are essentially linear, so small startups can start small with very little money, yet use the same services to scale to super large proportions with no changeovers required. Jeff calls this process one of commoditizing "undifferentiated heavy lifting", what Bezos calls "muck". Offered services:

1. Mechanical Turk - encoding human intelligence. Using humans to answer questions. This is like Microsoft Live QnA.

2. S3 - Simple Storage Service - web service that ASP can use to store data in the cloud. Redundant, 24/7 storage/backup. Smugmug uses S3 today. Cost: $0.15/GB/mo to store data.

3. EC2 - Elastic Compute Cloud - web service that provides CPU cycles on a standard platform.

4. Amazon fulfillment services - just launched.

--> for more information. check out www.aws.amazon.com.

Bezos quote: "We make muck, so you don't have to."

another good quote from Bezos:

"In the future, the best applications will be a hybrid of client-side code and server-side code. "


John Miller, CEO, AOL

John gave an "OK" overview of the Internet industry, and focussed mainly on AOL's new video distribution business, ostensibly an effort to get in on the YouTube phenomena. His message was while consumption is being disaggregated by all these new web sites, the monetization of video and other media is actually being aggregated by a small number of companies. I guess John hopes that AOL will be one of them. After hearing his talk, I'm not so sure...

Panel discussion lead by David Faber of CNBC, with reps from CNET, Reuters, etc. - Interesting but not particularly ground-breaking discussion.

Panel discussion lead by the CTO of Motorola. Another (barely) interesting discussion about innovation in various types of companies. Some of the notable statements:

- Innovation - can it be taught? Interestingly the moderator stated at the end that the group "concluded" that yes, indeed, innovation can be taught. This is of course garbage, as the group clearly indicated that, although the basics of innovative processes can be presented/taught, and examples can be given, and innovation can be nurtured, this is just like any other talent. Some people have it, and some clearly don't. So in my opinion the entire question was a red herring (much like most of these panel questions, because they want to generate discussion, not necessarily answers).

- Behavior - You get what you measure and reward. If you want a certain outcome, you need to measure it and reward it effectively. I really agree with this one. Way too many times people wonder why they dont get something when they are not measuring/rewarding what they want!

- The most interesting panelist by far was Jay Walker - had many great comments. One of his best was:
"Leadership is like soul - it can get 10X output from 1X input." This guy really gets it.

Panel discussion - "Online Application Wars" - reps from Google, Salesforce.com, Amazon and two small ASP companies (37 signals, Goowi) discussing how online apps will fare in the future. Microsoft was invited to send a rep but did not. Interesting title since on nearly every topic, all the panelists were in violent agreement. It was interesting, but it would be nice to have such strong, articulate minds engaged in more controversial, passion-inducing topics of the day. Here is my quote of the day:

"Life is too short to talk about the things we all agree on..." - Tom Berarducci.

That's it for day one...