Celso Martinho

Tech stuff

Here’s some videos that we took from the conference sessions and keynotes. Sorry about the Portuguese wrap.

English, Tech stuff, eTech2007

John Curlander, general manager of Microsoft Boulder talks about The Making of Virtual Earth

Microsoft Vision (envisioned by Bill Gates)

• Create realistic, global 3D framework
• Foundation for the 3D web
• Core of entertainment, commerce, information

In the future all website will move to a 3D experience he says.

Virtual Earth 3D was born. Microsoft approaches Vexcel in late summer 2005 and wants to do 3000 cities in 5 years (and I saw Portugal in one of the slides). Wide area coverage with automated processing was the only solution. Shows a making-of video of some sort.

Microsoft and Vexcel built a special 220 Megapixel camera for the process, the Ultracam.

Shows the “Syntopic” technique they’re using to do aerial photos of the land: Position of the four camera cones at identical positions (Syntopic exposure)

Requirements for the solution were:

High information

• Capable of >400MB/sec
• Equivalent of 10 ikonos of Quickbird satellites
• Focus on VE AOIs

Key to automation in sensor and collection methodology

• Multi-spectral imaging
• Hight overlap images, many looks at target
• Hight dynamic range, 12+ bits

Typically on a city they get 90% forward overlap with this camera. Shows the color film and the dynamic range they get with a lot of detail: 5-6 bits.

Microsoft only collects and processes data, they hire commissioned flyers to do the shooting.

Virtual Earth adds live services to the imagery data like live traffic, etc.

Workflow:

• Raw image ingest
• Initial classification
• Image orientation
• Dense matching
• Orthorectification
• Refined classification
• Bare earth topography
• Building extraction and texturing

Shows up detailed explanations on each of these bullet points and a live-demo on some of the cities.

Challenges with automation:

• World is 3D (Multiple z values for earch x,y)
• Trees: Tree detection
• Too manu facets

Look to the future

• Shift emphasis to streetside processing: true 3D
• Tree rendering
• Improved community tools
• Interiors

Labs: Photosynt, Tree detection and Image-on close range photogrammetry were mentioned.

Wraps it up with a video of New York with the obligatory Frank Sinatra soundtrack. Lots of questions after, many concerning privacy issues due to the increasing detail in photos we’re having.

English, Tech stuff, eTech2007

Anthony Ravitz talks about the Google Solar project.

Starts by showing off Google’s workplace with their fancy offices, free food, free transportation (and canoeing) and the fact that everything is organic and nature friendly.

Moves on to “Greeing Google’s Campus” and all the work, modifications and recycling they did on the campus to make it greener.

Thinking about off-site power was the natural move.

Shows some toys including: A SpaceShipOne mockup and a fullsize replica of T-Rex in the garden.

Why Solar ?

• Technology & innovation
• Scale
• Our Brand
• Our Culture

Due to tax rebates and incentives, it was a very easy business decision, it will pay off in 7,5 years and provide free clean energy for decades to come.

Project Initiation

• Secured rebates from PG&E
• Issued a request for proposal
• Competitive selection process for design build contracto
• Hired solar integration El Solutions
• Spent a lot of time on roofs
• Design
• Perming

Facts:

• Largest commercial is US
• 1.6 MW
• 9.212 Sharp photovoltaic modules
• Covering Googlespace and surrounding building
• Solar carspots in two parking lors
• 30% peak electricity demand
• Enough to power about 1000 california homes

Shows a video and some cool photos, and project diagrams including the parking lot solution while explaining several details on the implementation and the whole building process.

Lessons learned:

• Real solution available now
• Makes financial sense
• Installation relatively straightforward
• Working over Google engineers is challenging
• Boost employee morale
• Taking action drives market

Looking ahead

• More companies will go solar
• Larger installations
• Financing models make solar more accessible
• Will congress renew federal investment tax credit beyond 2007 ?
• More states providing financial incentives
• Increased manufacturing production – lower costs ?
• Newly emerging low cost technologies

Expected lifetime of the panels is 20-25 years. Looses only 1% efficiency per year. Did not say how much the project costed.

