Thursday, October 14, 2010

Physically Aware Internet


Pete Hartwell: Mashable: How a Physically Aware Internet Will Change the World: the first “Internet” looked nothing like it does today. .... we still haven’t even scratched the surface. .... connecting computers to sensors so that valuable new information can be created automatically without human data entry ..... sensors tackling our world’s largest issues: safety, security and sustainability. ..... A network of biochemical sensors can understand where and how food is being produced and stored by “smelling” it. ...... our computers are blind, deaf and numb to the world around us. We need to give them senses. ..... With billions, perhaps even trillions of sensors, we can begin to understand not just how the world is behaving, but how we are affecting it..... sensor networks are one of the principal ways we can use technology to address some of our most pressing global challenges like disease, pollution and climate change. ...... CeNSE, which stands for “Central Nervous System of the Earth” .... this is all coming sooner than you may think
To Natural User Interface

This is about moving from the internet of computers and the internet of human beings to the internet of things. This includes capturing real time data from not only objects but plants and other animals as well.

This is the tool that the climate change challenge has been waiting for. We need to know what's going on. And that we is not a royal we, it is a collective we. Anybody with internet access should be able to get a detailed view of the harm being done to the earth's ecosystem. That will elevate the consciousness level of humanity, and multitudes of people will demand the right things be done, and the democratic system will deliver.

The idea of having to sit in front of a computer to access the internet has been given a slap by the smartphone, but even the smartphone makes for a weird Homo Sapien, the one that is ogling at the small screen at all uncomfortable hours.

The internet is going to liberate itself from the screen and go everywhere.

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Wednesday, October 13, 2010

David Kirkpatrick: "Zuck Is Not An Asshole"


"Mark Zuckerberg is not an asshole!"
- David Kirkpatrick (Twitter, Wordpress)
The Facebook Effect, by David Kirkpatrick | Facebook
David Kirkpatrick - The Daily Beast

Lauren Indvik @laureni moderating.


Grrls In Tech Wednesday: Facebook Writer

There was another event next door, which is where I ended up at first.

"Please remind me how we know each other," a guy shook my hand and asked me.

"We don't know each other," I said. "You are here for the Facebook event, right?"

Nope.

I went next door to the right address, same street address. The event had a penthouse venue. I was one of the early people to show up. I said hello to the first four people who had showed up.

I went inside to where the event was to be. Ends up one of my friends was an organizer. When I stepped out, I spotted Audrey Buchanan who I first met at an Al Wenger event. I had no idea this was the building she worked in.

Edelman, 250 Hudson St.

I stepped out on to the roof. There I met David Kirkpatrick himself. He had visited my blog post where I had talked about him, he said. (To Make Sense Of The Facebook Movie) That was sweet to know.

Kyle Cameron I have gotten to know from going to many events. Got to sit next to Rebecca Narayana. We promised to become Facebook friends. She is married to an Indian.

Talk about mind meld, David Kirkpatrick and I both blogged about solar panels the day of this event. Fred Wilson calls it mind meld. His post. Mine.

The final person I got to know was Gary Sharma. The Bay Area birthed Craig's List. New York City birthed Gary's Guide.

PALO ALTO, CA - OCTOBER 06:  Facebook founder ...Image by Getty Images via @daylife
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Solar Panels To Roll Out

Solar cellsImage via Wikipedia
Technology Review: Clearing the Way for Cheap, Flexible Solar Panels: lightweight, flexible panels that are cheap to ship and easy to install (by unrolling them over large areas). .... The protective film is a multilayer, fluoropolymer-based sheet that can replace glass as the protective front cover of solar panels ..... Glass has been the armor of choice because it's cheap, weather-resistant, and durable enough to last decades. .... Blending solar panels into roofs also can overcome aesthetic objections .... a plastic film that is 23 micrometers thick, much thinner than the 3,000-micrometer glass typically found on solar panels today .... Flexible solar panels also can be larger than glass panels
Slow but sure innovation in clean tech is happening. One just wishes it were happening much faster.

