Red Herring Conf

was ok – Ray Lane spoke at the keynote on the first night dinner. There was a lot of discussion about his comment of in the near future we would be walking around with 100 GB on your belt – I don’t know if I agree with that. I wouldn’t want 100 GB on my belt with the potential that if I lost that belt, I would lose everything. however, if you’re talking about a cache where the original data is stored elsewhere, well that makes sense. What I took from Ray’s comments, is that you have the ability to store 100GB on your belt. if you’re dumb enough to store important data there, well that’s your problem.

There were some very interesting companies presenting there – in particular, Magenn Power stuck out. i know nothing about Wind Power and not sure if I a bunch of tethered blimps are less of an eye sore than wind turbines (for the record, I don’t think wind turbine farms are an eye sore – in fact I think they look kind of majestic), but regardless I think Magenn’s strategy is definitely worth exploring. With the cost of oil going sky high – not just the immediate dollar cost, but the long term environmental cost of enjoying life now only to throw away the life of future generations – wind power needs to be explored more.

However, just like the Mesh Conference, there were a few companies at the conference which seemed to just be ‘Web2.0’ companies without much of a plan and planning to well because of all the hype.

on the other hand there were some great companies like SocialText and Havok presenting. I’d be interested to find out how useful they found the conference.