Hipmunk, OnSwipe, MC10, Appature, Mimecast, and Northrop Grumman to Headline “6×6” Big Tech Ideas Conference Dec. 1

Daily deals and flash sales, please step off. Social-local-mobile recommendations, go fly a kite. Photo-sharing sites, go take a long walk off a short pier (and send me a picture).

We don’t need more companies like those. Here’s what we need. Stretchy, bendy wearable computers. New tablet publishing models. High-altitude unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs). The next generation of cloud-based communication tools. A computer that can read your emotions from your facial expressions.

And did I mention, the workings of the entire known universe might boil down to a few lines of code? We’ll have to ask Stephen Wolfram for an update on that (see below).

These and other potentially world-changing ideas will be on display Dec. 1, when we all get together for Xconomy’s “6×6: Six Cities, Six Big Tech Ideas” conference at the Fidelity Center for Applied Technology in downtown Boston. This is the second year we’ve run this event, where we invite top speakers from each of Xconomy’s cities to talk about their big idea and how they’ve built a real business around it. The sessions will be interactive, and there will be plenty of networking time for Boston-area innovators to chat with our speakers and guests.

This year our featured talks are by Jason Baptiste from New York-based OnSwipe (tablet publishing); Adam Goldstein from San Francisco’s Hipmunk (travel search); Michigan’s Nathaniel Borenstein of Mimecast (communication in the cloud); Kabir Shahani from Seattle-based Appature (relationship marketing); San Diego’s Bill Walker from Northrop Grumman (advanced UAVs); and Dave Icke from Boston’s own MC10 (flexible electronics and sensors).

We’ll have some amazing speakers giving bonus talks as well:

—Nathan Eagle from Jana (global mobile marketing and compensation)

—Gina Ashe from Krush (social commerce and brand marketing)

—Hardi Meybaum from GrabCAD (social product development/manufacturing)

—Rosalind Picard from the MIT Media Lab and Affectiva (computers that recognize emotions)

Plus a keynote from the aforementioned and venerable Stephen Wolfram, the founder and CEO of Wolfram Research, creator of Mathematica and Wolfram Alpha, and author of A New Kind of Science (which, thanks to Steve Jobs, has no quotes on its back cover).

We’ll be announcing the full agenda soon. In the meantime, you can get your tickets here; they’re going fast. See you on Dec. 1.

Author: Gregory T. Huang

Greg is a veteran journalist who has covered a wide range of science, technology, and business. As former editor in chief, he overaw daily news, features, and events across Xconomy's national network. Before joining Xconomy, he was a features editor at New Scientist magazine, where he edited and wrote articles on physics, technology, and neuroscience. Previously he was senior writer at Technology Review, where he reported on emerging technologies, R&D, and advances in computing, robotics, and applied physics. His writing has also appeared in Wired, Nature, and The Atlantic Monthly’s website. He was named a New York Times professional fellow in 2003. Greg is the co-author of Guanxi (Simon & Schuster, 2006), about Microsoft in China and the global competition for talent and technology. Before becoming a journalist, he did research at MIT’s Artificial Intelligence Lab. He has published 20 papers in scientific journals and conferences and spoken on innovation at Adobe, Amazon, eBay, Google, HP, Microsoft, Yahoo, and other organizations. He has a Master’s and Ph.D. in electrical engineering and computer science from MIT, and a B.S. in electrical engineering from the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign.