This summer, hundreds of the world’s leading bloggers, podcasters, and tech-savvy enthusiasts will once again descend upon the city of Seattle, Washington. The eighth Gnomedex conference is generating buzz in the blogosphere, which underscores our reason to produce it. Indeed, we will once again become the crossroads between producers and observers, between users and developers. Register Now!

• Who? Influencers, Entrepreneurs, and Tech Enthusiasts!
• What? A confluence of leading bloggers and new media!
• When? August 21st – 23rd, 2008!
• Where? Bell Harbor Conference Center in Seattle, WA!
• Why? Because all things are possible!

• We’ll be in downtown Seattle
• Breakfast, lunch, and snacks are included
• Tags are “Gnomedex” and/or “Gnomedex2008″

What Do You Get?

• A single-track conference with quality content
• A full conference pass
• Breakfast, lunch, snacks, and beverages (unlimited)
• Wi-Fi, professionally managed
• Your own electrical outlet for power
• The official Gnomedex t-shirt
• Business networking opportunities
• Free online promotion in the Gnomedex Blogroll… and more!

Why Attend Gnomedex?

• Business Models Brought to Life
• Movers, Shakers, & Deal Makers
• A tap into the Conversation Economy
• Thought Leaders, Industry Influencers, Entrepreneurs
• Continuous online conversation and PR
• The most affordable conference of its kind
• Important for new, existing company strategies

Adeona is the first Open Source system for tracking the location of your lost or stolen laptop that does not rely on a proprietary, central service. This means that you can install Adeona on your laptop and go — there’s no need to rely on a single third party. What’s more, Adeona addresses a critical privacy goal different from existing commercial offerings. It is privacy-preserving. This means that no one besides the owner (or an agent of the owner’s choosing) can use Adeona to track a laptop. Unlike other systems, users of Adeona can rest assured that no one can abuse the system in order to track where they use their laptop.

We will describe the motivation, design, and evolution of the Adeona laptop tracking service, as well as briefly give a high-level description of some of our other pursuits in academic computer security research. We will also give some hints of what’s in store for future versions of Adeona.

Larry Halff and Tara Hunt will be discussing how Ma.gnolia has implemented many of the tools of the open web such as OpenID, OAuth and Microformats and will also be unveiling Ma.gnolia 2, the next evolution of Ma.gnolia and a building block of the open web.

Scott writes:

Ultimately, my goal is to ask the audience to help design the future of space exploration — what I’m calling, admittedly with a certain bias, “Mars 3.0.” How could NASA use the Net not just to communicate better with the public but to actually enable the public to meaningfully participate in this grand adventure? To help the audience help me, I start with some background about JPL’s role within NASA, summarize how Mars 1.0 and Mars 2.0 worked, and describe how we drive the Mars rovers today. Then I discuss some of the legal, contractual, and practical restrictions on involving the general public in our mission. Finally, I’ll invite the audience to suggest approaches and help solve some of the problems that currently stand in the way of Mars 3.0.

photo credit: Wilson Afonso

The Internet has connected people across the globe; Generation Y will lose something as well as gain everything. Instantaneous access to information about people’s lives changes the expectation of privacy. How will people in Generation Y keep anything to themselves? Embarrassment, serious illness history, extra-marital affairs… these are things that have been changed by the Internet. The most recent example of this is Tara Hunt’s romance with Chris Messina. It ended up as a feature article in San Francisco Magazine. Is this what either of them wanted? Does everyone want to author a cancer blog?

What’s the purpose or value of “TMI”?

The gains are equally apparent: a strong sense of community with people who are constantly reaching out to help. And perhaps the fall of Communism and the end of national boundaries.

photo credit: MikeBlogs

Kevin Fox - How To Buy a Car for Under $1000

Kevin Fox is a community developer at Vidoop. His passions are cars and computers and anything that combines the two. Interested in one day getting paid to drive cars ala Jeremy Clarkson he is starting his career out by helping you buy a car for under $1,000.

Mario Schulzke - Why Deutschland Loves David Hasselhoff - (no link - was from Ignite Portland 2, description no longer online)

Mario Schulzke was born in Germany, came to the US 16 years later as a high school exchange student, then went to college in Montana. Got to live in places like England, France, Spain, Montana, Seattle, LA, and now Portland. After failing as a ping-pong player and comedian, Mario ended up in advertising.

