HEAD Conference: Day 1

Unfortunately I was not able to attend to much of the conference today since I was at work. I did have it on in the background, and was able to jump over and catch a few interesting tid bits.

So far I have been really impressed with the ease of logging in and ability to view and interact with the speakers as well as other attendees. My main complaint is the audio quality. At times its great, but it had a tendency to cut out, get feedback, or just get garbled. I was also thrown off a bit by the mysterious London Hub Schedule hidden away in Room 1. It had a great lineup, but was not displayed on the main schedule page. Luckily I caught it fairly early on.

As far as content goes, I got the most out of Simon Wardley and Tim O'Reilly. I only got to catch part of Simon's presentation (hope to catch the rest later), but what I did watch was insightful and entertaining. He made some interesting points about how innovation is built on the commodization of innovation.... say that three times fast. He also had a couple brilliant slides that described cloud computing and used an analogy of our economy to show how it could break down.

Tim O'Reilly closed the London Hub's schedule by discussing a wide variety of topics. My favorite nugget of information from this discussion was his answer to how Web 2.0 occurred and when will we reach web 3.0. He stated that Web 2.0 is not actually version number and should not be treated as such. It was first used after the dot com bust to state that the web is back... thus Web 2.0. It wasn't a milestone or a version, but rather a statement. To me, that makes complete sense. I never liked the whole web 2.0 garbage. The web will continuously evolve and it is almost impossible to set version numbers on something so dynamic/organic.

That covers day one. Hopefully I will get time to go back and watch some of the presentations with my full attention.

Now I am looking forward to two more days worth of information. Here are the main presentations I want to watch live... some of the rest I hope to catch later:


Saturday:
1pm: Big Spaceship Digital Creative Agency

3pm: Advanced Action Script Animation (Keith Peters)
4pm: Building Red5 Applications (Chris Allen)

Sunday
10am: Here be Pixels (Mario Klingemann)
11am: Papervision3D, Simplified (Seb Lee Delisle)
12pm: The Best Way to Predict the future is invent it (Carlos Ulloa)
1pm: Flash 2D & 3D Effects (Ralph Hauwert)
2pm: Generating Artwork (Dr. WooHoo)

I'd also like to watch the Game+Play topic, but I can't pass up an opportunity to listen to Keith Peters, especially when he is going to cover his book which he is almost finished with. And I would watch the SWFObject 2 Master Class... buts its at 9am. Lets be realistic here :) Hopefully the recordings will be good enough to watch later.

If you are attending this weekend and see me in one of the rooms. Feel free to drop me a message.