Los Angeles ACM Chapter Blog

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

Meeting: Thursday, September 13, 2007

"PETER COFFEE'S ANNUAL FORECAST"
About key technologies in Computing, Communications, and Business Applications

Peter Coffee
Salesforce.Com

(Note that this meeting is on the second Thursday of the month!)

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 blog.sforce.com/sforce/the_developing_world
prepared by Paul Schmidt

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