Started as a young new business guy, and helped double Wongdoody’s LA office in both headcount and billings, resulting into a serious shortage of bathroom space. Won a big award that made him want to start working on clients’ business. Then joined America’s largest independent Direct Response agency, R2C Group. There Mario ran the interactive division for a couple of years, which also doubled in size. He now acts as the company’s Director of Marketing.

Mario is active on the board of advisors at the University of Montana business school, teaches marketing strategy at the Academy of Art University in San Francisco, published a book on how to write complaint letters and blogs about his attempts to live an interesting life at www.themarioblog.com.

Eva Schweber - How To Run a Startup and Not Lose Your Mind

Eva ran a home-based consulting business for 9 years before launching CubeSpace, Portland’s Workspace Community. Instead of spending her time helping cash-strapped nonprofits, she now spends her time helping cash-strapped startups. But she continues to volunteer on way too many nonprofit boards. Her latest involvement is with Portland’s Small Business Advisory Council where she combines her love of microbusinesses and public policy.

Vanessa Holfeltz - Boiling Water in 5 Easy Steps: If you haven’t studied nuclear engineering, you are probably wondering how a nuclear reactor produces electricity.

We will learn how to boil water (and learn how to generate electricity from it) in five easy steps, using a nuclear power reactor. Okay, I lied: they aren’t that easy. We will (briefly) explore how a nuclear power reactor works, from mining and enriching the uranium, to splitting the atoms, to controlling the fission reaction, to the byproducts and waste that are produced.

Vanessa recently finished studying mathematics at Reed College in Portland, Oregon. She is currently the Associate Director of the Reed Research Reactor. She enjoys bicycling and Stumptown coffee among other pursuits.

Jason Grigsby - Cup Noodle: Innovation, Inspiration, and Manga

Scott Berkun - How to Make Love with your Fears

Scott Berkun is the bestselling author of the books Making Things Happen and The Myths of Innovation. His work as a writer and public speaker have appeared in the New York Times, Washington Post, NPR, MSNBC, CNBC, Wired Magazine and other media. He worked at Microsoft from 1994-2003, taught creative thinking at the University of Washington, ran an architecture tour of NYC for the GEL conference, is a regular contributor to Harvard Business, and runs a popular blog, at www.scottberkun.com.

Sara Davies - The Geeks Shall Inherit the Earth

Sarah Davies is a Seattle-based technologist involved in several projects. She is the Internet Operations Manager for the American Civil Liberties Union of Washington State. Her most recent project is a streaming video website associated with the ACLU of Washington half-hour television program hosted by Rick Steves - Marijuana: It’s Time for a Conversation. She is currently in the midst of a Drupal redesign for the ACLU of Washington, for which she will be compiling a detailed technical case study. She will be presenting the case study at sxsw, but only if you vote for her panel! She is a vocal advocate of open source software, accessible open technology, and liberal IP law on her blog at sarahdavies.cc. She is on the board of directors for ArtWorks, a nonprofit which pays at-risk youth to paint public murals around the Seattle area.

Matt Harding - The Making of Where the Hell is Matt?

One time when Matt Harding was in Hanoi, Vietnam, his friend told him to stand over by the curb and do his stupid dance. Now he is famous on the internet for being that guy who does that stupid dance all over the world. It’s his job. When he’s not doing his job, he mostly just sits around the house reading comic books and playing videogames, so things worked out pretty well for Matt.

Saturday

Jordan Schwartz - A mirror, a sharpie and an analemma

Jordan Schwartz hates staring at glowing screens, thus his days are spent in front of his computer inventing ways to get people out from behind theirs. He is CEO of Pathable, an on-line community service for conferences and events that helps people meet up in real life at events just like Gnomedex and he continues to dabble in mobile technology with Swaggle.mobi, a group-text messaging service.

On the weekends, he leads a team of 60,000 bees in the manufacture and production of a delicious, organic honey.

Eric Lin - The 3 Rules of Mountain Biking

Eric Lin, a longtime fixture in the San Francisco tech scene has recently made his home in Seattle to work with HTC. Long before he found a way to turn his lust for technology into a job, he worked in bike shops and outdoor outfitters. Which really was just an excuse to play with more affordable gadgets and get paid to spend time outdoors. Now eric is more likely to be found riding one of his many bikes through the city streets rather than mountain trails. And he has shifted his athletic interests to less gadgety sports like kickboxing, crossfit and urban mischief.

