Gordon Moore’s Law describes the economics of innovation

Demand for chips is huge with chip prices jumping higher every month and shortages of key components such as memory halting product manufacturing lines. The Semiconductor Industry Association this week reported a record $35 billion in August sales -- a jump of 24% -- the thirteenth consecutive monthly increase over the year ago period.

John Neuffer, head of the Semiconductor Industry Association, said:

"Sales in August increased across the board, with every major regional market and semiconductor product category posting gains... Memory products continue be a major driver of overall market growth, but sales were up even without memory in August."

A big jump in sales doesn't mean a big jump in units sold -- it means prices have risen sharply. It means higher prices for new servers, network equipment, consumer electronics, to put it simply: the entire digital fabric of our future -- including all of its promises of advanced AI, superior healthcare and a myriad other projects of technological progress -- will cost more; and there will be less of it. And there's no guarantee that prices will come down this time -- as they usually do.

This problem of chip shortages and higher prices is normally solved quite quickly by the chip industry.

Every boom spurs an over-investment of capital in new chip fabs and the resulting glut crashes prices and the bust cycle begins. But the availability of cheap chips creates new applications and new markets and new investments and new progress is made. This has been the economic cycle that underpins the innovative leaps and bounds of the technological miracles that enable our modern world.

Cheap chips...

The semiconductor industry does not get the recognition it deserves for its role as the foundational technology that has fueled the engines of innovation in every industry and in every market. Every two years the chips get twice as fast at half the cost. Sloppy software runs like a gazelle -- and faster chips makes for a a faster route to innovation of all types.

For more than 50 years the chip industry has been vital to our fast pace of innovation and in making technologies affordable on massive scales. But this time those cheap chips might be a memory and prices could remain high and shortages lengthy and even ruinous to some companies.

The chip industry is struggling with sub10 nanometer manufacturing and the challenges are becoming ever more expensive to overcome. The slowing of Moore's Law means stalled innovation: AI needs brute force computing power, so does scientific research such as drug discovery; and so do a trillion business processes. Computing costs are not zero even though programmers write code as if they were.

We don't have anything that can drive innovation at the same pace, and as broadly, as the chip industry. It means that the future will be delayed and the fruits of innovation will be far less affordable and shareable.

Our voice is important for Democracy… and in getting more productivity from our technologies.

The future sounds a little like Cold War Eastern Europe as the digital assistants try to listen-in and construct individual dossiers on each of us — to sell us goods and services rather than sell us out as secret policemen — but then again there’s all types of data buyers and digital assistants will only get better.

I have been reading some of the reviews of the improved and updated digital assistants — a growing crowd — and there is a common theme of disappointment.

Steve Kovach at Business Insider says it’s time to admit digital assistants are overrated:

The hype around digital assistants is real. But for now, it's just that. Hype. And it’s arguably the more overrated than any other emerging technology…digital assistants have turned into a fragmented mess and they're all little more than a minor convenience, assuming they work at all.

The biggest disappointment seems to be that they all handle applications poorly.  Yet we live in a 24/7 app world and each of us rely on dozens of daily apps to get work, life and the people and things we love organized. 

Siri, Alexa, Google Assistant, Bixby, and there’s more coming — are great if you want some information to win a bet with your buddies, or set a timer — Siri is brilliant at setting a timer. But the way they handle apps is terrible yet this is where the largest and most significant business opportunity lies.

The future will be voice operated. This means whoever does voice initiated tasks the best will win a strategic victory as the gateway to a user’s daily commercial and computing interactions, at work and at home.

But there’s still a lot that needs to happen before we will be able to use voice as a powerful user interface. It has to be very good at handling my applications — as good as if I were to talk to a human assistant.

Take a look at these possible voice commands: 

- Deliver the items on my weekly shopping list Friday afternoon and check for lowest prices on the produce. 

- I need Alphabet’s quarterly revenues for the past two years broken out by Adwords, and Adsense revenues in a graph plotted against traffic acquisition costs and mark the quarters that beat Wall Street estimates.

- Find the photos from last Saturday’s picnic, adjust for white balance and send me only the shots with me and my brother for review then email them to my mother. 

In these examples the voice gateway could choose alternate suppliers or band together with other buyers for lower prices plus there was no need to specify an app just the action and outcome. That’s a lot of power in the hands of the digital assistant.

Apps are key…

If digital assistant can control apps — and navigate their command structure to perform a complex set of connected tasks that might be called different things within different apps — then this is a huge step forward for computer literacy because people can voice the outcome they want without needing the skills to operate the software.

People that haven’t learned how to use computers will get nearly the same benefits as longtime computer users.

But it’s a troubling development for app developers. Sure, they want people to easily interface with their software using voice but a digital assistant could choose any relevant software to get the task done. The user won’t care if the results are what they expected. 

Walled Gardens are always listening…

All the major players are building walled gardens around their digital assistants. This is bad for competition and it is bad for the user.

If you are a major retailer and you do not have a digital assistant you are in trouble. As voice becomes more of a mainstream user interface how will independent retailers compete?

It’s clear that we will have many digital assistants around us at any time, listening and ready to jump in and help us. Will we trust them?

Is my digital assistant listening and working for me and my best interests? Or is it listening-in to sell data about me and to sell me out in whatever way it can? 

For the user it makes sense to shun the walled gardens and have an independent digital assistant that is not tied to Google or Amazon or whichever set of services and capabilities each one provides. 

Either way, the winner among the voice-enabled digital assistants will be the one handles apps the best — this is not a trivial task. 

Using voice commands to invoke a series of computing processes sounds like an invocation, like a magic spell but this is not a fantasy — it is a description of a real future ahead of us.

Successful technologies start life by being good enough to be useful. Could some technologies become unbelievably good at what they do—and become too good to be used?

Todays marketing technologies have improved greatly thanks to all that personal data we constantly give away. And they are about to rocket to a new level.

With the addition of Virtual Reality environments bolstered by artificial intelligence and personalization — it will be possible to create the Dream Marketing Machine.

Prime the Dream Machine with any Brand and it will reliably churn out passionate and emotionally committed customers. You’ll get Fanboys and Fangirls by the stadium-load and for pennies on the dollar that Apple pays in marketing costs.

We could be very close to this Dream Marketing Machine. 

At a recent event hosted by SpiritualVR  (photo above) panelist Anastasiya Sharkova said she was deeply moved by her first experience with virtual reality (VR) a title called theBlu:Encounter in which you go eye to eye with a blue whale.

She said the experience was so overwhelming it bypassed all reason and logic. She knew it was all computer generated yet when she looked into eye of the giant she felt a deep emphatic connection with the artificial whale that lasted for days.

And she used a lot less water for the next two weeks.

This scares me. What if the Blue Whale represents a brand such as AT&T and I’m suddenly emotionally bonding with a commercial organization and I can’t control it?

We know VR can affect behavior because it is already used in therapeutic applications treating post traumatic stress disorders.

Persuasive Realities…

Yuval Boger, CEO of open-source VR tech design company Sensics says there is already strong interest in marketing applications. "There are some excellent opportunities to create powerful branded VR experiences."

- But would you willingly agree to a VR experience that you knew was designed to persuade you and manipulate your emotions for commercial gain? And then continue to influence your behavior long after the event?

- Would you allow the Disney whale to try to emotionally bond with your child?

