What can you tell about an organization by what conferences they attend?

11 Sep 2008

Is this a trick question, or what?  Actually, I think it’s more like doing an analysis on the corporate ‘fingernail’ of 2Paths.  If I tell you about the conferences we attended this year, I think you will quickly get a good sense of what we’re into.  Here’s a few.  The No Fluff, Just Stuff conference in Seattle in early spring.  The Semantic Technology conference in San Jose late spring.  Geoweb 2008 in Vancouver in the summer.  And the Barcamp 2008 in Vancouver coming up at the end of September.   This is how we keep ourselves busy when we are not hard at work building custom web-applications, for those at home keeping score.

The No Fluff, Just Stuff conference aims to provide quality Java/Agility events for software developers that are locally based  and very technically focused.  Our team gobbled this one up like fat kids on chocolate.  Propeller-heads unite!  We sent a couple of our esteemed techies down to Seattle back in the early spring to participate, and they got a lot out of it.  For more info on our take on this conference, click here…

http://v2.2paths.com/blog/burbles/just-the-stuff-please
http://www.nofluffjuststuff.com/home.jsp

The SemTech conference  hails to be the world’s largest annual gathering of users, technologists, publishers, developers, innovators, and entrepreneurs targeting comprehensive, real-world business applications using semantic technologies. The dramatic uptake of semantic technologies was evident by the dozens of industry announcements and new product deliveries debuted at the conference.  Two of us arrived in San Jose with a healthy dose of skepticism on this emerging technology movement, and departed feeling invigorated about how this can help make our lives and the lives of our customers faster, better, and more efficient.  Check out Omar’s blog about some of the inner workings of what’s going on in the Semantic web here…

http://v2.2paths.com/blog/conference/semantic-web-conference-2008/
http://www.semantic-conference.com/

The Geoweb conference reflected a growing awareness of the need to interpret geospatial information in the broadest possible terms, especially where information sharing and collaboration are key to the increased productivity, efficiency and improved decision making.  Since we have been getting a lot of requests relating to the geographical representation of data, we sent half the company to this conference.    Every one of our staff came away with different takes on this.

Although this type of technology is brand spanking new to people like my mother, geographical information systems (ok, can you say GoogleEarth?) have been around for quite some time and are a relatively mature technology space.   The conference touched upon the broad spectrum of data inputs that can be leveraged by the adjunction of GIS to exact meaning from global data, which would be otherwise difficult to make any sense of.  Sensor networks such as inert, fixed sensors (ex on traffic lights), sensors carried on moving objects (cars, pedestrians (asthma research), and humans  (dependant on peoples’ motivation to volunteer, known as participant populations)  provide valuable information.    Leveraging these sorts of data inputs, initiatives like the Citizen Christmas bird count and Project Globe (a project where children around the world collect environmental data) and early warning systems for natural disasters have potential to give real benefit to the world.  The possibilities are endless.  Geoweb is an annual conference, and next year will be focused  on the Cityscape –

 city construction,  maintenance, simulation, and evolution.  Check it out.
http://geowebconference.org/

An upcoming conference that we are really looking forward to is BarCamp, which is an ad-hoc un-conference of a technical nature in Vancouver, BC, born from the desire for people to share and learn in an open environment. It is an intense technology event with discussions, demos and interaction from attendees.  All attendees are encouraged to give a demo, a session, a presentation, or help with one. All attendees are expected to be participants. All presentations are scheduled the day they happen. The gist is to prepare in advance, but come early to get a slot on the wall, and participate.  We like this gathering of the minds a lot because it is not pretientious and it’s packed with useful information.  That’

s why we sponsor it, and send our people to it.  Check it out.
http://barcamp.org/BarCampVancouver2008

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