Beth Kolko - Tech and Emerging Markets: A 5 minute talk looking at computers, networks, games, phones, and all matter of information and communication technology as it takes root in the developing world. Pictures and stories culled from several years worth of travel in Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan, Cambodia, Kenya, Liberia, and other places scattered around the globe. Innovation, grassroots hacking, and creativity in places of low infrastructure, limited electricity, and low access to technology generally.

Beth is an itinerant academic on an extended sabbatical. She has lots of frequent flier miles. She mostly travels to places where shots are required. She’s constantly amazed at the creativity exhibited as people adapt technology to local needs. On the official side of things, she’s a professor at the University of Washington, a fellow at the Harvard Berkman Center for Internet and Society, and a former visiting faculty researcher at Microsoft Research. She also fosters kittens.

Troy Malone - The GTD Timebomb: Troy will be sharing his personal experience with David Allen’s system and book, Getting Things Done. He will illustrate the value of the GTD system in the personal productivity realm and expose some of the deficiencies of the system when used in a group setting. All of this aimed at helping people avoid the “GTD Time bomb”.

After graduating from business school in 1999, Troy Malone founded Titan Investment Partners, a venture capital fund focused on early stage Internet companies. After placing three investments in the wireless and software space, in 2003 he acquired an enterprise software firm called Del Mar Database (DMD) and served as the COO. DMD eventually sold to Fiserv Corporation at which time Mr. Malone and a partner founded Blue Sky Broadcast, a multimedia services firm. In 2007, Mr. Malone founded Pelotonics, an online project collaboration system. Over the course of his career, Mr. Malone has been in pursuit of strategies and tactics that would allow him to accomplish more with less effort. He consults frequently with companies and non-profit organizations regarding group productivity and simple project management. His true passions are cycling, skateboarding, listening to Rush albums and hanging out with his wife and three young children.

Monica Guzman - How to be a Great News Commenter

Mónica Guzmán is the Seattle Post-Intelligencer’s first online reporter and the main contributor to the Big Blog, a news and conversation charged with following the stories that get talked about in the city. She first joined the P-I in January 2007 as a Hearst Newspapers Fellow, covering the culture of technology in a weekly column and a blog, Net Native. She plays on the P-I’s flag football team and calls it a good afternoon when she can tinker with her piano and her Ibanez guitar — and a good evening when she can get out and enjoy the nightlife. Mónica gives a weekly radio round-up of the week’s most talked about stories Wednesday afternoons on KOMO 1000 and serves on the advisory board for the University of Washington Information School’s Masters of Science and Information Management Program. She’s also what you might call an online news evangelist — giving talks about the future of journalism and how technology can enhance news engagement. Mónica has worked previously at the chron.com - Houston Chronicle”>Houston Chronicle, the Midland Daily News in Michigan and Foster’s Daily Democrat in New Hampshire.

Saturday 2:30 - 3:00: Boxee

Dave Mathews is the “user experience guy” at boxee and a consumer product expert, specializing in the convergence of digital entertainment devices. He holds more than thirty U.S. patents and has appeared on more than 300 television shows. Dave is also a regular contributor to Ziff Davis’ PC Magazine, O’Reilly’s MAKE and other consumer-tech outlets as well as industry publications.

Previously, Dave served as the Forward Thinker at Sling Media, identifying consumer trends leading to the development of the latest in digital media products. Prior to Sling, Dave was handpicked by the former chairman of Radio Shack as the Director, Product Innovation to develop their modern home strategy. Before joining Radio Shack, he was co-founder of Digital:Convergence – creator of the CueCat - a first-ever consumer barcode reader, distributed through Forbes, Wired, Parade and Nielsen Media publications.

twitter.com/gadgetboxee
twitter.com/boxee
blog.boxee.tv

Josh Bancroft is a geek, edge case, and storyteller. He compulsively follows what’s new and interesting on the internet, and loves to share what he finds with other people. In his day job, he helps Intel Software Network build community by making connections between developers. His home on the web is TinyScreenfuls.com, and you can find him as “jabancroft” in all the usual places (Twitter, FriendFeed, etc.).

Brady Forrest is Chair for O’Reilly’s Where 2.0 and Emerging Technology conferences. Additionally, he co-Chairs Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco, Berlin and NYC. Brady writes for O’Reilly Radar tracking changes in technology. He previously worked at Microsoft on Live Search (he came to Microsoft when it acquired MongoMusic). Brady lives in Seattle, where he builds cars for Burning Man and runs Ignite. You can track his web travels at Truffle Honey.