O'Reilly Emerging Tech conference earlybird reg closes Monday!

Next Monday is the last day for discounted Early Bird registration at the O'Reilly Emerging Technology Conference. Last year, the con sold out entirely — sign up early! I'm speaking this year, co-presenting with Trusted Computing advocate Peter Biddle (notorious as the author of the Darknet paper). Peter and I will be switching up a little this time: I'm going to present the case for DRM, then he's going to present the case against it. Should be fun!

The program is still being finalized, but already there are any number of exciting presentations on the slate, including:

MMOG: Modestly Multiplayer Online Game Building Workshop — a half-day session on building tiny, federated virtual worlds
Toward a New Animism: Old Interaction Paradigms for an Everyware World, Adam "Everyware" Greenfield's presentation on figuring out how to live in a world where all our possessions are smart enough to be trouble
If Paper Could Talk, What Would It Say?, presented by Osborne-creating PC hero Lee Felsenstein, on using printed codes to store machine-readable audio
No Program Left Behind: Liberating TV from the Tyranny of the Ephemeral, wherein BBC maverick Tom Loosemore (BBC Backstage) opens the kimono on the Pandora Box, a PVR that can record every TV program on every channel at once and archive them all for nine months
Super Ninja Privacy Techniques for Web App Developers — Marc "Wesabe" Hedlund explains the fine, subtle, transcendental points of maintaining privacy through good application design
From Pixels to Plastic: the always gnomic and fascinating Matt Webb on the coming revolution in outputting pixel-based designs in solid, volumetric plastic
Your Web App as a Text Adventure — I loved this thesis-statement: "Quite bluntly, if your web application can't easily be adapted as a classic text adventure, your application has serious problems on multiple levels"
Body Hacking: Quinn Magnet Sense Norton takes us on a stomach-churning adventure through the world of extreme body-mods
RFID Guardian: A Personal Platform for RFID Privacy Management — when I saw Melanie Rieback present her prize-winning paper on RFID firewalls at USENIX LISA in DC, I knew we had to have her at ETECH; her research on the security of RFIDs shows how we are sleepwalking into a world of incredible instability and insecurity

In 2007, we expect internet access to be instant, music collections to fit into our pockets, and communication as a constant. Technology is so tightly woven into our lives that at times we scarcely notice it. And yet, there are innovators, hackers, and thinkers plotting revolutions–often by simply reexamining underlying assumptions we already take for granted. From the infrastructure supporting mass-market players, the promise of mass computing, and alternative energy sources to personalized medicine, movie magic, web heresies, and talking paper, ETech 2007 explores the technological rejiggering and changes in perspective that are poised to blast off into the realm of magic. Join us March 26-29, 2007 in San Diego, CA–be a part of the ideas, tools, and discussions happening today that will give rise to the magic of tomorrow.