The company is preparing public information and footage. It will be revealed real soon.

English, Tech stuff, eTech2007

Ed Rowe keynotes about Apollo : Bringing Rich Internet Applications to the Desktop

Starts by showing what we see as a desktop application a web experience and moves on to an Apollo application for eBay bidding. Takes a few photos from the audience, places a bid online.

Apollo provides:

• Local disk access
• Desktop integration: drag’an’drop, clip board, file extenstions, etc.
• Background processing
• System notifications
• Network status
• Complete control over application chrome

Why build on Apollo ?

• Complementes browser -based applications
• More engaging application
• Sustained customer relationships
• Branded desktop experience
• Keep working offline
• Works in the background
• Extends reach os web developers

Apollo sits between the operating system and de the application and provides APIs to communicate with both ends. You can use HTML, Ajax, Javascript, Flash, Flex, PDF and remixed versions of all of these. It uses Webkit as the HTML rendering engine both for OSX, Win32 and Linux.

Apollo Developer Workflow

• Write Code
• Test Debug
• Package
• Deploy

Hands-on demo on build an Apollo application. Shows a small HTML Ajax application running in the browser which interacts with backpack. Does a little editing on the metadata XML file for it’s new app and runs it inside Apollo.

Shows off offline capabilities and pulls out the network cable. Changes some data on the app, connects the cable, the app detects the network back and submits the queued data. Pretty cool.

Moves on and shows how to build an application using Flex, now making use of some actionscript to interact with the OS and with Apollo’s APIs, using system VCards and Google maps.

Demos a few other samples.

I must say I understated Apollo when it first appeared a week or so ago, so in a attempt to redeem myself I’m promising another post on this. I admit it’s looking very exciting, I think Adobe may have hit the spot.

English, Tech stuff, eTech2007

Matt Webb, co-author of Mind Hacks and Availbot talks about From Pixels to Plastic

The presentation is all around the so called Generation C.

Shows the japanese refolding t-shirts video.

Products are people too. Focus on happiness and engagement when designing products. Experience counts!

Experiences while designing products:

• Experimental observation
• Autonomous things (predictable automation)
• Lost luggage

Experience hooks:

• Design
• Manufacture
• Discovery
• Being wished-for
• Selection
• Purchase
• Being shown-off
• Discussion/review
• Re-sale

Talks about the Chumby as an exciting good example of all of this.

• Generation C are networked, creative and capable of building the ir own product.
• We should treat experience as a d design surface, and as product inspiration.
• There are manu experimental approaches.

Socialize the Web!

This was a great presentation, one of the best, I hope I get a hand of the slides online.

English, Tech stuff, eTech2007

Chad Dickerson on Big Company Hacks at Yahoo!.

This was a presentation on Yahoo’s Hack Day event.

Starts by showing off Yahoo’s developer network and defining what is a hacker.

Key principles of the HackDay @yahoo:

• Build something in 24 hours
• Present it to everyone at the end of the day
• No prior review of projects
• Thats it

Result: Hundreds os prototypes build.

Shows internal E-Mail from Rob McCool on Yahoo’s hack day and how excited the whole company was about the event.

Why we wanted to do Open Hack Day: we wanted to do something big.

Shows Hackday cycle of innovation and developers helping developers, an highly collaborative environment.

Invited Beck, the hacker musician, to do a concert on the event.

Explains the invitation process, how open it was, people were coming from all over the world, including people from the competition, which was totally OK. Open “request for invite”. Asked only ONE question before acceptance: Are you going to build something ?

Something special happened at Yahoo many press writers said.

Hackday website

English, Tech stuff, eTech2007

Kevin Henrikson, Director of Engineering from Zimbra talks about Ajax Unplugged: Architecture and Tips for Taking Your Applications Offline.

Why is offline important?

