A look at tomorrow's technology

Yahoo software developer Dan Theurer set up his Bluetooth phone yesterday to communicate with his blog, as did several friends and colleagues attending ETech, an emerging-technology conference at the San Diego Marriott Hotel & Marina.

O'Reilly Media Tim O'Reilly bills the conference as a gathering of “alpha geeks,” the innovators who spawn companies such as Google or MySpace.

In one of many admittedly geeky demonstrations at the three-day conference that ends today, the wireless Bluetooth phones detected one another in the conference meeting rooms and formed an impromptu social network. Theurer could see lists of blogs read by the others in the temporary network.

At the seventh annual ETech, there's less worry about what sticks to the wall and more focus on having something cool to throw. The conference is a gathering of more than 1,200 programmers, engineers, executives, hackers, academics and others trying to chart the course of technology.

Theurer said he wasn't sure where else the blog “hack” would be useful, other than at large gatherings such as the tech conference. But he said it was interesting to combine mobile phone technology with blogging software.

Yahoo competitor Google brought something to throw against the wall, too. The Internet's dominant company is scheduled to loosen its tight-lipped approach today to Android, its open-source project to build a cell phone operating system.

In November, Google said it was working with other heavy hitters such as Qualcomm, Sprint and Motorola to develop a cell phone system that will compete with smart phone software from Microsoft, BlackBerry maker RIM and Apple. The open-source software will be freely available to all phone manufacturers.

Adobe demonstrated its new Air software, which runs Web sites from the computer desktop, without a browser. Air includes the ability to animate Web sites, similar to Adobe Flash. The company showed a version of eBay running on Air. The site can be launched from a desktop icon. Its auctions update automatically, eliminating the need to refresh a Web browser window.

In addition to the tech behemoths, conference presenters included startups such as MegaPhone, which is developing a public, multiplayer video game played on big-screen displays. Players control the game by shouting commands over cell phone connections.

Another young company, Adaptive Blue, has a plug-in to make browsers smarter. Highlight an address on a Web page, and the browser offers mapping programs and local information, such as weather.

“This is a conference about technology on the edges,” said Tim O'Reilly, chief executive of technology publisher O'Reilly Media, which sponsored the event.

“When you follow the hackers, you don't necessarily know where they're going, or where the money is,” O'Reilly said in a keynote speech Monday night. “But you know that something interesting is going on.”

O'Reilly bills the conference as a gathering of “alpha geeks,” the innovators who take an idea and convert it into a Google or a MySpace.

Technology is moving from its post-dot-com-crash Internet phase – Web 2.0 – to an era of ambient computing, he said. A pervasive network using new types of sensors will soon shape our technology experiences, he predicted.

“Watch how the sensors change,” O'Reilly said. “In Japan, there's a cigarette machine that scans faces, looking for age-related signs to determine whether someone is old enough to make a purchase.”

In another example, a marketing company tracks shoppers' foot traffic by monitoring the number of cell phone signals at a mall.

Another trend O'Reilly sees is the open-source hardware movement. There are groups such as the Open Prosthetics Project, whose members push and then openly share advances in the design of artificial limbs and other medical prosthetics.

Related projects such as the “open mobile” movement – with several operating systems being developed, including the Google-backed Android – could shake up the cell phone industry, O'Reilly said.

“What will 'open mobile' mean for the cell phone?” O'Reilly said. “Where else can we take it?”

Google's Dan Morrill plans to talk about his company's visions for Android phones. Morrill will “show a few examples of applications that fit into your life so naturally you'll wonder how you ever got along without them,” according to an ETech program.

Morrill declined to tip his hand too much, but he said Android will support a touch screen with a display resolution equal to the iPhone. A computer demonstration of Android yesterday showed something that looks very much like the iPhone, with no visible keypad.

The demonstration showed several icons that link users to the phone's software features, including one that linked to Google Maps.

Today, Morrill will show what the other icons can do.