For 21 years now, the digerati have assembled for Esther Dyson’s “PC Forum” (www.edventure.com/pcforum/pcforum.html)to evaluate how far computer technology has come and to guess where it’s going. Once again, Silicon Prairie is there, scouring for clues regarding the future of the industry and offering daily coverage.
Last year, PC Forum addressed the topic “Metaphors and the Net” and focused on developing a vocabulary that could describe how we work and play on the Internet. The topic and title might have led you to believe that these would be pseudoconversations about how we talk — but the sessions, led by personalities as diverse as Michael Bloomberg and Michael Crichton — were uniformly lively, entertaining, and provocative. That the conclave ended without agreement on the best way to talk about the Net meant only that the experience was too new for us to figure out how to discuss it.
This year, 620 industry executives shoehorned into the Westin La Paloma in Tucson, Ariz., to take on a topic just as wide-ranging and amorphous: “Let’s Be Clear: Identity, Transparency, and the Net.” PC Forum leaders Dyson and Jerry Michalski have built fascinating careers out of wondering who we are online and how we balance privacy with other concerns, so it’s a natural topic for them.
John Holland, professor of computer science and engineering/psychology at the University of Michigan, set the tone for the conference Monday with a discussion about his recent book, “Emergence: From Chaos to Order” (Addison Wesley), in which the father of generic algorithms explores how single-cell organisms can develop into complex systems no human can explain. Although the Internet is not an organic being, the metaphor is a relevant one, so his talk provided some scientific underpinnings for succeeding sessions. (Also, it was heartening to see a man acclaimed as a genius having trouble turning on an overhead projector.)
Then Holland joined Scott Cook, Intuit chairman and cofounder, and Steven Brill, formerly chairman and CEO of American Lawyer Media and now founder and editor-in-chief of “Content” (a magazine intended as a watchdog of the press), in a wide-ranging discussion of how Holland’s ideas work in the electronic marketplace of the Net.
Brill let off a few good one-liners (“When it comes to arrogance and lack of accountability, the press is the only profession that make lawyers look good”), but the most cogent speaker was Intuit’s Cook, who detailed how Intuit is trying to expand www.quicken.com into a trusted source for personal finance information on the Web, including mortgage rates, auto-insurance rates, etc.
“We are trying to do the same for financial services that Brill is trying to do for the press,” he said. Cook noted that trust is now fragmented, segmented, and specialized — we might trust Maytag for dryers, but not for financial news–and emphasized how the goal for every company is to create trust in one area and then expand, not unlike Holland’s systems.
Intel president and chief operating officer Craig Barrett spoke briefly and made little news, except when he described his company’s new policy of investing in small Net startups. He likened the policy to that of an ” enlightened government agency, like DARPA” and pointed out how Intel wants to “support good ideas” before it “makes any money,” which the company’s near-monopoly semiconductors do nicely.
Charles Palmer, manager of IBM Research’s global security analysis lab, delivered a sobering speech on what his unit does — “ethical hacking” to combat a growing hacker threat.
He estimated that of the 100,000 active hackers, most are mere annoyances, but that 10,000 of them were capable of committing crimes such as corporate or government espionage, and roughly 100 were capable of “serious damage,” financial and physical.
In a roundtable following his discussion, Palmer was joined by Charles Morgan, chairman of information broker Acxion, Nicholas Grouf, founder and CEO of Firefly Network, and Jeff Levy, CEO of Web demographic consultants Relevant Knowledge, for a discussion of privacy that quickly moved from corporate walls to personal walls. To show how focused attendees and speakers at PC Forum are on electronic commerce, no one brought up medical records in their discussions of online privacy, until questioner did.
Then seven “debutantes,” new companies showing off new products, were given five minutes each to make their pitches. Last year, I couldn’t figure out what all but one of the presenters’ products actually did (and that one, Netbot, was quickly purchased by Excite); this year the offerings were similarly vague (do we need another “community building” tool?) None of these new products is going to change the world.
After the debuts, the executives and venture-capital vultures broke for an outdoor lunch and then scattered to hotel suites for the real business of PC Forum, beneath all the intellectual exercises: deal-making.
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