Wired:I've spent the last week in San Diego, at the O'Reilly Emerging Technology conference. Over the last six years, Etech, as it's known, has been ground zero for the latest generation of approaches adopted by Silicon Valley after the dotcom bust, writes Danny O'Brien.
Over that time, cutting-edge but rough ideas presented here have been considered, expanded upon and have reappeared in a more corporate guise after being lightly dabbed with the Valley's venture capital dollars. Million-dollar sites like Flickr and universally adopted ideas like tagging spread from their introduction at panels or corridor chats here in a small, intense few days of laptop-lit discussion.
As its reputation has grown, the challenge for its organisers, book publishers O'Reilly Media, has also grown. Venture capitalists and entrepreneurs have mined the same spaces that Etech sought for its ideas. The wilder individual ideas don't seem as outlandish as they once were.
This year, the planners tried to extend Etech's sense of the future as far as they could: they called for papers about "magic" - hardware and software that was so advanced as to be barely conceivable, let alone marketable quite yet. (Not that product non-existence or impossibility has stopped the brave hypesters of Silicon Valley in the past).
So what was magic at Etech this year? And will consumers and businesses really see any of it appearing outside of Harry Potter novels?
Two of the most outlandish themes that emerged were near- infinite storage and near- infinite computer power, but even these principles were presented by established names.
It was a doyen, the BBC's Tom Loosemore, who demonstrated his skunkwork group's "Impossibox", a prototype machine that could record all the TV beamed into your home and then share it with everyone else online.
Loosemore's point was to highlight what home viewing will be like - and what TV companies will have to contend with - when storage is even more ridiculously cheap than it is now. Which, given the constant and still precipitous drop in storage costs, is always sooner than you think.
As Loosemore pointed out, by 2010, it is projected you'll be able to buy a terabyte of storage - an unseemly quantity now - for less than the cost of an iPod.
Filling that is going to need technology that can suck everything traditional broadcasting throws at us.
Nearly infinite computing power was the offer made by Amazon, the book seller which is now offering its own vast network of computers for time-sliced rent by outsiders.
It's not really infinite, of course, but companies and individuals alike can cope with sudden spikes in need for storage or processor time by outsourcing data and programs to the huge computer farms Amazon uses to run its sales.
Amazon competitively prices its S3 storage system and EC2 computer capacity at pennies per gigabyte and processor time used. So, if you suddenly need 400 PCs when previously you only had one (a not unknown event, when your website gets promoted on television and hundreds of thousands visit at once), a simple command or two will increase your virtual muscle.
Is infinite power really just an extension of selling books? Explained like that, the magic fades, as it always does from new technologies. There's still excitement at the wildest edges of Etech, which this year was provided by geeks peering at the world of medicine.
All of tech's old guard were there, transplanted into the messier questions of biology.
The entrepreneur behind the Palm, Jeff Hawkins, thinks he can build a computer memory system based on the human neocortex. Wall Street investor Andy Kessler, shocked to discover his doctor's best diagnostic tool was a rubber hammer to hit knees with, explained how he thought tech would make much diagnosis redundant in a few years.
While I may be biased (she is after all, my wife), journalist Quinn Norton gave the best, yet stomach-turning talk, describing how geeks were modifying their bodies to augment their senses and their abilities in the same way as they modified their computers to increase speed and memory.
Usually, after an Etech, I have a sense of where traditional technology will be going for the next few months. After this year's, I have a far better idea of where it is now, at least for California's more cutting-edge tech companies, and a very warped glimpse of where it plans to land in a few years.
Between the two is a large gulf to be crossed. A lot of people here seem restless to end the current boom cycle, and move on to the "Next But One Big Thing". "Software is boring," one attendee confessed, in a late-night postmortem of the industry.
But reverse engineering the brain? Moving from Bill Gates to Doctor Frankenstein? Things could get messy fast - if not fast enough for these explorers.
