EFF's Cory Doctorow opened the day with an excellent keynote about DRM.

  • Broadcast Flag is not capitalism, it's kleptocracy
  • Remember the role of "View Source" in the early days of the web
  • Studios exploiting the "Broadcast Flag Gap" between Europe and US to push new laws on both sides of the pond
  • Eat your competitors lunch: don't bow before content industry and deliver the technology your users want.

Nokia's director of multimedia applications Christian Lindholm gave a great speech about the future of mobile applications:

  • Mobile icons of today: laptop and monoblock phone
  • If it's not in the pocket, it's not mobile: « Everyone who owns an iPod stand up? (almost everybody in the room stands up) Now, if you have it in your pocket show it (only a few iPods show up) »
  • Think about the other 50% of the world population, females: they don't even have pockets!
  • Dominant design: monoblock, sliders, clamshell
  • New dominant design: the transformer? Is to the phone what the Lederman is to the Swiss Army knife.
  • Picture and video capture in mobile phones are a memory augmenting feature
  • Metadata enriched and timeline-based picture browsing
  • Google taught us that when the amount of data tends toward infinity, the UI shrinks to the bare minimum
  • Location metadata has to be democratized
  • The architecture: data > metadata (timestamps, ...) > superdata (relations between objects, private metadata, external, not embedded in objects) > Access Methods / Browsing / Sharing / Search > Mobile Devices / Laptops / Internet Servers / Home

Malthe Sigurdsson told us about the Skype brand:

  • Skype: application you use to talk through the internet for free and forever.
  • A Small, Big Company: 160 people in 15 countries
  • Free implies that you don't have to spend mental energy taking care of the communication costs
  • The brand is the product is the brand is ...
  • Release all the time, aggressive schedule, no PR stunts: the added value of meeting a deadline is nothing compared to the added value of getting things out fast
  • Skype has plans to further open their IM platform

Jyri Engeström gave a pretty academic talk on object-centered sociality:

  • Social network maps show how people connect but not why. What connects them? People don't connect to each other, they connect through a shared object.
  • Tagging, crafting, tuning, hacking are key features of those objects to make the network sustainable.
  • Bloggers invented a format of discussions which turned them into social objects.
  • When you think about networks, think about objects and eventually you'll think about play

Doug Bowman gave a pleasant speech about standards-based design nothing excitingly new there but it was still entertaining stuff.

Cluetrain's David Weinberger delivered an afternoon keynote entitled

The Natural Shape of Knownledge, it was pretty hairy and covered a lot of aspects but the things I remember the most were:

  • Owner of the information is no longer the owner of its categorization (power to the user)
  • Taxonomies: from trees to pile of leaves
  • Unlike blogs, most commercial sites are just afraid to link to the outside world
  • Topics get smaller (see Wikipedia articles on obscure subjects)

The talk about Social and Psychological Sides of Software Architecture was a complete catastrophe. Was anyone expecting an analogy between software and so-called brick-n-mortar architecture? I thought that this kind equivocal thinking was reserved to architects fed up building suburban homes! In addition, the speaker was actually not so good so I left the building to enjoy a bit of sun and fresh air...

Matt Webb's Fixing Broken Windows, Human perception and the user interface was smart and appealing:

  • Fix the little things first to prevent big bad things to happen
  • Things you perceive affect the way you behave on a global scale
  • When screen resets (i.e. page reload), it resets the users visual buffer
  • If something flies toward you, it pushes everything out of your mind, it grabs all your attention (bad examples includes Apple Keynote transitions and DashBoard)

But, as a coder at heart, the most thought provoking and mind blowing session was most certainly Matt's discussion about Physics and the Future of Computing.

His point was that types (and eventually schemas) must die. Use Duck Typing. It's all about aspects, capabilities, conventions, assertions, expectations, ...

One thing struck me: this whole conference was about forward thinkers and almost everyone in the room was a Python and/or Ruby developer, some more exotic languages such as IO or Haskell were mentioned as well. Oh boy, the future has never looked so bright, and Java is already out of the game. I'll certainly provided further development about these ideas within a few days as the they get digested and reprocessed...

If I had to extract 3 trends from these 2 days at Reboot, they would be:

  • Metadata
  • Simplicity
  • Skype