By Todd R. Weiss
In the next two days, prepare to be inspired, educated, challenged, informed and entertained by a cast of diverse IT experts who are here to share their insights and experiences on a wide swath of software development topics.
I’m technology journalist Todd R. Weiss, and I’m a regular contributor to Computerworld, PC World and TechTarget, writing about enterprise IT and the challenges it brings daily to businesses and their busy IT staffs.
I’m here on behalf of Chariot Solutions to help cover this conference and bring some of its key highlights to their customers and attendees at this 6th annual Emerging Technologies for the Enterprise Conference (ETE) in Philadelphia.
Among the software development notables here for this information-packed event are:
- Mobile application consultant Jonathan Stark, who is the author of O’Reilly Media’s Building iPhone Apps with HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. Jonathan will talk about his alternative approaches to building apps for iPhone and iPad using only HTML, CSS and JavaScript.
- David Kaneda, the developer of jQTouch, a Javascript framework for iPhone development and creative director at Sencha. David will talk about Sencha Touch, a mobile web app framework that allows developers to create rich mobile apps which look and feel native.
- Josh Clark, a designer who specializes in mobile design strategy and user experience. Josh is the author of “Tapworthy: Designing Great iPhone Apps” and “Best iPhone Apps” from O’Reilly Media.
- Eduardo Jezierski, the CTO of InSTEDD, a non-profit that helps communities around the world use, design and develop information tools for their health, safety and development. Eduardo will lecture about “Architecture and Agility With Lives at Stake.”
- Jonas Boner, the creator of the Akka development framework, who will describe Akka in detail and show how it can be used to solve hard scalability problems.
- Mark Chadwick, the chief architect at Google subsidiary Invite Media, who will describe how Invite Media serves up millions of advertisements to targeted consumers every hour in his lecture, Doing the Mundane a Million Times a Minute.
This year the ETE conference is part of the first “Philly Tech Week” being organized in Philadelphia across a wide range of sites in the city. Philly Tech Week is a first-time event that’s being promoted to showcase the bustling technology community in the region.
This is the biggest year yet for the ETE conference, which is hosting almost 500 attendees in 2011, said Tracey Welson-Rossman, director of sales and marketing for software development consulting firm Chariot Solutions of Fort Washington, Pa.
“We really feel that this is a tipping point and that we’re going to let people outside the area know that there’s hidden high-tech gems in the Philadelphia area,” Welson-Rossman said. “We’re really fortunate to have this level of talent that comes to us here at the conference.”
“We know that Philadelphia has an incredibly strong tech community,” she said. “That’s why were able to have this show. We wouldn’t be able to attract the speakers if the area didn’t have this reputation.”
Todd R. Weiss is a longtime technology journalist who worked as a staff writer for Computerworld.com from 2000 to 2008. Now a freelance tech journalist, Weiss contributes regularly to Computerworld, PCWorld.com and other publications. He has also written extensively for Linux.com, ForecastingClouds.com and TechTarget on a wide range of enterprise IT topics from Linux and open source to disaster recovery, cloud computing, virtualization, application development, IT education and mobile and wireless technologies. He began writing about computers in 1996 after a newspaper editor he worked for told him that “no one cares about technology.” Apparently, the editor was wrong.