Tech Week 2009

Last week was a whirlwind of late nights, traveling, and tech conferences for me. I attended both Adobe MAX in L.A. and Yahoo’s Hack Day developer conference in NYC in the same week.

This was my first year attending these conferences, so I didn’t know what exactly to expect but had a great time at both.

Adobe MAX was considerably more developer focused than I had anticipated, but there was still lots of cool emerging technology and creative centered talks to keep my attention. While many of the talks I attended devolved into presenters typing actionscript projected onto a wall, several talks stood out as being inspirational, insightful and educational.

Lee Brimelow gave a great talk about augmented reality and showed several examples of real world applications. Joshua Davis gave a very inspiring presentation about the evolution of his work, his process (Tinker, tinker, and more tinker) and his unfortunate encounters with print shops. I’m pretty sure everyone involved left that talk eager to go experiment on their own.

Some other highlights for me were being introduced to the Mega Phone platform, getting a behind the scenes of the new Guiter Hero website, gtting a glimpse of Photoshop’s content aware technology and of course, Roundarch‘s very own talks surround the Tesla model S.

The MAX Bash, watching the sneaks and meeting all sorts of cool, intelligent people are what really made this conference worthwhile.

The Yahoo Hackday experience was equally developer focused, but had a more grass roots flavor to it. After a day of talks promoting the latest Yahoo! technologies(which I was unable to attend), sessions broke and teams were organized. Each team had roughly 17 hours to brainstorm, build, design and test their “hack”. The definition of what a hack is and what technology or hardware it uses was up for creative interpretation.

I partnered up with Akeem to work on developing an interactive restaurant menu. While more time to work on our idea would it been appreciated, it was great to work under the gun (voluntarily for a change) and see what other teams came up with. While our idea attracted a bit of media attention, in the end we got beat out by some other really great ideas. The overall winner of the competition was Insider Trades by team Queens Law. They describe their motivation below:

Insider trading of stocks is very valuable information. Knowing which executives are selling and buying is a very useful indicator for the millions of people who are casual investors.

For a list of all of the winner, and a recap of the competition, click here

Overall, last week was super fun and jam-packed. I had met lots of cool, interesting folks and learned lots at both conference. I’m already looking forward to next year.