• Lack always-on internet access
• Travel
• ISP service interruptions
• Remote; un-connected land and water.
• More and more data lives in “the cloud”
• You users are asking for it.

Why ajax ?

• Data closer to the user (Akamai principle)
• Performance (client and server)
• Clear simple programming model
• Same UI both online/offline

What solutins are out there today ?

• Apollo
• Dojo offline toolkit
• Slingshot
• Firefox 3 offline support (explains)
• XUL runner

Roll your own:

• salesforce.com
• tiddlywiki – big emphasis
• zimbra desktop

Then mentions the advantages and disadvantages from each solution, one at a time (see photos).

After this, Kevin does a Zimbra Desktop demo.

Zimbra Offline has some key features that were mentioned:

• Cross-platform: mac, linux and win
• Cross-browser: ff, ie, safari
• Identical AJAX interface to online version
• Micro server for sync, persistence and search
• Support for large dataserts multi-gb
• License: MPL/ZPL Opensource
• Availability: Zimbra Desktop Alpha

Challenges for the developer:

• Selecting what to take offline
• Sync is hard
• End-user Desktop support
• Upgrades and patches

I asked him if they see Zimbra running inside Apollo, the answer is they’re still evaluating that possibility. Theoretically it would work but there are some issues with their local JRE agents and some thinking is required before a decision is made.

This presentation is available on Zimbra’s blog here

English, Tech stuff, eTech2007

Mike Culver from Amazon Web Services and Shuki Lehavi talk about Web Scale Computing. Yet another Amazon session.

Mike starts with some graphics from Alex with traffic from aol.com, flickr.com and fotolog.net and youtube.com, where the last two gain a tremendous market share on the whole web traffic as a basis for saying: If you an idea like these, you need to thing about the infrastructure to run this.

Ideas cost Money. Amazon eliminates the fixed cost in the equation. Pay for what you get.

Slide with a list of Amazon’s customers.

Moves on to S3:

Amazon S3 is… simple.

• Data storage in the cloud
• Web-service interface
• No set-up fee, no monthly minmum
• Storage: 0.15 per GB/month
• Data transfer: 0.20 GB to transfer data
• Private and public storage
• Each object up to 5GB in size

Then describes EC2, Amazon’s computing platform.

Shuki takes on to speak about gumiyo.com and their experience with EC2 and S3.

First describes gumiyo.com’s business and features. They provide RSS feeds and Webservices APIs. This is not a “Hello world” 3 pages application, it’s a complex website.

Decision factors to move to Amazon:

Strategic

• On-Deman capacity
• Operational Noise Reduction
• Complete data center outsourcing

Tactical

• The world’s best data center at $70 per machine per month
• No fixed cost and total variable cost
• Endless storage

They moved both the developing, staging & QA and production environments to Amazon. gumiyo.com also uses S3 for storage.

Gumiyo’s Arquitecture is then shown. Tomcar, apache, multi-node tomcat envs, mysql, Fedora core 6, s3 tools and Apache/Mysql. Java SE 6.0, Java EE 5.0, JSP 2.0 front-end and Spring 2.0 with Hibernate 3.2.

Website page load time goes from 90ms to 450ms. Shuki finishes by saying that their experience with EC2 and S3 has been nothing but great and they to invest even further on it.

Mike moves on and talks a bit about Mechanical Turk and shows somes examples.

English, Tech stuff, eTech2007

Pasha Sadri and Jonathan Trevor present Yahoo! Pipes

YP is a “Tool for Remixing the Web” and targets Bloggers, Hackers and Developers, so less than 10% their audience.

Starts with a practical example from Pasha: he wanted an apartment near the park, so he needed to do a mashup or some sort of perl scripting to combine data from several sources.

Then moves on to hands-on demo session of their service. Not much else to say.

I asked Jonathan later if they’ve inspired the editor on Apple’s Quartz Composer to which he confessed yes, to some extent.

English, Tech stuff, eTech2007