- What if your new job required a swim with the company culture whale as part of HR's on-boarding?

- What if your government insists you swim with its patriotic whale?

Don't get hung up on these balaenopteran examples. The creature will be chosen and shaped just for you -- for maximum empathy.

Hacking the brainstem…

Mass media critic Marshall McLuhan in the 1960s was alarmed by the effects on people from images on the surface of spherical cathode ray screens watched from afar.

VR immerses you inside a sphere of reality where its creator controls every aspect of your visual and auditory world. Marketing has never ever had so much control.

Marketing can use VR to step over your talent for reason and logic and try to tap right into your emotions much as in Neal Stephenson’s 1992 novel Snow Crash — hacking the brain stem — the oldest part of the brain. 

But who has the right to access our emotions? The government? Hollywood? Or anyone at any time and in any way?

If these technologies of persuasion become so incredibly good at what they do— and they will eventually reach that point — then they become too good to be used.

Society gains nothing by exposing its people to powerful methods designed to embed a long lasting emotional loyalty to organizations with self-interested agendas. 

But until we study and understand these technologies of persuasion and how to protect ourselves — marketers will be rushing into VR campaigns faster than Elon Musk in a Hyperloop pod.  

The issue of fake news is extremely serious and it requires immediate attention.  Its proliferation will undermine trust in everything. Everything will look fake. Including the truth.

Without reliable and trusted information:

- Consumers and commercial buyers will delay purchases.

- Businesses won’t have good information for investment decisions.

- Shareholders won’t have a clear view into investment risks.

The rich get richer…

The winners will be special self-interest interest groups — a variety of organizations with nefarious agendas. They will do very well in a fake news future and will learn to operate with impunity. Because even if outed — the truth will look fake. And anti-truth technologies will act as a red herring for a lot of censorship of valid content. 

It’s very bad for the economy. Fake news is also bad for your head. 

"The point of modern propaganda... is to exhaust your critical thinking"

It's a haunting line from a recent Tweet by Garry Kasparov, the former world chess champion and Russian political activist. 

 

"The point of modern propaganda isn't only to misinform or push an agenda. It is to exhaust your critical thinking, to annihilate truth."

https://twitter.com/Kasparov63/status/808750564284702720

Exhausting media...

The non-stop media channels everywhere you look -- now look back at you. And very soon every display near you will have a message specifically for you.

The most advanced technologies of persuasion are coming to a screen near you.Personalized. 24-7.

Will your thoughts and opinions truly be your own? Will they be based on truth or biased by others?

What's the solution? How do we escape fake news and the exhausting never-ending intrusions of influence?

There is a solution that grew out of the 1960s and 1970s when mass media was flexing its muscles and taking a massive cultural toll by trying to exhaust people's critical thinking around civil rights and the Vietnam war: People turned it off, turned away and turned on. The attention became Be. Here. Now.

Original ideas and original thoughts require that you take the time to have original experiences — experiences that are unique and unmediated — un-media-ted through the experience of others.

And that includes having an original experience of yourself. An uncomfortable zone for many. This is why meditation and mindfulness practices are so important to creating original ideas and thoughts. (And keeping notebooks nearby :)

Critical thinking is a limited resource and we could use plenty more of it in every human endeavor. Machines can't do it for us.

AI is a list of responses to a list of inputs — it is not a critical thinking machine. We have to do the critical thinking but the machines will be able to help us fight fake information with sourcing, verification and authentication — they are very good at those tasks. And they don't get exhausted.

[A Saturday Post... The future is already here — it just needs some connecting dots...]

If we take our technologies of personalization and predictive business analytics to their ultimate conclusion, in the future we won't need marketing or consumers. Products will just show up at your door.

Inside the box, the shirt or whatever the thing is, everything about it will be perfect: a perfect fit, perfect style, perfect color, perfect price — and perfect timing.

This future world is perfectly attuned to you, you'll sit on the apex of all our modern technologies, and you'll have the ultimate customer experience. Your favorite brands will know all about you, and know exactly what it is you need, before you knew you wanted it. And all with frictionless auto-debit.

You will marvel at the perfectly synchronized nature of this caring, observant, intelligent world that you live in, that just now delivered exactly what you needed without you having to even think of it. You didn't even know you wanted it until it showed up. It's all thanks to the incredibly powerful algorithms fueling society's Predictive Engines of Commerce.

A world without "wants"...

You will gradually forget the experience of consumerism, the "wanting to buy something" feeling. That hollow tagging, nagging in the gut, that unscratchable-itch frustration of desiring that thing... Yet knowing all along that it is all a lie, that the desire is manufactured through marketing and advertising.

In the future those conflicting emotions will be gone.

Our Predictive Engines of Commerce will save us from the onerous work of being a consumer: having to watch lots of advertising and hunting around to find something to buy. Then thinking about it, then thinking about owning it, then searching for it, going to the mall, going online, buying it, opening the box, throwing the box away. Finding the box, sending the thing in the box back, getting a new box...

It's a big job being a consumer (plus you need an actual job, too). 

Ending consumerism will mean an end to marketing: no more advertising, no more selling, no more pointless waste of peoples' time and energy. We'll return to a life uncluttered by artificially manufactured desires.

"Want" is cancelled out by "Get." In this world without wants  —you'll always get what you need.

The end of consumerism will undoubtably be recognized as the triumph of our age. And we can return to exploring this curious human experience of being... rather than buying. 

- - -

Vectors Of Engagement And The Click-Free Digital Economy -SVW

The Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas is featuring a lot of "wearables" reports Techcrunch (above) (which all seem to be smart watches).

Foremski's Take: All the fuss over Apple Watch will certainly help sell a lot of watches - regular and smart. I recently started wearing a normal watch.

I like the watch, not because I can look at the time but I like the way it looks. And that's a decision based on personal style. I might decide in a few months to stop wearing it. A decision that has nothing to do with the performance of the watch.

And that's why "wearables" need to become separated from the whims of personal style and fashion and disappear into the fabric of our lives. If our personal technologies become invisible no longer become objects of fashion — they can last longer than a season, and manufacturers can worry about the tech and not about becoming unfashionable. 

Personal tech is personal

Personal technologies should become personal — which means it is private to me what I choose to use or don't. Invisible personal technologies are private by their very nature nature.

Also, if our personal technologies become invisible they longer create the same social problems with others, such as those encountered by Google Glass wearers.

But personal tech "invisibles" won't come from a company such as Apple. Apple is very much a fashion brand, it makes its products distinctive and very visible. Its purchase of the Beats headphone brand underlines its fashion focus and it is how it can charge a premium. Becoming invisible would be impossible for Apple.

Invisible personal technologies will likely come from companies such as Google, which is interested in selling web services and not in selling hardware.

The future will be full of embedded technologies: all around us, invisible, and on us, and inside us. There will still be visible tech but it will be a tiny fraction of the tech that won't be seen.

The future of reality is a blended reality combining our technology tools with the natural world — screen-free and unobscured.

- - -

My tongue-in-cheek proposal for a new type of invisible wearable is an "unmentionable." The absorbent but shock-proof underwear has several regions that silently buzz notifications from your smart phone. You'll know if you have a message from your boss or your lover depending on if it's your back side or front side that buzzes.  

- - -

Please see:

Here is Marc Cantor on the Apple Watch.

In 2012, a 21 year old man was fatally injured in a drugs-related shooting near my home in San Francisco.

