Supernova 2007: because technology is everyone's business

Friday, April 28, 2006

What We're Not Talking About at Supernova

I try to position Supernova just slightly ahead of the curve, focused on key trends poised to enter the mainstream conversation.  It’s about actionable learning.  You should come out of the conference not just hearing new concepts, but understanding things that are useful to you.  Some ideas are fascinating, but too speculative to impact large numbers of users and businesses in the next few years.  Others are “hot topics” at the time, but only because everyone already knows about them.  And often, catchy slogans are so vague that they don’t really tell you much about what’s at stake.

The Supernova 2006 agenda is pretty broad.  But there are still some topics you might be suprised not to find there, like Blogs vs. Old Media, Microsoft vs. Google, or Is Web 2.0 a Bubble? These topics generate a lot of noise in the blogosphere, and they all reflect significant underlying trends.  Yet the conversations around them have become stale and caricatured.  They all reflect a simplistic “us vs. them” mentality.  It’s easy to make sweeping generalizations or dismissive judgments; it’s much harder to dig down and explore where things are going.  That’s what we try to do at Supernova.

Of course, the frameworks I set up through the formal conference agenda are only one thread of conversations that emerge around Supernova every year.  People will talk about what they want to talk about, both on-stage and off.  I have no desire to stop that (as if I could).  It’s important, though, for a conference to push its participants from time to time.  When I did a session four years ago called “Are Weblogs the Next Platform?”, the speakers (all of them leading lights of the blogosphere) were perplexed about what that meant.  Now everyone talks about Web 2.0, and Microsoft CTO Ray calls RSS syndication the connective tissue of Net.  The topics we address at Supernova aren’t necessarily my ideas; they are concepts I perceive “in the ether,” by listening to what many smart people are saying and doing.  This year is no different.

Initial workshop list

We’ve posted a preliminary chart of Supernova 2006 workshops.  The workshops, held this year on Wednesday, June 21, at the Wharton West facility, are one of the best parts of Supernova.  The more interactive, classroom-style atmosphere of the workshop day produces some very lively and producive conversations.  (Last year, some of them were almost too lively!)

You can register just for the workshop day, or it’s part of the 3-day full conference registration. Because things change so quickly, we’ve left a few of the workshop blocks open for now, and the content as well as the order of the existing ones may change slightly as Supernova approaches.

Wednesday, April 26, 2006

Congratulations to Jonathan

I remember the first time I met Jonathan Schwartz.  It was several years back, not too long after he joined Sun through the acquisition of his startup.  He was doing marketing or something for an obscure part of the company.

“You gotta meet this guy,” said the Sun PR person.  And she was right.  We had a great conversation, and I’ve stayed in touch with Jonathan ever since.  It was clear he was going places (at Sun or elsehwere).  Jonathan has a rare combination of deep technical knowledge with business savvy, and a lively mind that comes through in his blog.  Not to mention the significance of him having a blog, which he absolutely writes himself, and where he doesn’t hesitate to speak his mind!  So, although it wasn’t a great shock when Jonathan was named CEO of Sun this week, it was still a welcome development. 

I’m looking forward more than ever to my “fireside chat” with Jonathan at Supernova. 

Thursday, April 20, 2006

Knowledge@Wharton Interview with IBM's David Yaun on Innovation

Knowledge@Wharton has published the second Supernova 2006 podcast interview, with IBM executive David Yaun.  David, who I’ve known for years, heads up a major IBM project called the Global Innovation Outlook.  Innovation has never been more important to business leaders, but it’s also famously hard to define, and to achieve. So IBM reached out to hundreds of experts around the world.  The results are fascinating. 

IBM Senior VP Linda Sanford, who heads up the company’s internal innovation efforts, will be speaking at Supernova 2006, so I’m sure this is a conversation we will continue in June. 

May 18 Pre-Supernova party -- Save the date!

We had a pre-pre-Supernova party in February, and the week of Supernova in June is turning into one long party, so what should we do in between?  Why, have a party!

We’ll be hosting a pre-Supernova technology industry networking reception in San Francisco on Thursday, May 18.  More details coming soon, but mark your calendars now.

