Joint Meeting of the Los Angeles Chapter of ACM and The Association of Information Technology Professionals (AITP)

Wednesday, September 10, 2008

“PETER COFFEE’S ANNUAL FORECAST”
About key technologies in Computing, Communications, and Business Applications

Peter Coffee
Salesforce.com

(Note that this meeting will be on the 2nd Wednesday!)

With products like Windows® Vista and chip-based security, the battle of the PC is still going strong. Long-awaited breakthroughs in nano-scale manufacture and high-speed communication are finally leaving the laboratory, the Internet is maturing into a distributed computing platform with industry standards for remote Web services interaction.

Make sense of it all in an evening of analysis and comment with Peter Coffee; he will provide an "insider’s" view and forecasts for key technologies in computing, communications, and business and technical applications. His talk will span the range from nanometer chip fabrication techniques to worldwide multi-gigabit networks and will include time for questions.

Peter Coffee is Director of Platform Research at salesforce.com. He joined the company in January of 2007 after spending 18 years as a technology analyst and columnist at the industry magazines eWEEK and PC Week. He currently works with enterprise and commercial developers to clarify their requirements for use of the Salesforce Platform in developing and deploying on-demand applications. 

Peter was previously the first manager of PC planning at The Aerospace Corporation, where he also worked in space systems applications of artificial intelligence techniques. Before that Peter was a Senior Engineer working in arctic project management, chemical facility construction and synthetic fuels project planning at Exxon. He holds an engineering degree from MIT and an MBA from Pepperdine University, where he also served as a faculty member for information systems management; he has held other faculty appointments in computer science at UCLA and in business analytics at Chapman College. He is the author of two books, How to Program Java and Peter Coffee Teaches PCs. Peter's current commentaries for the salesforce.com developer network appear at URL: blog.sforce.com/sforce/the_developing_world
prepared by Paul Schmidt
 

The meeting will be at
The Spitfire Grill
3300 Airport Avenue
Santa Monica, CA 90405
Phone: (310) 397-3455
www.spitfiregrill.net

Reservations are required for this meeting. See the contact information below. Space could be limited depending on turn out.

The monthly council meeting of the LA ACM will be held on Monday, September 8, at LMU. This will be followed by the normal professional mixer at El Segundo Fish Company. The Council meeting starts at 5:30 PM, in the conference room at Loyola Marymount University's Doolan Hall. Although only council business is discussed, members are encouraged to attend. Professional Mixer Meeting starts at 6:30 PM, at the El Segundo Fish Company, (www.esfishco.com) located at 210 E. Grand Avenue, El Segundo, CA 90245. Council members will move on to the restaurant after the Council meeting for the socializing, scheduled to begin at 6:30 P.M. You are welcome to come to the 6:30 meeting and mix with those who are present. If the LA ACM Council is late, we will get there eventually so grab a table and start "mixing" with other arrivals. No reservations are required for the mixer; we just gather around tables and mix conversation with food and drink. Our group has been receiving a 10% discount on previous months, which we hope the restaurant will continue. Identify yourselves as LA ACM meeting attendees.

For general Council information Contact: Mike Walsh at MP_Walsh@acm.org, but there isn’t much more than what is indicated above unless you want to provide a proposal for the Council meeting.

You can also call Mike at (818) 785-5056 but email contacts are preferred.