From UNIX to Java to XML to Peer-to-Peer
Bill Joy, Chief Scientist, Sun Microsystems

Bill Joy will discuss the evolution from Unix to Java to XML to peer-to-peer. Unix first gave us modular applications, connected by pipes; Java gave us portable applications; XML gave us portable data; and peer-to-peer gives us simple distributed computing. This talk discusses the question: can we put these benefits together?

Plenary, Grand Ballroom

Web Services - A Panel Discussion
Moderator
Tim O'Reilly, Founder and CEO, O'Reilly Media, Inc.
Panelists
Steve Burbeck, Senior Technical Staff, IBM Software Group
Lucas Gonze, Cofounder and CEO, WorldOS Corp.
Dick Hardt, Founder and CEO, Sxip Identity
Anne Thomas Manes, CTO, Idoox
David Stutz
Michael Tanne, Founder and CEO, Wink

Much of the hype about P2P has focused on file sharing, but ultimately, the key message of P2P is that the network, not any individual operating system, is becoming the next software development platform, as web sites and other internet nodes offer APIs and protocols for programmable services. What will that platform look like? Who will own its infrastructure? Microsoft's .Net has made a bold claim to be that next operating framework, but it is far from the only contender. In this debate, we'll try to understand the dimensions of the emerging web services paradigm.

The Post-Spider World - A Conversation
Moderator
Rael Dornfest, Founder and CEO, Values of n, Inc.
Panelists
Cory Doctorow, Canada-US Fulbright Chair, Annenberg Center on Public Diplomacy, University of Southern California
Edd Dumbill, Principal, Useful Information Company
Dave Galbraith, Co-founder, Moreover.com
Gene Kan, Strategist, Project Juxtapose, Sun Microsystems

Today's Web is a great, big, glorious mess. Spiders, robots, screen-scraping, and plaintext searches are the order of the day in a desperate attempt to draw sometimes arbitrary distinctions between needles and hay. Does P2P threaten to throw straw and needles to the wind or, rather, could distributed metadata provide a viable alternative to Web index store-houses? Panelists share their experiences, project plans, and hopes for the Post-Spider World.

Business Track, Georgian Room

A Proposed Digital Packaging Manifest Scheme for Peer-Distributed Electronic Content
Mark R. Walker, Intel Corporation

Peer-based content distribution schemes lack flexible, interoperable methods for packaging digitally instantiated content to be transacted via the distributed network, therefore a new XML-based scheme for the packaging of peer-distributed electronic content is proposed.

It is anticipated that package manifests will enable the use of highly descriptive metadata, permitting sophisticated search techniques to be utilized by in-network clients in the tasks of finding and acquiring digital content in both end-user and e-commerce applications.

Business Track, Grand Ballroom

Peer-to-Peer and the New Collaborative Journalism
Moderator
Katie Hafner, Reporter, New York Times
Panelists
Jeff "Hemos" Bates, Slashdot
Dan Gillmor, Founder and Director, Center for Citizen Media
Rob "Cmdr Taco" Malda, Slashdot
Dave Winer, CEO, UserLand Software

Dave Winer, of weblogs.com, likes to say that "the P in P2P is people", and in this panel discussion, Rob Malda and Jeff Bates, founders of Slashdot -- now one of the most influential tech sites on the web -- discuss with Dave, Katie Hafner of the New York Times and Dan Gillmor of the San Jose Mercury News, the emergence of a new kind of "self-organizing" web site, which is built by contributions of its readers.

The Blocks Extensible Exchange Protocol: Internet Peer-to-Peer Application Infrastructure
Darren New, Senior Technical Staff, Invisible Worlds, Inc.

This talk will introduce the Blocks Extensible Exchange Protocol (BEEP, aka: BXXP) framework, now being standardized by the IETF, and how it can be used to build peer-to-peer applications quickly. It will also briefly touch on the IMXP (Instant Messaging Exchange Protocol) framework, a peer-to-peer application messaging platform implemented using the BEEP framework.

