Emerging Tech Wrap-Up for Rubyists

posted by pete on March 7th, 2008

I just returned from San Diego, where Ryan McMinn and I attended the O’Reilly Emerging Tech conference for the fourth year in a row. After a slightly disappointing experience last year, an infusion of new blood at the organizational level led to this being an amazingly high signal-to-noise event.

I’ve described ETech as the place you get to see all of the cool stuff you read about in blogs up close and in person, and then interact with the people who made them in a casual context. Some of the connections I’ve made at these “geek mecca” experiences have led to lasting friendships and even some of the philosophies that gave us the confidence to quit our day jobs and bet the farm on a technology that nobody had ever heard of called Rails.

So, while I strongly recommend that geeks with imagination and passion for discussing what could be go to ETech next year, the fact remains that I was there this year and might have been the only person from Toronto who was. I thought it would be helpful for me to summarize the bits of ETech that might be of interest to Ruby developers.

MooCards has launched an API
Moo, the folks that make the mini-sized business cards with photos on them, have made it easy for you to prepare a set of cards from your own app. You can do all of the preparation, and then pass them off to their service for payment. They will then pay you a healthy commission.

MegaPhone Games
Jury and Dan show off how a large scale multiplayer cellphone-based game goes down. They got everyone playing standing in their seats making animal noises. Their tech is based on Rails, which suggests that it could be easy to integrate with. Note that this is not SMS stuff, it’s closer to gaming via Asterisk.

Stamen Design: Information Visualization
Eric showed off a lot of really hawt visualization tricks that they’ve pulled off for their clients. I found it pretty inspiring, as I’ve done some stuff like this with LiveFilter.

Practice Makes Perfect: How Billions of Examples Lead to Better Models
Peter Norvig from Google gave a brilliant talk about how a computer can correct spelling mistakes, translate from Arabic to English, and recognize celebrity faces about as well as an average human—and can do it all by learning from examples rather than by relying on programming.

Amazon SimpleDB
Amazon’s web services evangelist showed up and gave a decent overview of how a document database could be used, showing some example queries. However, they had a guy that built a project with it speak as well, and I doubt they’ll have him back.

Yahoo Fire Eagle
Yahoo releases some cool middle-tier tech: a bi-directional API for exchanging geographic information in a neutral way between any device or site. This could be huge; expect to see a lot more geotagged apps coming out.

Bug Labs
The Bug is an awesome modular open-source computing gadget. It provides a linux powered brain that you can snap cameras, screens, GPS, velocity/heat/altitude/whatever sensors on, and a powerful IDE to build and configure the device. It’s all Java today, but they have Python running and if they have Ruby going by July, then they will make an appearance at RubyFringe. So cool!

CouchDB
Another RubyFringe speaker is Damien Katz, whose awesome CouchDB document database has me scrambling to learn Erlang. CouchDB is a RESTful datastore with really clever map/reduce functions and a full Javascript views engine. Really great stuff.