A year ago the FBI shut down the online illegal drugs market Silk Road. Jake Swearingen at The Atlantic, reports that so far, there's no successor among a motley collection of sites:

At DeepDotWeb, an anonymous editor chronicles everything darknet related . . . [He] predicts that the crazy explosion of smaller markets may be on the wane.

"The market was pretty stable for the last few month unlike first six months of 2014 . . . I believe that it will stay pretty much the same with some markets popping up and some shutting down from this reason or another until we will see some new technology—probably one that will offer decentralization of the markets."

Foremski's Take: With the closure of Silk Road, the Internet lost a chance to disrupt a truly evil global industry. 

Silk Road was able to create a protected market that kept money out of the hands of violent street gangs and international criminal syndicates.

And through its buyer reviews that highlighted the best quality products, it protected people (many US citizens) from exposure to the poisons that adulterate all street drugs.

A large enough Silk Road, or a collection of similar services, could have seriously challenged the revenues of street corner gangs, and international mobsters, on a scale that the US war on drugs has failed to do.

And it's far better for society if drug distributors compete online than by murdering each other in the tens of thousands, as in Mexico.

The beneficiaries of the war against dark markets are the international criminal syndicates, hit men, and the corruptors of government officials that enable the global drug trade to continue on as before, in staggering quantities.

It would be a game changer if VCs invested in startups that targeted disrupting the drugs trtade.

This story is not done yet. As The Atlantic article points out, the next generation of Silk Roads will be smarter and stealthier. And I'm certain their products will be of a far higher quality and safety than street drugs because for the first time the best producers will be able to directly compete against each other.

The Walter Whites of the future will be able to remain mild-mannered and middle-class. They will become small-batch artisanal producers, and they won't be forced to learn the murderous ways of the drug trade. Lost mail, keyword wars, and surprise changes in Google's search algorithm will be the most dramatic events in a future sequel to "Breaking Bad."

This next generation of Silk Roads will pose an even greater disruptive threat to the international drugs business than the first. And this is where the next attack on dark markets will undoubtably spring from: mercenary hackers working for the cartels.

But that would become a hugely embarrassing common cause for US drug enforcement efforts. It wouldn't look good if the pursuit of online dark markets by US law enforcement agencies directly benefited the business of the cartels.

Which is why this could all lead to more sensible drug laws, better treatment of addicts, and improved education for all. It'll help shrink all the drugs markets, on the darknets and in the dark corners of the street. 

Gastronomy at the San Francisco Exploratorium.

The Atlantic’s columnist James Fallows recently listed the top 50 innovations by polling “a panel of 12 scientists, entrepreneurs, engineers, historians of technology, and others.”

Strangely, I counted only 11 panelists (math wasn’t on the list), which included Silicon Valley VC John Doerr;  Joi Ito from MIT Media Lab; and the perennial favorite of every editor: whoever happens to be around the office at the time, which in this case was The Atlantic’s senior editor Alexis Madrigal.

 The list starts off with:

- The printing press (1430s not the earlier Chinese one). 

Then you have all the ones you’d expect: electricity, semiconductors, optics, internal combustion engine, Internet, of course. But they missed the most important technology breakthrough of all time: Gastronomy.

The editors said they wanted to list the most important innovations since the wheel, or about 6,000 years ago, so that they could avoid listing fire. But that makes little sense because fire is not an invention but a natural phenomenon. And some recent civilizations, such as those in the Americas, didn’t use the wheel for transportation, or like the Mayans used the wheel only for toys. Atlantic could have just said 50 most important breakthroughs (fire and wheel not included).

Mind expanding technology

When we developed the technology of cooking it literally blew our minds — our brain size quadrupled and our stomachs shrank. We became much smarter and we looked fabulous — what other breakthrough technology did that?!

Gastronomy unlocked a vast amount of energy in raw food and we used it to build a much larger brain.

But that brain had to be used for serious things because it is very expensive to maintain, requiring 25% of daily calories in the form of high octane glucose for just 2.5% body mass. And the brain has to be fed 24/7 even if other organs have to be shutdown. 

The cooking pot allowed us to build a Ferrari of a brain, expensive to maintain but incredible in performance. We left the other raw food primates in the dust and now we’re on the doorstep of our next big leap forward, into the mashed-up singularity of some kind of bio-digital reality.

Cooking gave us time to think. Eating raw food takes a tremendous amount of time to chew enough to fulfill daily needs, and so does foraging for it when you haven’t figured out yet how to grow it.

Innovation comes from thinking. In fact, when you think about it, all good things in our society come from having the time to think.

If gastronomy hadn’t been invented there would be no civilization, science, arts, computer technologies, or top 50 lists because we wouldn’t have the time to invent them all — we’d still be chewing.

- - -

The 50 Greatest Breakthroughs Since the Wheel - James Fallows - The Atlantic

The Science Of Food - Gastronomy Night at The Exploratorium -SVW

Historians will look back at the past 20 years as a unique period, a time when there was great opportunity to see deep into the collective soul of entire societies because people’s online behavior was largely naked of any fears of being judged or monitored.

Novelist Gabriel Garcí­a Márquez wrote: “All human beings have three lives: public, private, and secret.” We once had insight into that secret world. 

People now go “dark” — ditching their natures, becoming self-monitored, self-critical, and second guessing themselves and everything around them, in the wake of the NSA disclosures and the enormous amount of corporate spying on individuals, so that they will buy more products. We lose far more than we gain.

The individual and their search box was almost as private and sacrosanct as the communion box — and exhibited the same honesty.  You can see this in the search data that AOL released in 2006 as part of a research project. It anonymized 658,000 users but for the first time we got to see a narrative from each user that pointed to great sorrow and drama within ordinary peoples’ lives that could not be revealed in any other way.

Here is a list of searches by user “005315”:

letters and responses written by women to emotionally
abusive partners
men that use emotional and physical abandonment to control their partner
warning signs of a mans infidelity or sexual addiction
the sociopathic relationship
southern california newspaper stories about woman murdered by boyfriend in pomona december2005
names of females murdered or found dead in pomona california in 2005
characteristics of a sociopath in a relationship
a person that shows lack of empathy
help in writing a letter to a abusive narcissistic ex boyfriend
how to hurt the narcissistic man
retaliating against the narcisisstic man

AOL search user “4331025” seemed to be going through a divorce:

cheer up plaques
mass custody definitions
kids health
visitation schedule
kids gym places in worcester
counter surveilance products
sample visitation schedules
how are fat girlfriends
revenge for a cheating spouse
civil war a fathers guide to wining custody
first date dos and donts
how to satisfy a woman
penis enlargement
how to get revenge on exwife
how to do a background check with a liscense number

There’s lots more, some of it can be very disturbing.

Selfies and self-centered life…

For a few years, the search box became a new form of confessional and the answers offered some salvation.  Now, that’s gone because the innocence has gone.  However, there’s a ton of archives for future anthropologists to sift — if they become available from Google, et al.

What’s worse than self-censoring your entire life is the boost Internet technologies have given to the incumbent powers. The early utopian ideals of blogging, citizen journalists, and transparency — have not been realized. Those “transformative” technologies have in fact, helped the ruling powers continue to survive amid greatly magnified levers of control and abilities to impose their ideas onto larger masses of people. The social media promises of challenging the status quo failed to be realised and instead, social media became the social distribution of mass media (SODOMM).

