This afternoon the geeks and the grad students who drove the IEEE InfoVIS (information visualization) conference with their clever but mostly useless inventions swarmed into the hotel lobby for some reason that only their well-wired brains understand. They are a different crowd from the one I’ve seen lately.
This year I’ve only been to business intelligence conferences. That bunch is mostly from business but also has many from the technical end of the house, IT. Compared with the geeks, most of them are boring. They talk about “goals and objectives,” they tell the same stories, and they wear the same clothes, by which I can tell they also have more money.… Read the rest “Running with the infovis geeks”