ETech, Sandy, and more soon...

As many of you already know (because I'm running to you in hallways!), I'm chairing the O'Reilly ETech Conference in San Diego this week. There's so much intelligence, creativity, and fun in this place. I always swore I'd still run the ETech program even if I left O'Reilly: and, for the 6th year in a row, I'm thrilled and honoured to be involved. (Now if I could only be in all those sessions at the same time.)

Of course, I have plenty to tell you about — namely, Sandy and her debut at Under the Radar last week — but will have to wait till I have more than three minutes at a time in front of the computer. More soon...

We're SXSW Awards finalists

SXSW 07 will be my fifth year at what I consider to be one of the best web related conferences I've been to. I consistently look forward to early March, and upon leaving Austin always come away with a renewed sense of creativity and pride for what I do. Attending SXSW during the post dot-com boom made it plainly obvious that while excessive and senseless investment was gone, the passion for creating useful tools and services was still just as strong (if not stronger) as it was in previous years.

And this year I've yet another reason to be excited: Stikkit has been named as a finalist in the SXSW Web Awards for Technical Achievement. As you can imagine, this has everyone at Values of n pretty excited. We truly believe we're making a difference when it comes to building web applications and it's an honor to even be considered.

And while the judges will ultimately decide whether or not we're the best in our category, you get to decide the outcome of the People's Choice awards for each category. So we encourage you to make your opinion known by casting a vote for your favorites — whether or not that includes us (although you know our preference).

Also, if you're going to be in Austin in March, seek Rael, Asha, or myself out and say "hello." We're all scheduled to speak or lead panels as well and I'm certain some of our philosophies on application development will be evidently expressed. (Oh, and if you're not already scheduled to go: why not?)

See you in Austin! And don't forget to vote.

net@nite: "The people behind Stikkit"

I had the pleasure of hanging out (virtually, at least) and chatting with Amber MacArthur and Leo Laporte on their weekly podcast net@nite. Uber-organizer and pal Merlin Mann was kind enough to demo Stikkit on a forthcoming episode of Leo's Call for Help show and they were taken with it enough to invite me to chat about some of the ideas behind our work.

You can listen to the podcast at TalkShoe (Episode 7: "iPhone?"; I pop on at time index 27:47).