Atop San Francisco's Nob Hill, there is electricity in the air at the FlashForward 2000 conference, a sold-out three-day intensive on Flash featuring the biggest business players and the most creative artists and teachers in the business. This set of interviews from Monday March 27th include Lynda Weinman, Steward McBride, Mike Ninness and Robert Reinhardt.

Adobe, Macromedia, RealNetworks, and Apple all have their top people here to promote the products that are competing for the most popular, most effective, and easiest approaches to streaming vector graphics. But it is the graphics themselves, and the people creating them, that are the stars of this show.

Produced by Lynda.com (Lynda Weinman) and United Digital Artists (Stewart McBride), the conference is centered on what you can do with the medium and how to go about doing it. Lynda Weinman, whose charismatic teaching brings students from around the world to her California workshops, is teaching non-stop here, and when hands-on presentations and workshops at both beginning and advanced levels aren't in session, there are sparkling displays of Flash wizardry arranged by UDA.

And most of all, before and after, in the intersticing, at the parties both small and large, there is a flavor of excitement that is more like the Oscars than Internet tech. The technology is here - in spades - but what fuels the atmosphere is what you can do with it.

Part of it is because streaming vector graphics formats like Flash seem increasingly to be the wave of the Web's future, and part of it is that new programs such as Adobe's live motion is making it a whole lot easier to do.

Throughout the program we'll be bringing you streaming sound bites from the main players here, along with pictures of what's going on and who's doing it.

Nob Hill Masonic Center

Just like this shot of us pulling up to the grand entrance of the Nob Hill Masonic Center in scenic San Francisco. That's Susan Townley in the back seat of our shiny red roadster getting out all of our AV equipment.

If you heard our "Welcome" audio file when you started this page then you already have QuickTime installed and working. If not, just get QuickTime. Let's start our virtual tour of FlashForward 2000.