Singularity web conference speaker spotlight: Tim O'Reilly

Tim o Reilly speakering at the Singularity Web Conference

I'm honored and humbled every time I look through the list of stellar speakers we have confirmed to present at the Singularity web conference. As such, I want to take a moment every week to highlight a new speaker, starting this week with Tim O'Reilly.

I had the honor of meeting Tim several years ago during a talk he was giving in London on the Open Source Paradigm Shift. In his talk, Tim predicted the mainstream commoditization of the web. Four years later, we stand as witnesses to the birth of the Commodity Web with Google's release of Google App Engine. (Simon Wardley, recently chronicled this very subject with great eloquence at his keynote speech at XTech.)

Several years later, I was in an elevator at the Venetian hotel in Las Vegas, heading to watch the keynote. There was one other person in the lift with me and I turned to ask him if he knew where the keynote was (the Venetian is huge). He told me that he was heading over there too and that I could follow him. Looking closer, I recognized Tim (he had a beard that hadn't been there in London) and re-introduced myself. Only later did I realize that Tim's conversation with Bill Gates was to be the highlight of the keynote. I guess it made sense that he knew where the keynote was after all.

Tim O'Reilly truly doesn't need any introduction. He is, of course, the founder and CEO of O'Reilly -- the most highly-regarded computer book publisher in the world. He is a true visionary who has both predicted and helped craft the state of the art on the world wide web -- not least by coining the term Web 2.0 to describe the social web of open data and applications that the World Wide Web has evolved into. (Few memes have had such lasting mindshare on the web today as Web 2.0 has.)

Find out more about Tim and our entire line-up of stellar speakers on the web site for the Singularity web conference and read Tim's thoughts on his blog.

The Singularity web conference is everywhere October 24-26, 2008. Tickets are scheduled to go on sale this month at $99 to coincide with the launch of the new web site on Google App Engine.

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