Crossover
Technologies
February 16-17, 2006
Pasadena, CA

Mike Hawley previews the conference (MP3)

With Distinguished Guest
Bran Ferren, Chief Creative Officer, Applied Minds

conference overview
Technology innovation is no longer hatched purely in IT and R&D laboratories, and technology adoption has ceased to be a top-down process. What often drives business technology usage today are new waves of emerging technologies, such as the rising tide of consumer technologies propelled by vast economies of scale. Entertainment devices, cell phones, Blackberries, blogs, and iPods are no longer just the latest “cool” thing: they have emerged as essential, integral, and indispensable parts of our personal and organizational communications infrastructures. What the home entertainment industry provides (flat panel displays, for instance), IT consumes, as the two worlds continue to blur their boundaries.

We used to think 3G was expensive overkill as a mobile infrastructure, but maybe its time has come. The miniaturization of hardware components, like disk drives, and the integration of increasingly powerful devices (cameras, screens, health and bio sensors) will contribute to the on-going mobile (r)evolution of devices. Buildings are now routinely covered with LED video screens, and giant 100-million-pixel displays are on the way. With cell phones and the computer world increasingly intertwined, how soon can we expect speech synthesis on a computer to really sound like a person or a character? Once in place, and with voices and images as easily chosen as typefaces, is the notion of machines exhibiting a very strong, and very real, sense of personality a near-term reality?

This conference examines the emergence of technologies emanating from the realms of entertainment and mass communications, and explores their impact on organizational IT. We’ll ask what adoption models and cycles will impact the way we run our organizations in the future? We’ll look at what can we learn from the consumer, entertainment, leisure, and lifestyle industries about networks, streaming content, payment systems, and fraud protection.

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speakers
Mr. Bradley Allen, Founder and CTO, Siderean Software, Inc.
Mr. Charles Barnes, Chairman and CEO, Dataslide, Ltd.
Mr. Ron Bloom, Co-founder and CEO, PodShow, Inc.
Mr. Dan Bricklin, Co-creator, VisiCalc and President, Software Garden
Mr. Tom Cohen, Advisor, Squidoo, LLC
Mr. Aden Holt, Founder, Buzz-Oven
Mr. John Kim, Vice President, Strategy, The Gale Company
Ms. Julia Komissarchik, Co-founder, Glenbrook Networks
Mr. Jason Krikorian, Co-founder, Sling Media, Inc.
Ms. Dianne Lynch, Dean, Roy H. Park School of Communications,Ithaca College
Dr. Gloria Mark, Associate Professor, Interactive and Collaborative Technologies, University of California, Irvine
Dr. Richard Marks, Manager, Special Projects Group, Sony Computer Entertainment US R&D
Dr. A. Richard Newton, Dean, College of Engineering, University of California, Berkeley
Mr. Clifford Ross, Photographer
Dr. Deb Roy, Director, Cognitive Machines Group, MIT Media Laboratory
Mr. Stephen Sifferman, Executive Vice President, Operations, ArrayComm
Mr. Leon Silverman, President, LaserPacific Media Corporation
Dr. Adrian Travis, Co-founder and Chief Scientist, Deep Light, LLC
Mr. Mike Ziemer and Mr. Michael Henry, Founders, Third String Productions

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