Topic: The Internet and the World Wide Web

Never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon speeding down the motorway, filled with magnetic tapes full of data. Those tapes hold a large amount of data, but the station wagon is hardly traveling at the speed of light; and adding more station wagons isn't going to make them go any faster. This quick talk by Philip Tellis describes how to measure latency and what to do about it.

Dr. Moira Gunn talks about cybercrime with Wired editor and author, Kevin Poulsen, about his new book Kingpin, How One Hacker Took Over the Billion-Dollar Cybercrime Underground.

John Heilemann talks with FCC chair Julius Genachowski about the FCC's policy-making positions and challenges for the 21st century; including spectrum reapportionment, net neutrality, keeping up with the spectrum requirements of mobile broadband, global competitiveness, and "keeping the pipes open for innovators and consumer choice."

Consumer mapping on the web and traditional back-office geographic information systems (GIS) are becoming less distinct. Both are more accessible, standards-based, and flexible. Jack Dangermond, President of ESRI, speaks about the creation of a publicly accessible GIS mapping system, ArcGIS.com, a web platform that works with maps from various authoritative sources and provides the public with useful tools to add and use their own crowdsourced, volunteered geographic information (VGI).

"Store em if you got em!" That's the way Lindsey Simon of Google describes the crowd sourced Browserscope project for profiling web browsers. Take thousands of browser tests, store them in the cloud, and share them through various visualizations. Browserscope aims to track the performance of browsers as they become faster, safer, and more consistent for both users and developers. This talk explains and demonstrates how.

"Users beget content, which begets more users." That's how Jeremy Stoppelman, Co-Founder of Yelp, explains how he adds a million reviews every few months, more than 10 million in total in a massive base of local information. Sought after by investors and partners for their ability to curate and moderate local content, Yelp is a heavy user of mechanical turk to ensure content is valuable. As Stoppleman puts it "we're trying to get consumers to the best local businesses."

From rebuilding communities in Detroit around technological and artistic innovation to improving legal services, each of these speakers share their experiences and insights as to why groups succeed - and sometimes fail - in their attempts to adopt the latest information technology developments and apply them to the greater public good.

Currently popular JavaScript benchmarking programs may report misleading results, potentially wasting developers' time. Ben Zorn, a research engineer from Microsoft, shows case-by-case examples of misleading results revealed by his work with co-authors Ben Livshits and Paruj Ratanaworabhan. Ben Zorn compares performance of real web sites to the artificial sites employed by optimization tools SunSpider and V8. He also shows how to avoid the pitfalls of solving "problems" that are merely artifacts of skewed benchmarks.

Dr. Moira Gunn tracks down author, Guy Kawasaki, to talk about his new book Enchantment: Changing the Hearts, Minds and Actions.

How does a 3rd party Web application developer make the app run fast on the host site? And how can it do so without breaking other things on the site? How can an app load lots of features and functionality, while avoiding blocking the rest of the page from loading and giving the user a negative perception? Enter on stage the Meebo bar, now on over 6,000 websites, as a way to make 3rd party apps and local content live peaceably together.