Security expert Bruce Schneier, recently wrote in The Atlantic: The Battle for Power on the Internet 

There is more government surveillance than ever before. There is more government censorship than ever before. There is more government propaganda, and an increasing number of governments are controlling what their users can and cannot do on the Internet. Totalitarian governments are embracing a growing “cyber sovereignty” movement to further consolidate their power. And the cyberwar arms race is on, pumping an enormous amount of money into cyber-weapons and consolidated cyber-defenses, further increasing government power…

The interests of corporate and government powers are aligning. Both corporations and governments benefit from ubiquitous surveillance, and the NSA is using Google, Facebook, Verizon, and others to get access to data it couldn’t otherwise.

Mr. Schneier believes that by being nimble, it is possible to use technology to out-fox the ruling powers. However, it doesn’t take long for governments, and corporations to catch up. And as the cloaking technologies become more complex to use, fewer use them, and users can then become very exposed by using them even if their content isn’t.

This is why cloaking technologies should be ubiquitous and built-into the fabric of online infrastgructure because they are essential to a modern democracy. Their absence should be considered anti-democratic and a form of human rights violation because peoples' access to free speech and freedom to organize cannot be guaranteed.

Nearly eight years ago I wrote: The future transparency of the past--we live in glass houses | ZDNet

Will we have Big Brother? Yes, because we can. Because once we digitize something, we can process it, and we can store it--very easily. We can monitor the inventory in coke machines, and we will monitor everything else soon too.

And if we can track people, we will, because we can. If reasonable technologies exist to prevent crime, terrorism, or any other illegal acts, then we would be negligent in not employing those technologies. That will be the logic of the lawyers and legislators.

Welcome to the future transparency of your present moments.

When Big Data can predict who will buy shoes it can also be applied to predict crimes and criminals. Predictive analytics might sound benign when applied to business but in the hands of government or police states it becomes truly frightening. 

When Big Data can predict who will buy refrigerators it can also be applied to predict crimes and criminals. Predictive analytics might sound benign when applied to commerce but in the hands of government or police states it becomes truly frightening.

We could easily paint ourselves into a corner, as in North Korea, or Nazi Germany and become trapped inside hideous societies ruled by inhuman idealogies because of our advanced technologies of control.

This is why techno-optimists must also become techno-activists to ensure that we get the right future — there are many to choose from but only a few that are worthwhile.

We could easily paint ourselves into a corner, as in North Korea, or Nazi Germany and become trapped by our advanced technologies of control.

This is why tech-optimists must also become techno-activists to ensure that we get the right future — there are many to choose from but only a few that are worth fighting for.

Imagine if you had a choice: work at a company for a decent salary and benefits, or work at a company with decent salary, benefits, and the opportunity to live longer?

The latter offer is the one that Google will eventually be able to make thanks to its investment in life extending technologies venture Calico. And it has said that such a job offer is possible.

Earlier this year I attended a Commonwealth Club event focused on the strategies local tech companies use to attract top talent.

Representatives from Google, Twitter, and Cisco Systems spoke about their recruitment tactics and the perks and other incentives they use to get, and retain, the talent they need.

(Above from left) Doug MacMillan, reporter for Bloomberg BusinessWeek moderated: Melissa Daimler, Head of Organizational Effectiveness and Learning, at Twitter; Rowan Trollope, Senior VP and GM of Collaboration Technology Group, at Cisco Systems; and Todd Carlisle, Director of Staffing at Google.

 Mr. Carlisle said, what if where you worked resulted in you being able to live a lot longer? "You might never leave the company," he said.

It is the ultimate work benefit, more valuable than free gourmet lunches, or free rides to work.

And the value of a highly talented software engineer is greater the greater your platform. Because their work is easily scaled across the entire platform.

If life extension technologies mean that Google can hire the best engineers in the world then it is worth it, because in addition to being able to scale their work the most efficiently across its global platform — the competition doesn't have them. Google keeps a lot of engineers "on the bench" simply to deny them to competitors.

- - -

Please see: 

Incredible Revelation By Google Exec: Compete For Software Engineers With Life Extension Technologies -SVW

Calico: Google's New Project to Solve Death - TIME

Superb interview here with Neil Postman about technology and the Faustian bargain we make with it. He manages to predict the issues that we face today with social networks, online education, and who benefits from technology.

For example, he says that schools help socialize people and how to learn in a group environment, which is essential if people are to become effective in business and in society as a whole.

He also says that with every technology we should ask the question, what problem is this solving? Whose problem is it solving? Which is especially apt with all the web services from Google to Facebook, that are solving a problem for marketers wanting to know more about us. 

There's lots more in this nearly 20 year old interview.(Hat tip Adam Thierer.)

Neil Postman - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Neil Postman (March 8, 1931 – October 5, 2003) was an American author, media theorist and cultural critic, who is best known by the general public for his 1985 book about television, Amusing Ourselves to Death. For more than forty years, he was associated with New York University. Postman was a humanist, who believed that "new technology can never substitute for human values."

Neil Postman, 72, Mass Media Critic, Dies - NYTimes.com

It won't be physics that sets the limits of Moore's Law but fiscal issues — as the chip industry's platform of exponential innovation grinds to a halt after a 50 year run in the face of mounting costs around 2020.

Then it'll be up to software to take over in doubling computing power and halving costs every two or so years. Good luck with that. 

Rik Myslewski at The Register, reports from the Hot Chips conference at Stanford University:

"When Moore's Law ends, it will be economics that stops it, not physics," declared Robert Colwell of DARPA's Microsystems Technology Office…"Follow the money," he advised.

According to Colwell, who was Intel's chief chip architect from 1990 to 2001 and an Intel Fellow, there's absolutely no doubt that Moore's Law will eventually be repealed. "Let's at least face the fact that [Moore's Law] is an exponential, and there cannot be an exponential that doesn't end," he said. "You can't have it."

Colwell believes that 2020 will be the earliest date for the Law's demise. "That's only seven years away," he reminded his audience…"We'll play all the little tricks that we didn't get around to" – but the halcyon days of exponential performance improvements will be at an end. And with them, Moore's Law.

He raises an interesting point about the incremental improvements in chip performance following the end of Moore's Law. Will people buy a chip that's 50% better, 20% better, 10%?

If customers won't buy smaller improvements then chipmakers won't make the chips. Chipmakers won't invest billions of dollars in new manufacturing lines if the performance improvements are incremental.

Lots more here: Silicon daddy: Moore's Law about to be repealed, but don't blame physics • The Register

Also please see:

Hardware Is King, Software Is A Spoilt Brat Grown Fat Suckling On The Teats Of Chip Industry Innovation -SVW

 Qualcomm CEO Worried About End Of Moore's Law

Will Software Developers Be Able To Keep Moore's Law Alive?

Mark Zuckerberg's call for an industry-wide effort to bring Internet connectivity to billions of the world's poorest is framed in the context of a great humanitarian crusade, he calls it "one of the greatest challenges of our generation."

It seems lacking in ambition and imagination to focus on Internet connectivity as a grand challenge that will inspire many others to devote their time and energy into making a reality. It is also incredibly self-serving. 

Do the world's poor want Internet access versus say clean water? Shouldn't Mr. Zuckerberg ask them? 

Over at One Hacker Way (above), the Hacker Way calls for lots of A/B testing. Has Facebook carried out any A/B testing regarding what the billions of people on the fringes of digital society want? Do they even have a say? 

