If you’ve attended any recent Flashforward conferences, you’ll remember the introNetworks community networking environment we had running on-site. For anyone who hasn’t seen it, it’s a great example of how to use the latest Flash features to build a web-based common space, and it uses some very interesting filtering to help you find people you might enjoy talking to — basically we were using tags before tags were cool.

Yesterday we launched a full-time, year-round installation of the Flashforward introNetwork and pre-populated it with — get this — everyone who attended any Flashforward conference, ever, including not just paid attendees but also speakers, staff, volunteers, etc.

We want this to be a permanent perk of attending a Flashforward conference, and another means (along with this blog) of establishing a community that persists beyond the three days twice a year when we all get together in the same building.

If you sign up for Flashforward 2005 San Francisco, you’ll get your welcome email to the introNetwork shortly afterwards. If you already registered or are a previous attendee, your email should have arrived yesterday. If it didn’t, it likely means that the email address we have on file for you is out of date. If this is the case and you want to join in, just email us your name, current address, and which conference you attended — we’ll update your account and re-send the welcome email.

Already logged in to the introNetwork and looking around? Feel free to say hi — this blogger’s name is Christoph Wiese — and post something in the comments here to let other people know what you think of the experience.

See you in cyberspace! Ha ha, I crack myself up.

So the Flashmaps guys emailed us a while back offering to build a cool interactive map for the Flashforward conference, with all the hotels and restaurants from our web site plotted out and easy to navigate. Cool! All we had to do was a little data entry and we’d have this great new feature to offer you.

And then no one volunteered to do the data entry and we kind of forgot about it.

And then a while later they emailed us again to say they went ahead and did the data entry for us! And they wanted to give a free Flashmap to every conference attendee who wants one! And here it all is and all we have to do is put it on the site! And it still took us a couple weeks to get to it because we’re slow! And they don’t care because they’re just unbelievably nice guys!

So check out our shiny new Flashmap — handy if you haven’t booked your hotel yet and want to see how far it is from the venue, or if you’re trying to decide where to grab a bite between sessions or before the party.

And remember: if you try really hard for months and do all the work, we might let you give us something for nothing!

Better all the time — Erik Natzke is another late addition to our 2005 San Francisco roster!

UPDATE: Natzke’s bio and session description have now been posted.

And as a special surprise, he said we could link to a new video he’s built that hasn’t been widely seen yet:

Natzke: Black + White

Not that there was anything wrong with his previous reel — anything that features the Doctor Who theme song is cool almost by definition — but we can’t wait to see this one on the big screen, along with whatever else Natzke has to show us.

(Speaking of which, does anyone have a link to Natzke’s old reel? Or know which version of the song it featured?)

Last year at Flashforward, Bill Buxton demonstrated some prototype displays based around miniature laser projectors that could be used on any convenient surface. He suggested this could be one approach to making devices smaller without resorting to unusably small displays (or Brazil-style magnifiers everywhere.)

In case you’re a previous Flashforward attendee wondering what became of this, we’ve been keeping an eye out for examples of this technology ever since, and now Siemens has shown off a phone with a version of this concept in place.

There have also been several demonstrations of laser-traced virtual keyboards, so essentially the same approach for solving the input problem on a mini device. (And we first heard about these at a Flashforward long ago, during a presentation by Yugo Nakamura if we recall correctly.)

But lasers aren’t the only solution fighting to become the future: for output there are roll-up displays, mini projectors, heads-up displays and text-to-speech software. For input we have mouse gestures, camera gestures, voice recognition, tilt-detection and good old handwriting recognition (…we are unapologetic Newton enthusiasts.)

Flash context? How about this: scalable, adaptive interfaces seem like a must-have for any solution that will utilize any subset of these I/O options, and as Flash gains a foothold in today’s small devices, it may be well-placed to power those interfaces.

But really we just couldn’t help geeking out on this stuff for a few minutes. Thanks for understanding. Hit the comments and tell us what we forgot to mention…

(Links via Gizmodo etc.)

Phillip Torrone is working on a podcast appliance using an XML/Flash interface.

…so what did he manage during his second cup of coffee this morning?

Torrone has spoken at Flashforward several times, and as his backstage tech support, one of the moments we look forward to with the greatest anticipation is when he unzips his suitcase to reveal a couple dozen Flash-enabled gadgets we’ve never seen before and may never see again.

So we’re excited to announce that he will be with us again for the 2005 San Francisco conference, this time speaking on behalf of O’Reilly’s new Make Magazine, where Torrone has found another outlet to showcase his DIY technical skills.

We’re already looking forward to that suitcase…