The Rewired Internet
Brandon Wiley, Author, University of Texas

Freenet is attempting to "rewire" the Internet to be anonymous and decentralized. It's more than just an attempt to make a better Napster, it's a whole new way of doing things. One of the core Freenet developers will be discussing a project to port all of the interesting Internet protocols to Freenet. E-mail, news, chatting, and more, all available from your normal clients but with the added anonymity and decentralization of Freenet.

Object or Document? Converging Models of Communications on the Web
Chris Smith, OpenCola, Inc.

Many XML communications initiatives use HTTP as their transport mechanism. This means that the same basic protocol is being used for document-centric and object-centric purposes. However, HTTP and XML were not originally designed with the serialization of software objects in mind. Does the object-oriented approach to communications over HTTP make the best use of both HTTP and XML?

P2P and the Future of DNS
Jim Gallagher, Ackme

Is DNS dead? A look at the history of the domain name system, how it developed out of a chaotic mess of computer nicknames and how it may no longer have any real meaning or purpose in a P2P universe which relies on new models of trust based more on IP addresses, name spaces, and, once again, nicknames.

Technical Track, Colonial Room

How Gnutella Happened
Gene Kan, Strategist, Project Juxtapose, Sun Microsystems

Gnutella is one of only a few systems which exhibit community involvement leading to its success. Gene Kan will speak about Justin Frankel and Tom Pepper's involvement in relation to Nullsoft's parent company AOL, problems with scalability, inconsistent client software, the future of Gnutella with corporate involvement, and how some current projects are using Gnutella as an uncompensated content source.

Characterizing P2P Infrastructure
Wes Felter, Editor, Hack the Planet Weblog

The P2P world is filled with a variety of systems; even P2P systems with similar goals take quite different approaches. If you are designing a new P2P system, looking for interoperability between systems, or thinking about P2P standardization, it is helpful to understand the different design choices that are available. This talk will examine several aspects of P2P including naming, routing, messaging, and searching and the tradeoffs that are involved.

Center + Edge: Do Web Computing and Peer Computing Intersect?
Andrew Mahon, Director, Strategic Marketing, Groove Networks, Inc.

Is peer computing a fad or a legitimate new era in technology? Is it evolutionary but revolutionary? Will it disrupt business models and technology infrastructure, or will it extend existing Web- and server-based systems? Will it be driven by end users at the grass roots, or will it be embraced by IT and line of business managers for competitive advantage? Part of the answer lies in how easily and how well peer computing is able to integrate with today's existing technology infrastructure. Learn how bot technology may represent a means to that end.

Network Applications: What, Why and How?
Michael Tanne, Founder and CEO, Wink

The Internet is fast becoming an always on, executable and multi-directional network. The market has experienced a great jolt as the peer-computing phenomenon has opened up the resources of the network, as well as our imaginations about the potential of this enabling technology. But the story has just begun. There is widespread support from analysts who believe that P2P is about to grow up. As P2P matures it will give rise to a new class of Network Applications that will literally run "outside of the box" and make computing a much more consistent and rich experience. Soon a streaming session about to lose its connection will intelligently be re-hosted on the fly relative to network traffic (similar to how a cellular phone network can maintain a conversation as a user migrates from one cell to the next). Based on the natural activities of the network, soon virus protection applications will become Network Applications as they learn about and respond to dangerous files and network-wide behavior in real-time. By intelligently combining the power of the peer with the pervasiveness of the network, the network will finally become the computer and applications will become unhinged to transparently leverage the best of all architectures, technologies and devices on an as needed basis. Proposing a solution on the road to revolution, Michael Tanne, CEO of XDegrees, will provide in-depth examples of how a wide variety of applications can harness the value of distributed architectures. As well as how developers can easily migrate their efforts today to realize tomorrow's potentials. To provide a deep technical understanding of the issues at hand, he will look "under the hood" and explain in detail the addressability, performance, availability, security and scalability challenges posed by implementing the best of peer and legacy architectures - and will outline methods for achieving fast and viable deployment. Finally, Michael will provide a glimpse into the future of network applications and the technical framework that will allow network capabilities and resources to be better leveraged by intelligent applications that recognize applications, people, data and devices as first-class objects.