Wednesday, April 19, 2006

Supernova and BarCamp SF

The selectivity and content-driven structure that make Supernova succesful unfortunately mean that we can’t provide a platform for everyone doing cool things.  Time and space are limited, and I have to make hard choices to pull together the best possible program.  There’s a totally different approach to conferences, which is to make them free, open to everyone, and participant-driven in terms of content.  These “unconferences”, to use Dave Winer’s phrase, are complemenary with events like Supernova.  Each format has its strengths and weaknesses.  I’ve always wanted to see a truly open, decentralized event happen alongside Supernova. 

This is why I’m thrilled that Chris Messina, Tantek Celik, and a group of technologists and entrepreneurs are organizing a BarCamp and Mashpit in conjunction with Supernova 2006 in June.  Chris just posted the announcement on his blog. 

BarCamp is “an ad-hoc un-conference born from the desire for people to share and learn in an open environment.” In other words, it’s a self-organizing gathering of cool people, showing off (or creating!) cool technologies, where no one is turned away.  The success of the BarCamp model is a testament to the power of the Net to bring people together.  There have been BarCamps all around the world during the past year, organized and attended by innovators with passion.  There’s obviously no shortage of those types in the San Francisco Bay Area, and many others will be in town for Supernova.  The current plan is to wrap events around both sides of Supernova, creating a weeklong festival of tech goodness. 

We’re excited to support this community effort, and have offered to contribute Wharton West as a venue.  We’ll post more details here as things solidify, or you can participate directly in planning the event through the BarCamp San Francisco wiki.

To quote Chris, “this is gunna be fun.”

Monday, April 17, 2006

Raph's recollections

Legendary game designer Raph Koster recalls some insightful comments from his panel at Supernova 2005, which he labels “[o]ne of the best conferences I attended last year.”

Friday, April 07, 2006

Speakers, we've got speakers

A successful conference is all about the people.  People who attend, and people who speak.  (Although I learned from Esther Dyson to blur the line between those categories as much as possible.)

We’ve posted the initial speaker list for Supernova 2006.  There’s more coming, but I’m pretty excited by the group we’ve pulled together so far. 

There’s no perfect way to this—slots are limited, and Supernova covers a lot of ground.  I can’t invite everyone deserving.  Moreover, the speaker one attendee has heard ten times before may be a revelation to others.  So I’ve tried to include both my friends in the “digerati,” like Joi Ito, Dave Sifry, Dan Gillmor, and Jonathan Schwartz, as well as fantastic people like Rajesh Jain, Martin Varsavsky, Mike Zyda, Beth Noveck, John Garstka, and Dan Hunter, who you aren’t “usual suspects” on Silicon Valley tech conference rosters.  75% of this year’s speakers weren’t on the program last year.  We have entrepreneurs, academics, investors, corporate executives, journalists, bloggers, and representatives from six countries (Japan, England, the Netherlands, Spain, India, and the US).  And purely by accident, we’ll have both protagonists in the recent brouhaha over whether corporations should blog—Werner Vogels and Robert Scoble.  Not a bad start.

I’m also happy that more than a quarter of the speakers are women.  That’s still too low, I’ll admit, but it’s better than virtually every technology conference I know of.  And these aren’t tokens—people like Esther Dyson, Linda Sanford, Lili Cheng, Lise Buyer, and Mary Hodder need no defense.  They deserve to be there as much as anyone else on the list.  I try to make the Supernova speaker roster diverse (and not just in gender), because the world isn’t solely made up of people who look like me.  If we’re trying to understand technology’s impact on business and society as a whole, we can’t be myopic. 

Supernova is always a learning experience.  For me at least as much as for everyone else.  And we learn through exposure to new information, ideas, and perspectives.  I’m working to bring together a group of people who will help make that happen.

Sunday, April 02, 2006

New Supernova 2006 website

With the help of Emily Chang and Max Kiesler of Ideacodes, we’ve revised the Supernova website to make it more informative and easier to use.  The basic look hasn’t changed much, but we’ve moved to a template-based platform behind the scenes, and a standards-compliant CSS layout.  This will make it easier to update the site as more information about the conference becomes available.  And believe me, there’s a lot more coming! 

We’ve now posted an draft agenda and an initial list of confirmed speakers.  And, as you’ve noticed, since you’re reading this, we’re officially launching this weblog!  Be sure to subscribe to subscribe to our RSS feed for updates.