So I spent two days in PulverHWC trying to find out how we will communicate. The event happened in a nice location close to Silicon Valley, in a winery in Los Gatos. The attendance was quite different from what you would expect from the old VON conferences, almost a hand picked crowd and the event could be called a think tank more like a conference is some conference center.

We started off with a meditation session, I would say to get into the "flow", followed by more sessions that were seemingly in my world unrelated to what I would expect from a communications conference where lots of techies are sticking their heads together. Considering that Pulver was also involved in the Twitter scene I was ready for some unusual experiences; after all this was about finding out what is going to happen next and some psychological exercises made sense.

One thing that really became clear is that we need to pay attention to messaging. We learned about the correlation between emojis (those paintings made with colons and brackets) and successful dating. Pulver should not have called it 140 characters conference, he should have called 26 characters conference (or 95 characters conference). The kids in the trains are expanding the ASCII character set into something we know from Japanese and Chinese, I assume that soon teachers will tell the kids what a smiley is. What is also becoming clear is that the large messaging platforms are working on ways to reach out into different spaces and leverage their subscriber bases, e.g. run "apps" inside the messaging which seems to make sense to me.

I was so tired, maybe even had a little jet jag that I decided to skip the karaoke night and instead planned to attend the morning walk at 7 AM. Not many people showed up, and the trail was up & down the hills of Las Gatos. Some people needed a shower after this; luckily I did some walking exercise myself last couple of years and could go straight ahead back to the winery and get some emails done.

Pulver was able to convince an astronaut to come from the Google conference and tell us why mankind has to go to mars and how hard it will be to live with round trip delays 1,200,000 ms (20 minutes). Voice conversations with planet earth will really be difficult unless they find a ways to send signals faster than the speed of light. On the first day someone showed up with her dogs for the presentation (it was actually about how dogs communicate). I guess it is okay to be crazy in Silicon Valley as long as the results are convincing. Pulver also talked about his experience pushing too hard to the limit and ending up in the hospital. All sessions were strictly only 15 minutes, keep it short and crisp.

Here and there we briefly touched topics like WebRTC, but those who wanted to learn about stuff like this better use the Internet to get information about this. I guess nobody expected detailed descriptions about technical details, including myself and instead focus on the ideas that could turn into the next big thing in the communications space. If it really happens I can say I have been there and maybe have ran into the next billionaire without even knowing it.