A/B testing would save Internet.org a lot of time and trouble if it turns out the poor would rather have a safe place to live, sanitation, schools, clean water, health clinics, electric lights, roads, or food. Not that there's a choice but in theory, if they had a choice what would they want?

I bet Internet connectivity never comes up in their social conversations. Internet connectivity is nice to have but it's only useful if you have the other basic things needed for existence. 

Bill Gates is right when he commented about Google's aptly named Project Loon venture to float balloons in poor countries, carrying Internet access: "When you're dying of malaria, I suppose you'll look up and see that balloon, and I'm not sure how it'll help you."

Google co-founder Sergey Brin has funded a project that grew strips of meat from stem cells, which were then collected to form a burger, cooked and eaten at a live event in London.

Bloomberg reporter Makiko Kitamura: Brin's $332,000 Lab-Grown Burger Has Cake-Like Texture - Bloomberg

The 5-ounce burger, which cost more than 250,000 euros ($332,000) to produce, was developed by Mark Post of Maastricht University with funding from Google co-founder Sergey Brin...Cultured meat production uses as much as 60 percent less energy, resulting in up to 95 percent lower greenhouse gas emissions and 98 percent lower land use compared with conventional production in Europe.

The texture was described a cake-like and with no fat in the meat, there isn't much flavor. It's color came largely from beet juice and saffron.

Growing meat is a lot less damaging to the environment than farming it. However, it could be another "decade or two" before it is commercially viable. Scientists have to figure out how to grow fat.

The lab process requires fetal bovine serum, which is expensive and it competes with its use to make vaccines.

There's no word yet if "Brin's Burger" will be offered in Google's free food staff cafeterias, or if it will come with cheese. 

The Guardian has a video of Sergey Brin and scientists explaining the impact of meat consumption.

It was great to catch up with Aarti Shah from The Holmes Report, and Matthew Greeley, CEO of BrightIdea. Matt had a great take on 3D printers. He pointed out that when the time between thinking something up, and then physically having it - shrinks towards nothing - as with future 3D printers, our reality becomes less distinguishable from living in a digital reality, the Singularity. 

He's right and it's an interesting idea to explore further. In a similar vein, products such as Google Glass offer a similar merging of the worlds. Former magazine publisher Fred Davis showed me his Google Glass and I appreciated the fact that he could near instantaneously looking something up online, or take a photo. The lag between thought and action is shrinking.

When Google Glass figures out what I need, and when I need it - because it knows my physical context there will be no lag time, I'll get exactly what I need when I need it.

I won't even need to go through a process of "wanting" something, say my supermarket shopping list, because it'll know I'm in the supermarket and it won't let me pass by the tomatoes. With no need to "want" I'll always get the digital things I need in the physical world.

This experience of a "blended realty" won't be far off from a true experience of a digital Singularity. "Does it blend?" will have a new meaning when it comes to digital gizmos and gadgets.

I found an interview (above) of Nikola Danaylov talking with Thad Starner, professor at the Georgia Institute of Technology, and technical lead for Google Glass. He coined the term "augmented reality" and is a pioneer in wearable computing. It has an intriguing headline: Reduce the Time Between Intention and Action.

Here's a description:

We cover a variety of interesting topics such as: how he coined the term augmented reality (AR) and the definition thereof; what is wearable computing and how it is different from AR; Google Glass -- its major breakthroughs, popular apps, misconceptions and implications; Starner's other cutting-edge projects such as the passive haptic learning mobile music touch glove; his personal advice for young augmented reality designers and developers; Vernor Vinge's Rainbows End and the technological singularity...

Competition for software engineers is incredibly intense and Silicon Valley firms are pulling out all the stops to recruit and retain top talent. A great software engineer is a very scalable asset.

Every company can offer perks of free food and high salaries but where can an employer get ahead of the pack and offer something no one else can, what is the ultimate perk? How about life extension.

That's where Google is headed.

Earlier this week, at a Commonwealth Club Inforum event on the topic of HR and what Silicon Valley companies such as Twitter, and Cisco Systems are doing to attract the best people, panel member Todd Carlisle, Director of Staffing at Google, had the last word, by teasing a possible future scenario.

He asked, what if a perk of working at a company was that it extended your life? He said that people would likely never leave the company, they would be incredibly loyal. 

If you connect the dots that's exactly where Google is headed.

Late last year it hired Ray Kurzweil (above) a vocal proponent of an idea called the Singularity, which predicts life extension technologies will eventually extend people's lives indefinitely. This will start happening in earnest within this decade.

Here's Google's recruitment slogan from the future: "Come work at Google and live longer. It's a Singular Experience!"

How can other companies compete?!

Google can make sure its engineers have a seat on the Singularity bus. It already has the driver of the idea in Mr Kurzweil, and the Singularity will require the world's largest, most powerful computer system, which is exactly what Google is building.

It's an incredibly compelling scenario and software engineers would probably accept lower salaries for the chance to be among the first to benefit from the Singularity. It's also a message that doesn't need to be directly stated, but can be implied, as Todd Carlisle clearly did earlier this week.

What could competitors come up with? There is no amount of salary, free food and beer, that could rival Google's leadership in lifespan extension technologies. 

Rivals may have to resort to this recruiting slogan: "Come work here --  the work is so dull that it'll seem as if you are living longer!" 

[It's cribbed from Joseph Heller's novel "Catch-22" where one of the World War II bomber pilots seeks out the most boring things to do in his free time, so that it will feel as if he is living a long life, rather than the reality of the shockingly short life expectancy of bomber crews -- just six weeks.]

Life imitating art – a building in San Francisco's SoMa district.

Liz Ganes at All Things D reports:

Google Glass security vulnerability that allowed an outsider to take control of the wearable computing device via QR code has been fixed…

… since Glass allows users to connect to Wi-Fi by taking a picture of a QR code, it’s possible that someone could trick a Glass wearer to unwittingly join an access point that allowed someone else to remotely control Glass and to stream the display via Bluetooth.

Google Glass Had a Vulnerability for Being Taken Over Via QR Code - Liz Gannes - News - AllThingsD

This scenario is reminiscent of Neal Stephenson's seminal 1992 science fiction novel "Snow Crash" in which the protagonist (Hiro Protagonist) battles a drug/virus that infects people's brains. The viral code attacks through the brainstem via linguistics. Hacking the brainstem – a brilliant concept.

Victims look at virtual business cards that contain an image that just seems harmless "static"  as in an untuned TV set and become infected.  QR codes look like static (below) but they contain computer instructions.

Many people have QR codes on their business cards, therefore looking at them via Google Glass creates a point of infection that directly mirrors the novel.

What other vulnerabilities are there via QR codes? Smartphones could potentially be hacked in a similar way, maybe they already are. 

 Life imitating art. It's worth reading, or re-reading Snow Crash. Even though it was written in 1992, it is an incredibly astute predictor of the future and its media wars. 

With no handheld screen to look down into, Google Glass wearers will be walking around like blind men, staring off into a void of their own.  "Glassy-eyed stare" will have a more literal meaning in the near future.

BTW,  here's a fascinating peek into Google's senior level exec meetings from Eric Schmidt - most of this digital elite can't make eye contact with each other.

