It’s time for Philly’s premier emerging tech conference, and I’m going to be speaking once again this year. The conference, Emerging Technologies for the Enterprise, is taking place March 26-27, 2008 in Philadelphia.

I’ll be giving a more technical talk this year than last, combining my interests in leading-edge web applications and security. The talk is called Securing Web 2.0 Applications:

The challenges of securing first generation web applications and infrastructure seem like a distant memory: immature technologies throughout the stack, coded in a culture that didn’t understand or value security. Today we have a much more security-conscious community producing components from operating systems to routers to web servers, and the basic architecture of the Internet application has had 10 years to mature under fire.

Even so, the security challenges of Web 1.0 were in many ways less daunting and harder to ignore than those of the current generation. This talk will review the challenges and lessons of the past, and survey security requirements, issues and techniques for dealing with a new generation of web frameworks and tools, massively multi-tenant applications and hosting environments, and loosely-coupled systems.

Its great to see Jeff coming to Philly for this; we have a small but vibrant and growing emerging tech and startup community here, and some people are already using S3, EC2 and the rest of AWS for new projects. For details on the meetup and to sign up, see the event page.

As promised, here are the slides from today’s presentation. We talked so much about each point that I’m not sure how much value these have to folks who weren’t in the room… maybe we can get the organizers to do audio or video next time.

Whether building a new company from scratch, or keeping a big company competitive, emerging technologies have changed the rules. Open source software, web services, mashups, AJAX, Ruby, Rails, and RSS… only a few of a seemingly endless list of technologies that have redefined what is possible for small teams. This talk will focus on startup experiences, lessons learned about technology choices and tradeoffs, and on building, funding and running a technology startup in the new environment.

The Emerging Technologies for the Enterprise folks are also putting on a pre-conference breakfast for CxO’s and executives on the 15th. I’ll be the keynote speaker for that event, talking about Tiger Team Innovation:

Startup companies use small teams beginning with a blank slate and the latest emerging technologies to build incredible value overnight. This talk will focus on using the same techniques, with a few twists, to deliver measurable value to the enterprise in new ways.

The main conference is open to everyone and seems to be quite reasonably priced compared to most such events; registration is here. I believe the breakfast is by invitation, so if you’d like to attend leave a comment or send me email and I’ll ask the organizers to include you.