R&D-Live - My ETech learnings

ETech is for a mobile guy like entering a different solar system. One where laptops and wi-fi are on center stage and rest is context revolving around it. It is very eye-opening to experience this hands-on. ETech is like an big adhoc R&D lab performing live. The crowd is really switched on and I am really impressed by the people here.

Below are first impressions or ternds in no particular order:

1. From digital to analogue
The US presidential elections seems to drive collective behaviour, where the web acts as a catalyst for getting people together physically and act on or meet on issues that are dear to them. In this case the locomotive for this trend is: Meetup

2. Most cool stuff is web centric rather than PC centric
It seems like many of the cool applications are web based rather than PC Based. Tecnorati.

3. Collaborative innovation - A fluid mix of open and propiretary
Trendsetting companies are using the power of the web to innovate, by opening parts of their services for developers. This will eventually take their offerings into interesting directions.

4. Smartphones are still not on the map with techies
In Tim O'Reilly's keynote the mobile did not seem to be on his radar. Alot of the concepts I see at ETech, would work very well in a mobile perspective, some even better. A good example of the state of Mobiles among techies was when Rael Dornfest told me he gets basic questions like: How do you change the wall paper on the S60 phones. This was not his 'mother-in-law', but some fellow super geek. That feature is not very usable, but that is not my point here, rather: would there be room for a section in MobileWhack for Hacking the Series 60? I guess deepending on perspective one could call 'changing the wall paper' a hack ;-)

5. The market share of Macs in the internet trendsetter community is close to 50%
This switched on community is very centred around Mac, most solutions work cross-platform and people multitask with up to a dozen of windows all being monitored at the same time. I hope the Mac continue to have success, as I am myself using Mac in my private life. Started in -87 with a Mac Plus. I wonder how long it will take for this trend to spread to the corporate world. I guess of the tools I use frequently only existing on the PC platform is NetMeeting.

I will evolve this post during the week as I continue to hyper learn...