Innovation in San Jose

The flight was scheduled for 9:10 and, thanks to the magic of time zones, we were scheduled to land in San Jose at lunchtime. Thanks to the magic of paranoia, we got up at 5:45. The Airport transport limo was waiting for us by 6:30 as we ran through the house taking care of the last details. Once at the airport, we got through JetBlue curbside in 10 minutes and then braced ourselves for the wonderful world of post 9/11 security: Take off your shoes. Take out your laptop. Put the laptop case in a tub. Put the laptop in by itself. Walk through the gate. Put your shoes back on. Unlike the scum at Baltimore County airport, everybody is wonderful. Then we had the further detail that JetBlue is building an all new terminal, so we had to buy food and be transported to a nightmare of a temporary facility. It looks like it's in a building that was supplied by war surplus, and there was barely room to walk to the other end. Once we got on the plane, it taxied for 20 minutes so it could wait another 20 minutes or so to actually take off. In spite of all that, the plane arrived in San Jose exactly on time, and we were in our hotel room 45 minutes after that.

With so much time on our hands, we opted to take the light rail service to Mountain View. That is a great destination for a number of reasons. The main street has two independent bookstores, two Irish bars, 15 Japanese restaurants, 4 stores that answer all of your Buddha needs. The 45 minute train ride is like a feature on the theme park known as "Silicon Valley World." Heading North from the convention center, you pass the world headquarters of Ebay, Cisco, and Yahoo. You don't see it from the train, but somewhere in Mountain View there is a headquarters building known as the "Googleplex." If that weren't enough, NASA has a major facility along the way. One can only imagine the synergy that comes out of the Irish bar on a Saturday night.

Conference Day 1
Opening session:

Corey Seeman gave introductory remarks.

Jerry Kline. I'm obliged to omit any specific information about Innovative Interfaces products in this public forum. I can however say that in his opening remarks, Jerry felt that the company was doing really, really, mindbogglingly well.

(Bleep)

Robert Cringely was the keynote. Author, PBS personality, and 12th employee of Apple. His first job was shelving books at a county library. His mother was a librarian. Here to talk about technology and the future. In 1970 was working as a war correspondent in Beirut. Dodging shells. Started wondering about his choice of careers. He had got a degree in physics. He went to Stanford fir a science job. Joined the computer club, and met the people who later founded Apple. After the formed the company, he got hired. They couldn't pay much, so they offered him stock. He turned it down for a reduced pay. He walked away from countless millions that night. Wrote the first manual. They fired him, so he went back to Stanford. Was rehired by Apple in 1980 to work on LISA project. His lasting feature in Apple was the trash can icon. Afterwards, got a job on a commission that investigated 3 mile island. This led to a book deal.

Did his work on a word processing typewriter, and managed to erase all of his work. Went to the help desk at 2 AM. He was able to rebuild much of the book from printouts that he had saved in the past. This inspired him to develop the trash concept. It can be retrieved. The icon was set to bulge when stuff was in the trash. He added an automated fly that flew around the trash can. Turning the fly off created a computer bug. So they fired him again. Then hired him again to develop a networking program that later became America Online. He wrote a mail program that allowed the user to take back an email message that you sent by mistake. He demoed this by sending insulting messages to the company president, and then calling them back. One day the president opened the message just as it arrived. Gone. Then went to work with Adobe in their early days.

He writes a futurist column for the PBS web site. Being a futurist is easy if you plan your exit right. He makes a list of predictions every January and then evaluates it in December. Claims that he is right about 80 per cent of the time. Craigslist is killing the newspaper want ads. Started by Craig Newmark in San Fran. Nearly all of the ads are free. Want ads used to be the cash cow of newspapers. Big time problem. Nobody in the industry ever thought to buy out Craig. Has written 3 books and run in 3 marathons. The book publishing industry isn't sure what to make of the Internet. Ditto with the movie industry and music industry. We overestimate technology in the short term and underestimate it in the long term. Henry Yuen, inventor of the VCR plus, put 150 million of his dollars in ebooks, thinking that was the big web of the future. He lost his shirt. Cringely says that it will take ten years for the ebook to reign king. Was riding a bike inside the VAB at Canaveral, wearing a cell phone, ipod, heart monitor and GPS. The point was that he had more computing power than the first men who landed on the moon - wearing 1000 dollars worth of equipment. Corrected for inflation, all of that would have cost 11.5 billion dollars.

Any impact that we've seen in libraries is nothing compared to what we're going to see. The step after ubiquity is invisibility. The people at Google mean well, but not every genius in the field works there. A lot of people in the industry start their day by trying to anticipate what Google will do next, and then try and do it first. In the long run, Google will be the library's biggest competitor, but they don't do everything well. The biggest competitor to Google is a bunch of disgruntled employees who are about to leave. They're made because Google won't split the stock. A few thousand of them will migrate into a new company with a lot of good ideas that Google never touched. UnGoogle.com? The Ungooglers will be more library friendly. In the long term future, books will nearly disappear from libraries. You should pay attention to the emerging marketing of metadata. The data about the data is where the action is.

In Mexico, the only way to tell a real taxi from a fake is an rfid tag. The task of moving past the easy cheat to the true integration of knowledge is the hardest thing in the world. Paste that one on the church door. Technologists to librarians - "We love you but we don't want your job."

Apple Iphone debuts next month on Cingluar. It's a mac in your hands. In two years there will be 10,000 applications to be running on these phones. It doesn't make use of Cingular's highest speed network - not compatible with Apple. They get the middle selection instead. The cost of the phones will be half in two years what it is for the early adapters next month. Myself, I'll hold out for the Goophone, which will probably be released in time for Christmas. Auto manuals are going away as cars are getting computerized. Anything today that runs on a desktop will be on a handheld within three years.

Corey on IUG. A new Beacon award inspired by its first recipient Bob Duncan. First award went to Mieko Yamaguchi - and Bob Duncan, who deserved it hands down for help he has given to me and countless other libraries. Corey introduced the current and incoming board members.

We found lunch at an old favorite - the Sonoma Chicken Coop in Old Town San Jose. After that, I went to a very interesting series of breakout sessions.

(bleep).

In the evening, we were invited to the All-conference dessert reception down the street at the Claremont. As usual, Jean Armstrong did a superb job in lining up desserts whose calorie count exceeded the dollar count of the national budget of Trinidad and Tobego. It was all wonderful, and the music was provided by a talented team of Innovative staff and IUG folks - most notably my old friend Karen Perone and her husband Jim.

The next morning we got up what we thought was early and went 2 blocks up the road to eat breakfast at Peggy Sue's diner, and found ourselves behind 20 other librarians who had absolutely paralized the eatery. Afterwards, I caught the 9 AM session....

(bleep)

...after that excellent presentation, I met most of the other Quinnipiac librarians for the all-conference lunch.

(bleep).