The Killer App conference started up in full force today, with demos and presentations of dozens of broadband apps. Whether you're a consumer, a business executive, an educator, a health care provider, a developer, a network provider, a government official or a superhero (just keep reading), there was something here for you.

With four separate tracks and the Applications Theater -- not to mention site visits to two Fort Wayne broadband businesses -- we couldn't see everything. So what follows is just a tiny sampling of the riches on display today:

- StashSpace.com digitizes all those boxes of home-movie videotapes that have been sitting for years in their customers' closets. Then they give customers online tools to edit the videos and show them off to friends and family. (We've written about StashSpace before, when it was still called HomeMovie.com.)

- Network2 searches the Internet for episodic short-form content (translation: series of short videos) and brings the best of them all together in one place. If you're tired of LonelyGirl 15 and you can't figure out what else to watch on the Internet, Network2 will help you find video that's interesting, funny, informative, cool or socially relevant. Are you still wondering about those superheroes? Today's presentation was given by Network2's official superhero, Chris Brogan (at least that was his title du jour -- if you check in with him tomorrow, he may be the company's Grand High Slizmux by then).

Lars Krumme of StashSpace.com (l) and Chris Brogan of Network2 (r).
Photo credit: TechnologyEvangelist.com

- Yesterday, the New Urbanists told us that good urban planning meant designing towns where people could walk to work. Today, we found out about applications that let people work from home. A real live Fort Wayne telecommuter, Tom Miller, told us how fiber-to-the-home had made him more productive in his work as a customer-support field engineer. Other presenters demonstrated Blue Otter, a Mac-based collaboration program designed for the publishing industry, and SightSpeed, a videoconferencing program that's used by many kinds of telecommuters. We've written about SightSpeed before here.

- Here's how high schools in East Allen County, Indiana are using their fiber-based videoconferencing system:
* Teaching classes in German, Latin, creative writing, landscaping, child development, African-American studies, entrepreneurship, Web design, and sports and entertainment marketing. These are classes that couldn't be made generally available without the videoconferencing system to aggregate students from all five high schools.
* Offering students college-level classes from Indiana-Purdue Unversity at Fort Wayne.
* Taking students on virtual field trips to the Baseball Hall of Fame and puppetry workshops, introducing them to their elected officials, and letting them watch surgeries and autopsies.
* Holding professional development sessions for teachers.
* Holding case conferences at a school for the deaf.

Inventor Ray Kurzweil
Photo credit: TechnologyEvangelist.com

- Ray Kurzweil, today's leading inventor, who has launched nine different industries and made computers read, talk, and play music, gave an exciting but dizzying keynote address about the accelerating pace of change. Moore's Law ("The number of transistors on a chip doubles about every two years," according to Intel's official definition) is only one instance of this general acceleration of knowledge, Kurzweil said. In a graph illustrating the pace of change from the evolution of RNA through to the Internet, Kurzweil showed that this acceleration has been astonishingly steady for billions of years. The reason: Every change builds upon the last one.

Kurzweil's lesson: Don't assume that the pace of change over the last 50 years will be replicated over the next 50 years. It won't. It will be immeasurably greater.

The lesson for killer apps: There's no question that any bandwidth we can provide today will be fully utilized in a very short time. Kurzweil foresees that within a few years, computers will disappear as separate devices and will simply be integrated into all of our everyday objects (clothes, eyeglasses, etc.) Everything and everyone, he says, will be permanently connected into a broadband network.