Wired and NextFest

NextFest 2007 is scheduled for September 13 - 16.
WIRED's vision of a new World's Fair is a four-day festival of innovative products and technologies that are transforming our world. This year's NextFest in Los Angeles features more than 160 interactive exhibits from leading scientists and researchers around the world.

ThingM will be presenting its new WineM RFID wine rack. The ATLAS Rope Ascender, designed by MIT students is part of the Security exhibition sponsored by Northrup Grumman. The Brasilian WheelSurf, available to try out in SL, will be in the Transportation pavilion. The LifeStraw will be in the Health pavilion. The Exploration pavilion will house a skin-tight space suit in development at MIT, and the SpaceX Dragon spacecraft.

Most of these innovative products, even those originating in research universities, are being developed and brought to market by entrepreneurs such as PayPal's co-founder, Elon Musk, who founded SpaceX in 2002:

SpaceX aims to ... develop a family of launch vehicles which will ultimately reduce the cost and increase the reliability of space access by a factor of ten. Coupled with the newly emerging market for private and commercial space transport, this new model will re-ignite humanity's efforts to explore and develop Space.

COVITS 2007 Registration

Registration is now open for the 9th annual Commonwealth of Virginia Innovative Technology Symposium (COVITS).

Featured sessions include:
The Strategic Plan for IT in action
Breakout sessions on intergovernmental cooperation – federal/state/local
Breakout sessions on the intersection of R&D and IT in Virginia
A special breakfast policy briefing on opportunities for SWaM vendors
Showcase of innovations resulting from the Productivity Investment Fund
Monday evening reception hosted by the Northern Virginia Technology Council (NVTC)

Some speakers have changed, so an updated program is available. Vivek Kundra, now CTO for the District of Columbia, will return to talk about Homeland Security and Interoperability, and to join Mark Warner in a "town hall" style meeting introducing the Broadband Roundtable, which includes Dr. Ted Rappaport, founder of Virginia Tech's Mobile and Portable Radio Research Group (MPRG), one of the world’s first university research and teaching centers dedicated to the wireless communications.

Ubiquitous Computing and Appliances

John Seely Brown, formerly of Xerox PARC, is now an author, consultant and visiting scholar at the University of Southern California. His new article at receiver #18 is on ubiquitous computing entering the "home zone", the era of connectivity as a matter of course, and how crucial it is to keep things simple in order to cope with the wealth of information engulfing us.

Mike Kuniavsky of Orange Cone has a piece on the Evolution of Appliances in the same issue. A good time to note Bruce Sterling's 2004 neologism, Spime.

Patents and Tech Workers in Virginia

Dr. Christine Chmura writes for the Richmond TimesDispatch that

The American Electronics Association says Virginia had the highest concentration of tech workers in the country in 2005. However, the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation ranked Virginia 26th in the number of U.S. patents issued to companies or individuals per 1,000 workers.

Collab and Collex

Day 1 of the University of Virginia New Horizons conference pointed to some sophisticated projects using Collex and Sakai Collab.

Bethany Nowviske's PataCriticism blog addresses the development of NINES (Networked Infrastructure for Nineteenth Century Electronic Scholarship) with Collab.

David Germano described his Sakai Collab work on the Tibet and Himalayan project for coursework.

The conference continues through Thursday, with several early presentations available again. The schedule is here.

New Horizons at UVA

The University of Virginia New Horizons for Teaching and Research conference is underway, with presentations and demos of new online tools and collaborative projects.