Business Track, Grand Ballroom

Peer-to-Peer Technology: Enabling the Global Virtual Marketplace
Jonathan Hare, Co-founder and CEO, Resilient

Peer-to-peer has the potential to foster the trend away from hierarchical control models that existing systems imply and a move towards dynamic, free markets and low friction exchanges. We will witness a complete redefinition of ?process? and an accelerated transition to the evolution and creation of new business models. The question is, who will take advantage of this technology first and what will be the impact over the long-term?

Managing Infinity: P2P's Hypeless Marketing
Cory Doctorow, Canada-US Fulbright Chair, Annenberg Center on Public Diplomacy, University of Southern California

The Internet makes it possible to publish and distribute for free, but makes it nearly inifinitely expensive to connect your work with an audience. P2P sharing and reputation networks make "relevance-switched" networks where media finds its audience without marketing. This will fundamentally change the relationship between artists, publishers and audiences.

Security: A Business Model For Leveraging P2P Rather Than Fighting It
Zach Nelson, President and CEO, myCIO.com

Peer-to-peer technology has been vilified to some degree by Napster, but some companies are employing the file distribution technology to deliver substantial business benefits to enterprise customers. Some companies have introduced software that harnesses the power of peer-to-peer distribution to beat viruses at their own game.

Peer-to-peer distribution is much more than music swapping; it is a valuable technology that can be leveraged to deliver critical services for business.

Instant Messaging as an Applications Platform
Michael Bauer, Vice-President of Product Strategy, Local Matters, Inc.

The "next generation of instant messaging" - IM's relevance and impact upon applications such as CRM, B2B exchanges, Collaboration Tools, Device to Device, and Games.

Lightning Talks

We've adapted this popular feature from YAPC (Yet Another Perl Conference) to give you a whirlwind tour of the companies in the peer-to-peer space. Each Lightning Talk session gives a dozen companies and projects pursuing related markets an opportunity to give a 5-minute elevator pitch. Presentations will be followed by questions and evaluations by a panel of experts.

Lightning Talks in the technical track help you to evaluate competing or complementary approaches to the same problem.

Business Track, Grand Ballroom

Wanted: A Survival Model for the Music Industry - Napster and the Consequences
Andreas Becker, Senior Consultant, Diebold Deutschland GmbH

Has the music industry maneuvered itself in a position between ?a rock and a hard place?? According to some industry experts the recent process between RIAA and Napster is a clear indicator, that the music industry is lacking a clear strategy how to successfully integrate the Internet into its corporate strategy. P2P technologies and concepts are considered to be a major threat while its huge potentials for customer retention, cross marketing, 1:1-marketing and branding are ignored.

Diebold has outlined the major challenges the music industry is currently facing. Based on a analysis of the Internet strategies, the ?Big Five? record labels are currently pursuing, the talk will focus on the major mistakes these players have committed over the last 24 months. P2P pioneers with their revolutionary models of sharing and distributing information will be presented afterwards. Diebold believes that only a radical change of strategy and business models will enable the record industry to re-gain lost ground on the Internet. The talk will close with an in-depth analysis how such business models might look like.

Patenting of P2P Technology
Greg Aharonian, Editor, Internet Patent News Service

Those making use of P2P technology, especially in commercial products, invariably will encounter the bane of many other programmers, patents. In this talk, I will review the demographics of issued P2P and virtual LAN patents from the early 1990s to the present time. I will discuss who is acquiring these patents, the growth curve for such patents, the quality of such patents, and how such patents might be asserted. I will also discuss companies with P2P patents that are advocating that the business world adopt P2P technology, but without mentioning that these companies have P2P patents that might be asserted against those in the business world that find a commercially viable use of P2P.

Business Track, Colonial Room

Lightning Talks
Moderator
Justin Hibbard, Senior Writer, Red Herring

We've adapted this popular feature from YAPC (Yet Another Perl Conference) to give you a whirlwind tour of the companies in the peer-to-peer space. Each Lightning Talk session gives a dozen companies and projects pursuing related markets an opportunity to give a 5-minute elevator pitch. Presentations will be followed by questions and evaluations by a panel of experts.

Lightning Talks in the business track give you a quick way to evaluate possible investments, the depth of competition in a given area, and the quality of the key company executives.