Curt Woodward senior editor at  Xconomy writes:

During Schmidt's decade as Google CEO, before co-founder Larry Page took the helm, there was a standing rule for one senior-executive meeting: No computers, no smartphones, and talk to each other face-to-face for one hour per week.

It was so hard to resist the pull of the Web, though, that Schmidt had to walk around the meeting room and look for people hiding their phones under the table, dispensing fines to the offenders.

"Even one hour per week, you couldn't have a civilized conversation. So when Larry replaced me, he gave up. And now I sit in the meeting, typing away like everybody else, with no eye contact. So, if you like eye contact, I'm sorry--you lost," he said to laughs.

 Schmidt: Google Glass Critics "Afraid of Change," Society Will Adapt | Xconomy

Please see: Old age is the killer app for Google Glass | ZDNet

Google Glass has a promissing future -- although not in the markets that Google thinks it's targetting: urban early-tech adopters -- they are a fickle bunch at best.

Where Google Glass will make its mark and find a large and loyal customer base is in helping families and communities deal with the ravages of old age.

We have a very large population of Baby Boomers. This is Generation A -- Aging on a massive scale, a population that's on a collision course with all the ills and predicaments that an older life brings.

Generation A is doing pretty well so far, but it can't live forever, even though it secretly thinks otherwise.

The realities of old age are well documented. Such as: brittle bones, difficulties in walking, small falls that can break hips, and many other injuries that were trivial when younger now become deadly. Prolonged physical inactivity due to injuries are a quick slide towards mortality. [Acturial tables are the original "Big Data" app.]

Older age brings other challenges such as muddled thoughts and for some, a slow slide into dementia because of Alzheimer's, or because of the effects of powerful medications.

With special Google Glass based applications, however, we could soften the problems that Generation A is facing. And it can be done at a very low cost -- probably for about the same amount of money as a monthly cell phone bill, which makes it affordable to nearly every family.

Here are some examples of Gen A Google Glass applications:

- Google Glass sensors can track a person's gait, and identify mobility problems that signal a potential fall and broken bones in the near future. Early warning signs can trigger preventative treatments and healthcare providers would be motivated to try stop a fall before it happens.

- Reminders for taking medication and preventing double dosing -- a big health problem. Plus reminders of family birthdays.

- People beginning to suffer from dementia would find Google Glass based apps tremendously useful. For example, the device could recognize family members and offer simple messages such as, "This is your son, his name is John. Say, "Hello John, how are my beautiful grandchildren?"

- When John asks his aged mother, "Do you remember the trip we took last year to Las Vegas?" Google Glass can run a quick replay video of the highlights. Not only would John's mother recall the trip but she could use John's wireless printer to print out her favorite photos for him, right there and then.

- Families are often separated from their older members because of jobs thousands of miles away. They could check-in with their parents very easily. With Google Glass-type devices, they could patch into what they are doing, even what they are seeing (there would be a "courtesy" filter to screen out any embarrassing scenes).

- And if there were a problem, "Help, I've fallen and I can't get up," aid would be on the way in seconds.

- Finding old episodes of "The Rockford Files."

The possibilities for Google Glass are huge in this older market. Why do companies chase the 19 to 25 year old demographic? Those kids have little money and the entire generation has lousy job prospects.

The Baby Boomers of Generation A are the largest and wealthiest demographic of them all. They will love Google Glass.

- - -

Google's rush to Google Glass makes perfect sense, if you consider that founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin are 40, and 39 years old, respectively.

With every day they have more and more in common with 60 year-olds than with 20 year-olds. Google Glass is an exercise in future-comforting their old age.

[And so is the hiring of Ray Kurzweil, it's to ensure that Google's founders get a front seat on the bus ride to the Singularity, and its promise of immortality. (If you are in the back seats you might not get there in time. (It's a different type of digital divide.))]

Jaron Lanier, an early Internet pioneer, talks with FT Business about the new digital economies, and why free information is not a good idea.

Mr. Lanier says he was one of the first in advocating digitizing the music industry and he used to argue that free music would enable artists to make money from live shows and merchandising.

He now says that this did not turn out well and that information should not be available for free because it doesn't create the basis for sustainable wealth creation. If people and governments, paid for information as they once used to pay, it would create sustainable businesses.

Foremski's Take: Good luck putting the Genie back into the bottle. Every industry undergoing transformation to a digital business is facing enormous disruption in transitioning to new business models. The music and the news media industries are the most visible examples but there's plenty more.

Digitization also means that businesses can cherry pick the lowest-risk highest margin businesses and give away information as a loss-leader.

Google does it all the time, other companies do it too, giving away content, apps, etc, that other businesses used to sell. 

Take a look at Craigslist, which cherry-picked free-classifieds and didn't have to produce the journalism that helped sell the classifieds ads. Craigslist only charges for job ads and its revenues were estimated to be $126m in 2012 and are expected to increase by  $27m to $153m in 2013.

It is clearing about $103m in profits -- not bad for a private firm employing just 35 people. But to make that money it has decimated the classified ads market. A market that was worth $19.6 billion in 2000 had fallen to $6bn in 2009. The value of all those free Craigslists ads is more than $13 billion a year.   Craigslist has likely destroyed more than $100bn of revenues over its long span. It's responsible for tens of thousands of lost jobs.

But it's not Craigslist's fault, it's simply the power of the Internet, a basket of virtually free, standardized technologies, which manages to devalue every business it touches (except healthcare).

If a product or service can be digitized it can be produced or offered, for nearly free. If a business makes money on something else it can easily support "almost-free" to the detriment of other "non-free" businesses in that market.

Stewart Brand, a Bay Area publisher and techno-optimist, coined the phrase "Information wants to be free" in 1985.

"Information can be free" -- is what he's actually saying. And because it can be offered for free  -- it often is. And software too, the open source movement is a perfect example of that trend.

Mr Lanier is right about the need for developing sustainable businesses and the inability of free information to provide a means of wealth creation, especially when the competitive strategy du jour is the simple bludgeon of scale, who has the biggest computer platform.

But developing sustainable economies won't be done by going backwards in time. We face a future that will be defined by the end of work - it can become a golden age or one of horrific consequences. We have no means of dealing with this type of future, we have nothing that has prepared us for it, we only know how to punish and ridicule those that don't work.

It would seem a better use of their time if futurists such as Mr. Lanier focused on the future, and less on going back to the past.

We need to figure out how we deal with the end of work -- it's the most important problem we face bar none.

We have hugely productive manufacturing and other technologies. It doesn't require all 7 billion of us to produce the things we need for a sustainable, healthy, vibrant society. Yet we will impose austerities and false shortages to create scarcities in a bid to monetize markets.

We have at our disposal immense, irrepressible technologies of mass abundance, yet we constantly seek to muzzle them.

It doesn't add up, it doesn't make sense, and it's because we don't have the language and the concepts to even begin to know how to talk about living in a world that celebrates the end of work, the fruits of thousands of years of progress.

Yet we insist that 7 billion people work, or else they are failures, failed societies, failed countries, failed economies. The Internet is helping to create a lot failed economies, it's what it does best.

We need a new way of understanding the future and coming to terms with it on its terms -- and not those from our past way of thinking.

Predicting the future is easy, figuring out how we live in it is much harder. 

- - -

Please see: The Internet Devalues Everything It Touches, Anything That Can Be Digitized -SVW

Motion: "This House believes that Silicon Valley innovation will solve the healthcare crisis."

