Day One: ETech 2006

Here are my impressions of day one of the Emerging Technology Conference...

• Way too many dudes here
• Had a great time catching up with Scott Beale
• Saw some familiar Yahoo faces
• Bruce Sterling's keynote was very good and entertaining (I met him 10 years ago when he was writing an article for Wired magazine about Burning Man... my company iSTORM built the BM site and was doing the first netcast of the event)
• Nearly everyone has a Mac laptop!
• Web 2.0 is a bunch of crap :)
• Blow-up chairs are stupid
• New web sites and platforms should be about making your life more simple. They should limit your view instead of expand it. Less is more. Display only objects that are meaningful to you...
• At least two guys are wearing kilts
• Spoke with Hans Peter of Plum for a long time. I'm very impressed and excited about their service. I feel we'll all be talking about Plum soon. Hans seems like a great guy.
• My back doesn't hurt because of my new bumbakpak.
• I don't really feel like I fit in. Is that because there are no other Yahoo! Shopping people, because I'm not an engineer, or because none of this really matters and maybe I'm the only one who knows? -- oh don't get all bunched up... of course it matters.
• I'm going to be evangelizing three things 1. Shopping APIs  2. Social Commerce and 3. The Digital Life Manager