Powercast freaks me out

Business 2.0 talks about Powercast . . . which has apparantly achieved the Holy Grail of drawing power from thin air. Or nearly so.

Imagine no more little chargers around your house. Instead, your cell phone and other low-power devices recharge by converting radio signals from the air into energy.

To the average end-user, this is power from *nothing* . . .

Pipes: A Tool for Remixing the Web

At ETech today I sat in on a session titled "Pipes: A Tool for Remixing the Web" by Pasha Sadri and Jonathan Trevor of Yahoo! In the company's words, "Pipes is a free online service that lets you remix popular feed types and create data mashups using a visual editor. You can use Pipes to run your own web projects, or publish and share your own web services without ever having to write a line of code."

All in all, very cool . . . and it got me thinking about the concept of taking the output of one feed on the web and using it as the INPUT for another, etc. When you add the capabilities that Pipes adds to loop, iterate, and branch, you wind up with a powerful programming tool for turning existing data sources into something completely new.

http://pipes.yahoo.com/pipes/

Jeff Bezos is a skinny little dude with big ideas

I'm in the midst of the O'Reilly ETech Conference in San Diego, soaking in the latest tech developments and meeting interesting people.

I walked by a small, slightly built man in the hall today and thought to myself "Gee, that looks like Jeff Bezos, the CEO of Amazon." Then I saw his name badge, and of course that's who it was. Hangin' out in worn jeans and looking relaxed. [EDIT: I have to admit, I found myself waiting around for the door to open to where the coffee was being set up for a break . . . and had a short conversation with Jeff, mostly related to Amazon Web Services, about which I was highly curious. He politely asked about Atomic Learning as well :-) . . . and listened to my (I hope brief) description of what we do and are about. Surreal.]

I mention this by way transition to the fact that I saw Amazon CTO Werner Vogel speak during the keynotes this morning, giving details of Amazon's Web Services, including S3 (simple storage solution) and EC2 (elastic computing cloud). Imagine being able to start a new web-based business without having to buy/manage hardware for servers or storage. The concept is very exciting and gaining maturity rapidly. I got the distinct feeling Amazon is out way ahead on a trend (cloud computing) that is going to change everything.

http://aws.amazon.com