Speakers:

Stacey Chang, Director, Health & Wellness Practice, IDEO. 

Joe DiNucci, Proposition Team Captain, Professional Coach; Partner, Enabling Thought Leadership.

Bruce Jenett, Partner, DLA Piper (Life Sciences).

Gary Lauer, Chairman & CEO, eHealth. 

Michael Malone, Opposition Team Captain, American author, columnist at The Economist, Wall Street Journal, and New York Times, former editor, Forbes. 

Robert Obana, Executive Director & CEO, NCIRE, The Veterans Health Research Institute.

Maria Sendra, Partner, Jones Day.

Disease, infections, aging population, healthcare access and cost. Some people see healthcare as a crisis. Others see opportunity. While Washington wrestles with rising health care costs, Silicon Valley's engineers and scientists are dealing in molecules, sensors, and other technologies to radically improve healthcare treatments, options and outcomes. Yet some observe that the science/engineering/innovation mindset will not solve the crisis-- that, in fact, the most serious challenges in healthcare are not that rational.

Foremski's Take: This should be an entertaining evening. Healthcare is one of the only industries that has managed to take innovation and increase costs. In nearly all other human endeavors innovation in technology has helped to dramatically reduce costs -- why is that?

It seems that the motion is proved from the start that the "challenges in healthcare are not that rational."

A recently published study by researchers at Cambridge University in the UK and Microsoft Research, used an automated analysis of 58,000 volunteers' Facebook "likes" to make highly accurate predictions about a person's private and very sensitive personal attributes. 

The authors of the study: "Private traits and attributes are predictable from digital records of human behavior" claim that they were able to use "easily accessible digital records of behavior, Facebook Likes," to accurately predict a wide range of attributes that included:

Sexual orientation, ethnicity, religious and political views, personality traits, intelligence, happiness, use of addictive substances, parental separation, age, and gender.

The researchers developed a model that could predict if a man was homosexual 88% of the time, and 75% of the time for women; ethnic origin (95%), gender (93%), religion (82%), political affiliation (85%), if they use addictive substances (75%), and relationship status (67%).

Margaret Weigel, writing on Journalist's Resource, notes that clicking "Like" on popular subjects such as "Britney Spears" or "Desperate Housewives"  were among signs of a homosexual orientation.

The model was less accurate when attempting to predict the length of the parents' marriage (60%). "Individuals with parents who separated have a higher probability of liking statements preoccupied with relationships, such as 'If I'm with you then I'm with you. I don't want anyone else.'"

Foremski's Take: Predictive models such as the ones used by the researchers in this study, become even more accurate as more data is collected. 

Easy access to such highly sensitive information could be used by employers, landlords, government agencies, educational institutes, and private organizations, in ways that discriminate and punish individuals. And there's no way fight it. 

Big Data has become a massive threat to individual well being in society. There is no difference between Big Data and Big Brother.

There are many "silent listeners" in social networks that collect people's "Likes" and other online behaviors so that the information can be sold discretely to third parties. Facebook, Google, and all other social networks, also collect such behavioral information. 

While the companies say that their behavioral Big Data is stripped of users' names,  it is possible to use other databases such as electoral records, demographic information, and location data, to identify individuals by name. 

It's essentially a secret dossier on more than a 1 billion social network users.  

While this dossier is fragmented at the moment, sophisticated new technologies will soon make it trivial to pull together a massive amount of sensitive private data on every individual that interacts with the Internet in any way.

Your phone records, or information about events and parties you attend,  could implicate you in the future if they show a connection with people that were later identified as drug dealers, criminals, terrorists, or maybe even paedophiles.

Big Data gradually accumulates a cloud of suspicion around you simply by association.

Google, for example, already assesses the quality of a web site by who links to it. If you have lots of what Google considers to be low-quality, spammy site back links, it will downgrade your web site's all important PageRank and bury it deep within its index. 

This is why website owners are desperately sending out letters to other web sites asking them to delete their back links. [The Fast Unravelling Web: How Google Is Killing The Hyperlink.]

Think about how such methodology could be applied to determine the "TrustRank" of an individual in Google's world. People can't erase past links to friends and associates now considered "low quality" or possibly even criminal.

Welcome to the future obligations of your present life.

Big Data technologies currently under development will be able to make highly accurate predictions about nearly every important aspect of your existence: your health, your lifespan, even your sanity. 

Big business loves Big Data because it helps them manage their risks -- it's what corporations do best. 

I was at a recent Cisco event featuring their futurists. One of them talked about people's FICA scores, which determine their ability to get a mortgage, and developing a type of healthcare "FICA" score for each person as a way of determining their ability to get healthcare insurance.

I pointed out that it was a brilliant idea for cutting healthcare costs since it would likely result in mass hospital closures as companies only insured people with a low risk of needing their services. 

The future benefits of Big Data are stacked firmly against the individual. 

This evening (March 26) The Churchill Club hosts Alan Kay (above), formerly of the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center, Apple, and Hewlett-Packard in conversation with  SAP's technology and innovation leader Vishal Sikka,  hosted by analyst Paul Saffo.

Many people are familiar with Mr Kay's quotes such as this one from 1971: 

"The best way to predict the future is to invent it."

He is sometimes called the "Father of Personal Computing." Mr. Kay predicted the "tablet" style computer decades ago,  which he called a "Dynabook." He is a winner of the Turing Award, inventor of the Smalltalk computer language, and a pioneer of graphical user interfaces and object oriented programming.

He's a vocal critic of modern software applications, arguing that software developers are lazy and produce poor tools, which results in bloated, highly inefficient software. It's only the continuing advances in microprocessors and semiconductor technology through Moore's Law that provide software developers with ever more powerful and scalable platforms. 

 Mr. Sikka leads technology and innovation at SAP, the world's largest business software company. It will be interesting to see if the subject of bloated software comes up in their conversation.

Mr. Sikka has developed his own philosophies around software development, and a concept he calls "Timeless Software" described as "software that does not cause disruption to the user as technology landscapes evolve." SAP has adopted this approach.

He is a long-time admirer of Mr. Kay and contributed an essay in tribute to him on his 70th birthday.

There's more on Alan Kay and his ideas on software in this excellent article by Demis Bellot:

The Deep Insights of Alan Kay - mythz blog

... a little unknown nugget of what the primary motivation behind the amazing research teams Alan was apart of, whose pioneering efforts in advancing computer-science started about 40 years ago with the goal:

"...to help children -- and thus humanity -- to learn and absorb 'science in the large'".

Event details: Churchill Club: Technology and Transformation: Vishal Sikka and Alan Kay, in Conversation with Paul Saffo

Eric Berlow, an ecologist and network scientist, sketches a flowchart to illustrate what happens in the lifecycle of publicly shared data.

By Intel Free Press

Ecologist turned network scientist Eric Berlow is tapping top experts to make public data more useful, meaningful and accessible.

Eric Berlow plans to catalyze and democratize big data.

Berlow is dead serious about it. He believes big data is controlled by big business when it should be openly available to the public.

"What if there was a system in place that encouraged people to share so they could make a bigger impact in the world?" he asks. "I'd like to help launch a decentralized, egalitarian data revolution that improves life for humankind."

For many, big data, which describes data sets too large and complex to work with using available database management tools, means information overload or spreadsheet number crunching. It's something that only big businesses, scientific researchers or data junkies are able to process in their quest to find hidden meaning or spot trends.

