Well, ETech was a wrap Thursday afternoon, so Friday morning I was up early trying to net it out so I could file a story to my editor at Conferenza, Gary Bolles, who’s based in San Francisco. I last saw Gary at Demo ’07, and am looking forward to seeing him again in SF in mid-April at Walt Mossberg and Kara Swisher’s “D” Launch Party. Gary’s the cofounder of Conferenza, and the site’s URL is now http://conferenzablog.typepad.com. The link for my story is here.
Update: To include the specific Conferenza link for my ETech recap.
Webb asked the question, “How do we design for this generation?” Though he’s a product designer himself, he went on to say later that Generation C is capable of building products of their own, being so into social networks and mashups and things — so one wonders then why we need product designers? But that’s just the pixel side of the equation. We still need people with design sense to help us sculpt things made out atoms — plastic or whatever. Products are getting smarter and more social, with all kinds of networking capabilities, of course. And we have “new paradigms for interaction,” said Webb. He cited widgets, for example, which he said is such a great paradigm, “it shouldn’t be limited to just the desktop and web.” A key point Webb made is that experience is what counts to this generation, and “how do we design for experience?” He said in his wrapup that experience should be “treated as a design surface,” and that all of us in the room are the right people to address these new design challenges. One nice thing the O’Reilly people pointed out to us in the description of this session was that “people have been paying for plastic longer than pixels.” So, the business model is there! 🙂 It should be an exciting future for product designers, whoever they may be.
Similarly, games are made up of games — lots of little ones are in any good game, he said. Building games is about good “interaction design.” Then he ran us through a quick lesson in designing for fun, or applying game design to, for example, social media applications. He said you should have statistical features and opportunities for competition. “Never start an interaction with no context,” he said. And the participant must be able to prepare for the next encounter. Users should be able to solve challenges with a choice of tools, he said. “Reward them with different feedback. Variable feedback keeps things lively. And it should be visible to everyone.” Raph closed by telling us to check out his book site for more: 
Magic is a good metaphor, “a useful abstraction … because it does not cripple — it explains.” Magic to him is about the interaction you have with an object. 
He cited a recent 37Signals book on how to do a Web 2.0 startup, which has a chapter entitled something like “Scale Later – Because It’s Really Hard.” That, of course, plays right into why you should let AWS worry about such things. “Focus on your idea,” said Werner, “and let our web-scale computing services meet infinite demand, cheaply and effectively.” A customer from RightScale.com, Thorsten von Eicken, said he’s been “running his service on Amazon for six months and will never go back.” Doug Kaye, CTO of Gigavox Media, said the service “has been big for us,” and that the price is right: his firm’s bill from Amazon for the first two months was only $84. “How great is that for a startup?”
“The new games are supergames,” she said. “They have massive scale, they are a superimposed hybrid experience, they’re super heroic, and they’re supercomputing.” What does all this have to do with the three realms of happiness? “They make you feel a part of something bigger, that you’re making meaning,” said McGonigal. Her talk closed with her ETech call to action: “Understanding and innovating happiness is the new capital. Hack happiness!” she said. And she told everyone to check out 
A new friend I just met, Alex Iskold, wrote a post about Numenta this morning on 
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