The second Riapalooza will be held on Friday May 8th at the Illinois Technology Association (200 S Wacker 15th flr) from 9AM-5PM. It’s an unconference gathering of RIA (that’s Rich Internet Applications for you not in the know) professionals who are passionate about what they do.

There will be 6 exciting talks as well as ample opportunity to network. Here are the panel titles:

• RIAs Beyond The Mouse & Keyboard
• Top 10 Questions About RIA That You Never Had The Courage To Ask
• RIA Problems You Never Knew Existed
• Building Interactive Applications using UX Principles
• Empowering the Client-Side: Consuming Internet Services in RIA
• Social Media, RIA and Sustainability: A Website Development Case Study

Roundarch’s Adam Flater and Pek Pongpaet will be giving the talk on RIA’s Beyond the Mouse & Keyboard. This talk will be the last talk at the end of the day so we’ll keep it short, fun and sweet so people can get to the beer at 5. Without giving away too much, we’ll talk about how RIAs and computer interaction in general is moving away from the keyboard and mouse interface as can be seen by the success of the iPhone and Nintendo Wii.

Here’s a couple of sneak peek videos of some of the stuff you’ll see at our talk.

Flash + Merapi + Lego Mindstorm =

Flash + Papervision3D + Augmented Reality Toolkit + Twitter =

So be sure to join us as we demo some really cool stuff.

On May 8th, Chicago will be the host to the 2nd annual RIAPalooza mini-conference, and in the same fashion as last year, Roundarch will be one of the event sponsors.

The 2008 RIAPalooza event was a great success, and brought together designers and developers from the Microsoft, Adobe, AJAX and Java camps to discuss the progression of Web and Web-connected desktop applications and to dive in and take a look at the competing technologies in marketplace.

RIAPalooza is different from many of these types of events and the organizers are committed to keeping RIAPalooza a “platform agnostic and PowerPoint-free zone”, which means a strong focus on keeping the presentations compelling, with no hidden agendas and company marketing pitches masked as presentations on technology.  RIApalooza is about creating Rich Internet Applications; how to go about building them and what is being built.

Roundarch is proud to be a sponsor of the event, and I am excited to see that our own Adam Flater and Pek Pongpaet will be one of the featured presenters. We wanted to give a talk that would capture the interest of attendees and cover something different than what they may have seen at other events. Because of this, we settled on the topic “RIAs beyond the mouse and keyboard”.

This talk is going to show off a variety of technologies, including our own Merapi Project, a bridge between desktop software and the local operating system and other technologies, including Adobe AIR, Adobe Flash, Microsoft Silverlight, and AJAX.Be prepared for Adam and Pek to show off some of the exciting things that they’ve been experimenting with. I am positive that the content of their presentation will inspire you.

Other speakers at the event include Kevin Hoyt (Platform Evangelist at Adobe), Josh Holmes, (MS UX Architect Evangelist), Michael Labriola (Lead at Digital Primates and author of “Flex 3 Training From The Source”) and other RIA experts from Chicago companies working with Rich client technologies.

For more information and/or to register for RIAPalooza, be sure to visit  http://www.riapalooza.com.