ILM sent me down to SIGGRAPH this year in Anaheim since I've been one of the software developers on the Alembic project.

Practical Acceleration of Alembic
Birds of a Feather
WEDNESDAY, JULY 24, 2013 - 11:00AM TO 12:00PM

For SIGGRAPH, we released Alembic 1.5, with the new faster Ogawa backend. For my part, I got to speak a bit about some of the tools I've been working on for Alembic:

AbcView is a graphical PyQt-based Alembic inspection and visualization tool. It offers a number of widgets to help you inspect and visualize your Alembic data, as well as assemble hierarchical scenes.