Offshoring The Wind Harvesting: Google Wind

A Simpler Route to Plastic Solar Cells
Giving Plastic Solar Cells an Energy Boost
Pushing Plastic Solar Cells

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To Natural User Interface

3d Fantasy Yellow House made with 3D Studio MaxImage via Wikipedia
Technology Review: Microsoft's 3-D Strategy: Microsoft has joined the wave of companies betting that 3-D is the next big thing for computing. .... treating the device as a natural extension of how they interact with the world around them. ..... have people shopping and searching in 3-D as well. .... move computing from today's graphical user interfaces to the "natural user interface" ..... gesture and voice .... a natural interface frees up attention and concentration so that they can focus better on the task at hand .... processing high-definition, 3-D video in real time would strain the capabilities of most home computers today .... the average person views 3-D technology as something used on special occasions, not as a day-to-day technology
The graphical user interface itself was a huge jump. Before that you had to enter exotic commands into your machine. The natural user interface - or 3D computing - promises to be a similar big jump, comparatively a bigger jump.

Just like a big chunk of humanity never bothered with landlines and went straight to mobile phones, I can see the same thing happening with the natural user interface. The natural user interface could end up the majority of humanity's first introduction to the full fledged computing experience.

A computer is not a tool. Computing is an environment.
eMarketer: Email Still Tops Facebook for Keeping in Touch: 86% of survey respondents said they used email to share content, while just 49% said they used Facebook ..... ages 18 to 24, reverses the trend, with 76% sharing via Facebook, compared with 70% via email. .... Rather than focusing on sharing content they thought the recipients would find helpful or relevant (58%), most respondents cared more about what they thought was interesting or amusing (72%).

Technology Review: Craig Mundie's Cloud Vision: cloud computing--the trend shifting computer processing and storage away from desktop computers and onto distributed computers across the Internet. .... Traditional procedural programming languages tend to mask or in fact squeeze out the inherent parallelism in many problems just as a byproduct of the structure of the languages. How you get programs to be correct at larger and larger scales across this distributed concurrent environment is another problem. ...... "Look, I just expect to be able to listen to my music no matter what device I happen to pick up." .... what I call this composite platform, where you've got a balanced set of roles between what you expect the cloud to provide and what you expect the clients to provide themselves.

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The 2010s Belong To New York City


In tech, the 2010s belong to New York City, the way the late 1990s belonged to Silicon Valley. New York City has a good start. The 2010s belong to the mobile web, or at least the first half clearly does. And the mobile web - unlike the big screen web, which itself is a pretty global phenomenon - is the most global of phenomena. And New York City is the most global of cities. NYC has a geographical advantage.

Did New York City Just Buy TechCrunch? I Think We Did
Microsoft-Oracle: Unlikely Alliance Against Android
Fred Wilson: A Tale Of Two Cities

That is not me discounting nanotech. Nanotechnology swept the Nobel prizes this year. That should tell you. If you could find the right nano startups to invest in right now, you could be looking at some astronomical returns in a decade, but it is not easy to pick winners. Much activity ends up being froth.

An IP Address For Your Heart

When it comes to web technology, this coming decade I think belongs to New York City.
Broadway show billboards at the corner of 7th ...Image via Wikipedia
The Valley has matured. Let them build hardware and data centers. Let them do search. But then Google is a bi-coastal company. A lot of people don't realize the size of Google's presence in New York City. They have rented out an entire block. Some day I am going to go check it out.

This is not me discounting clean tech. It is my firm belief America could see a second industrial revolution based on clean tech. This is not me discounting biotech either. But then NYC could do nano, clean and bio as good as anyone else too. Thanks to the subway, we already are one of the lower carbon emission cities in the country. And we stand to benefit from Google Wind.

Offshoring The Wind Harvesting: Google Wind


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