| | By John Oram in California @ Tuesday, March 10, 2009 4:13 PM
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| | O'Reilly's ETech is the place to meet people from all over the world who are serious about technology. RFIDs were handed out to everyone who signed up for the conference. Those are our 'keys' to special benefits. As the event name, Emerging Technology Conference, implies, the promise is that we will learn about the most important and disruptive innovations on the horizon, rather than the ones that have already arrived.
 During the coming week, we are supposed to learn how the experts define 'social software'. This year the focus is on how the way we live is changing - through policy, technology, and ideas. The proliferation of sensors, advances in materials and manufacturing, the changes in government and the financial market will all have a profound affect on our industry.
ITExaminer spoke with Kuwaiti IT engineer, Abdulaziz Al-Duaij, who works for Kuwait National Petroleum Company (KNPC) and Daniel Hannaby, Skunkworks engineer, for France Telecom. Both came to find out how sensors are changing their infrastructure along with the way we live and work. They wanted to learn how to tie sensors into their daily applications.
Al-Duaij appeared to be your typical 'suit'. He is an instructor of introductory and advanced programming techniques with a local Kuwaiti school system. During our conversation, this reporter found we had graduated from the same college in the US at different times. Al-Duaij said that he was returning later in the week to receive an honorarium from his old engineering department for his dedicated alumni work. He went to the ETech seminar called 'Scratch: Visual Programming for Anyone'. We got an email from him which said that he was learning a lot about new object oriented programming techniques for students as young as six years old. Al-Duaij also said these new techniques will speed learning for all his students.
Hannaby and this reporter spent our time at ETech learning about 'Holistic Service Prototyping: Sketching Hardware and Software' from the folks at Tellart in Rhode Island. Tomorrow, we will fill you in on the details of this hands-on seminar.
The first day ended with a keynote speech by Tim O'Reilly, the founder and CEO of O'Reilly Media, and sponsor of ETech. Tomorrow, we will have more on O'Reilly's view of the future. X
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