So I eventually managed to make it to the FITC venue, just in time (or actually somewhat late) for Colin Moock's presentation about the proposed new features in ECMAScript 4.0 and it's consequences for the next version of ActionScript.
I did miss part of the lecture, but the most interesting parts for me were the new functionality at better and stricter typecasting, easy iterating with the new iterators & generators, operator overloading and other general improvements for debugging and quick coding purposes.
Something I noticed was that a lot of functionality seemed to be borrowed from or inspired on python, so any of you guys who have some experience with this language should be quite happy with that.
For some more in-depth information I'd like to refer you to the presentation file or Ruben's upcoming post, since he was there for the entire lecture and managed to take some notes.

At the end of the presentation I met up with Ruben and we continued on to Seb Lee-Delisle's presentation about particles in Flash.
Since I work a lot on interactive visual performances, this was one of the lectures that was of particular interest to me. I especially liked the somewhat more advanced applications which involved user interaction using webcams, such as the interactive fireworks display Pyrotechnics to the People.
His approach is simple, effective and quite neatly coded, which is always a plus in my book. It isn't quite as extensive as most particle systems found in professional video editing systems, but it's simplicity gives the user a lot of options to custom tailer it to personal needs, be it with a bit more work.
If you would like to experiment with his particle code, you can download his experiments.

That's it for the lectures I attended today, hopefully tomorrow I'll end up with an entire day's worth of new impressions, so check back here tomorrow!