O'Reilly Etech 2007 San Diego

What I learned at Etech:

Wearing a $happiness++; tshirt I designed for Right Media is a great way to get noticed especially when there's a Keynote about happiness that day. And a great way to get on flickr.
Speaking of happiness, Jane McGonigal's keynote on happiness has rekindled one of my passions in life, designing games and creating fun out of nothing.

Video games are apparently the key to the future of interface design. The three topics covered were how to emulate happiness in video games in applications, how to create video game-like fun in interfaces, and how websites should be made like text-based games. Apparently all those years I've wasted playing video games were not a waste at all. They were years of research that can now be applied.

Companies like Amazon are also banking the future means using someone else's infrastructure instead of building your own. They call it Amazon Web Services.

Others are banking on the fact that the next step to the 2.0 web will be offline applications. Adobe has Apollo and companies like Zimbra already have offline web apps.

I learned that when you play Werewolf with a bunch of strangers, don't make accusations right off the bat, that only makes the Werewolves want to eat your face. Also, sitting next to two werewolves is a great way to die in the first round. (Others might know this game as Mafia)

I learned a lot actually, but these are the most prominent.