Another SmartFabrics conference, but with very few surprises this time. The talks I thought would be good were, and those that I had low expectations for weren't as great. What I didn't plan on was to see Robin Shephard (formerly of Eleksen) give as much insight as he did concerning the abrupt decline of Eleksen.
Certainly we'll be seeing case studies in future classes at business school -- but it would have been fun to have had the chance to see it in the "E-dreams" documentary context.There also seemed to be a great deal of emphasis on the "wearable computing" aspect of SmartFabrics. While there's nothing wrong with that, it would have been nice to see more technology talks at the fiber/yarn/fabric level vs. just device integration.
Other notable talks included Crosslink's talk on electroluminescent fabrics for tents/shelters, Nyx Clothing's talk on power requirements and connector testing, and a view of the back-end processing and modeling of e-textiles from VA Tech's Tom Martin.
I understand that next year's conference will be in Rome, which makes it a tough sell to get the boss to pony up the cash for travel -- I guess we'll have to start working on it now.
