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Speaking at the P2P Conference

Recovered from the Wayback Machine. In some ways, what we described was the origins of a pseudo-blockchain functionality. But Michael went back to Sydney, and I went on to other things.

I’ll be speaking at the first P2P conference, presented by O’Reilly and being held in San Francisco in February.

I’m co-speaking with Michael Hitz, from Skyfish The focus of the presentation will be:

Managing power grids (such as Florida Light and Power’s) and mass transit systems (such as the new light rail system to the airport in Hong Kong) each require sophisticated control systems. The sale of these large scale complex systems often requires an international marketing and engineering effort that demands the input of many different people, many of whom live in different countries and speak different languages. Such a sales process is fraught with an engineering challenge of its own that demands accurate price estimates, bills of material, forecast manufacturing orders and communication across sales, engineering and manufacturing teams in multiple time-zones.

 

This talk focuses on a development effort currently underway to create an automated configuration tool for such systems; one which will allow a number of distributed participants to collaborate on the description of a complex system of distributed parts. Output are various stages of quotation, requests for approval, and an automatically generated bill of materials (BOM).

 

In order to facilitate the geographical separation of people using the tool, the creators will be using P2P technologies to locate and access distributed services based on the needs of both configuration and user, at each stage of the configuration cycle. Streaming data will be used to dynamically generate the user interface, based on work in progress by one or more active participants and each engineer’s locale.

Peer-to-Peer is more than just another buzz word or a technology such as Napster. Ray Ozzie, the creator of Lotus Notes, has started a company and a technical framework called Groove that encompasses P2P technologies and concepts, and no one can say that he doesn’t understand either technology or the current market or how to merge the two.

P2P technologies such as distributed computing, collaboration, and shared services and resources will change the way we access functionality and use the Internet in the next few years. To be blunt, the last time I was this excited about technology was when I first used this new thing called the “web”, years ago.

Here’s your chance to get in at the start of a new way of doing things — attend the P2P conference in February, and attend our presentation Friday, the 16th of February in the afternoon.