At the AlwaysOn Innovation Summit

I'm here at the opening reception for the AlwaysOn Innovation Summit at Stanford University. Founder Tony Perkins in on stage announcing the AlwaysOn Top 100 tech innovators, led by the CEOs Blue Lithium and PhotoBucket.

This might also be called the Money Conference, with lots and lots of talk about money and venture capital and over-the-top commercialism at times. But the AlwaysOn folks want to make things interactive with the audience, and they've got a Blogers' Bullpen (half empty tonight), and an IRC backchannel that is flashed on one of the main screens in real time.

As usual, the most interesting conversations happen off stage, in the hallways and in the gardens outside. The wi-fi's not too bad for the moment.

Later: Ed Leonard, CTO, DreamWorks, gave an interesting demo of the production process for big-screen animation. He noted that when it came out, Shrek required 5 million CPU hours for computational rendering. Shrek 2 required 10 million rendering hours. And the recently released Over the Hedge took 15 million rendering hours. "Most of those 15 million hours are in the lighting and effects area."

Coming out from DreamWorks this fall: Flushed Away. Another animation coming in 2008: Kung Fu Panda.

More than a few bloggers here reporting on the summit, including Denise Howell and others.