That view needs to change, according to Berlow.

In fact, he sees the growing tsunami of information as a threat if people ignore it. Berlow wants the public to tap into the potential of what researchers dub the secret life of data. If they have access to it, he believes, big data might help them live better lives or even save the planet.

Vibrant Data...

To help give more people that access and make sense of it, Berlow is working on the Vibrant Data Project. Inspired by the use of Facebook and Twitter in the Arab Spring popular uprisings, the intent of the project is to help people collectively simplify complex problems using big data.

The World Bank equated Vibrant Data to "a neural net" that will "require us to think differently about problem solving. To thrive in such an environment will require collaborative tools and skills."

Berlow may be best known for his 2010 TED Talk "How Complexity Leads to Simplicity," but he's more than just a YouTube sensation. He earned a Ph.D. from Oregon State University, completed postdoctoral work at UC Berkeley and has published in Science and Nature.

"The more you step back and embrace complexity, the better chance you have of finding simple answers," Berlow says of his big picture approach.

He's used it to create a crowdsourced map of how we can democratize data. It's based on insights Berlow gathered from more than 50 experts.

That input helped him identify essential elements of a big data system that could benefit: digital data literacy, trust, open platform for sharing and easy access.

Barlow joins Berlow...

"Crowdsourcing data exploration is what a lot of people are looking at as the future," said John Perry Barlow of the Electronic Frontier Foundation in a video interview about Vibrant Data.

Barlow, the iconic former Grateful Dead lyricist and cyber liberties activist, is one of many working with Berlow on the Vibrant Data Project.

Other TED fellows and such experts as Sun Microsystems co-founder Bill Joy and Jean-Baptiste Michel of the Harvard Institute for Quantitative Social Science are working on the effort, which is a collaboration between Berlow's Tru North Labs, The Gathering Think Tank, Brainvise and Intel Labs.

Big Data Literacy

"This data revolution can topple dictators or empower them with better surveillance," said Berlow. "It can broaden economic opportunity for more people or it could be used to consolidate wealth into the hands of a few."

Each day, 2.5 quintillion bytes of data is being created each day by mobile phones, social media sites, online shopping, climate sensors and through other digital means according to IBM estimates.

Put another way, 90 percent of the world's data was created just in the last two years.

"Today we are creating lots of new public information even just walking around with our phones," said Berlow, referring to location and content shared from people's devices while connected to wireless networks and the Internet.

"But most of it is controlled by companies like Apple, Facebook and Google. I don't even know what my data looks like to these companies. We are the data and we don't always benefit from sharing it."

If he gets the algorithms and essential processes right, Berlow believes a vibrant data system could bring people important insights that today remain hidden or inaccessible.

With access to the world's data, people's collective intelligence could help solve economic, health and environmental crises.

"Data flows like energy flows through the food web," Berlow said. "We're trying to identify all the moving parts and understand it like an ecosystem to identify the critical species with the most impact."

Explaining Vibrant Data

[I used to work with Mr Keen at Podtech where I was helping develop a range of tech-related video shows.]

Mr Keen has spent many years lamenting the fall in quality of our culture because of amateurs rewriting our encyclopedias (Wikipedia) and competing with high quality TV (Youtube videos of skateboarding cats) and the decline of professional journalists and editors (and the rise of blogs).

His book "Cult of the Amateur: How blogs, MySpace, YouTube, and the rest of today's user-generated media are destroying our economy, our culture, and our values," struck a chord with many people.

In May he published "Digital Vertigo: How Today's Online Social Revolution Is Dividing, Diminishing, and Disorienting Us."

I have heard Mr Keen speak several times and I disagree with him on most things. Plus, I don't see the point in looking backwards, especially with a twisted mirror.

I'm far more interested in how technology and media is changing society, how it is changing us, and how it will enable us to potentially develop a completely new society and experience of humanity.

We're entering a post technology world where it's the economic and cultural applications that people engage with -- that become the most interesting topic -- not the technology.

As for the dumbing down of society? We've been doing a pretty good job since Greek and Roman times, we don't need technologies such as the Internet or Youtube to go lowbrow.

Why whine about bloggers and low quality content? I don't read or look at crap, because it's easy to escape it these days - not so easy when the choices were limited -- there were just three TV channels in the UK until 1980 and mainstream media dominated all media. We are far better off today.

Mr Keen sends me his weekly newsletter which tells me where in the world is traveling, and where he is appearing: conferences, TV, radio, magazines, etc. He's extremely busy, his role as an articulate techno-pessimist is much in demand.

Here's an extract from his latest e-mail:

I just came back from Sao Paolo and Rio where I keynoted The Next Web conference and then launched the Brazilian language version of Digital Vertigo.

I flew to Brazil via Aspen, where I got grilled by CNET's Declan McCullagh at TPI's Aspen Forum.

And the week before that I was in Scotland, where the Glaswegian novelist Ewan Morrison interviewed me at the Edinburgh Book Festival.

... I'm off to Toronto this week for a debate on Thursday at the University of Toronto's Rotman School of Management with my arch-frenemy, the bestselling utopian Don Tapscott.

I'll be at both Frost and Sullivan's GIL and Techcrunch's Disrupt conferences next week in the Bay Area.

After that, I'm in Europe for the rest of the month, first at WPP's Stream unconference in Athens, then speaking at the InternetBeta conference in Rzeszow, the Dutch Tax Office's curiously named "Week of Inspiration" conference in Apeldorn and, finally, the Recorded Future conference in London.

There's some pro-bono appearances here but the rest are paid gigs. Speaker fees at conferences can be $30k to $50k and sometimes more, so there's a very good living to be made as a professional techno-pessimist. There's not too many around - I'm sure the market could handle a few more.

Evgeny Morozov is a rising star in this sector. I enjoyed his takedown of TED (Has TED 'Become An Insatiable Kingpin Of International Meme Laundering'? - SVW). He's a very entertaining writer.

I'm neither optimist or pessimist, all the time. I am optimistic about some things and critical about others. I want to be free to choose instead of always being just one or the other. It's easy being just one or the other.

Chief Marketing Officer or VP of Marketing/Communications has to be one of the toughest jobs around these days. Why? Because of the massive fragmentation going on in media and communications.

...

The good news about the new media and communications channels is that it is all measurable. You can measure things in incredible detail. You can slice and dice the measurement data in ways that were never possible before.

The bad news about the new media and communications channels is that it is all measurable. There is a mountain of data that can sliced and diced in so many ways. What is worth measuring? How much should you measure? What do the measurements mean? How can you relate the measurement data to revenues?

We are still figuring out these and many other questions. And that's why marketing and communications today is so challenging and it isn't going to get any easier.

That's from my post Chief Marketing Officer - Toughest Job Around . . .  written about four years ago.

Here's a good article on the same theme but with some hard data from various industries, written by McKinsey staff: David Court, Jonathan Gordon, and Jesko Perrey.

As the external marketing environment becomes more complex, so must the internal environment. Marketers historically had only a handful of communication vehicles; now they have dozens of them, and the number is growing rapidly.

This proliferation has led to the emergence of both external and internal specialists, with accumulated experience not only in media channels (such as social media) but even in individual vehicles (such as Facebook).

The exponential growth in marketing complexity seems unending and needs to be managed.

There's some excellent advice:

First, you'll require a number of specialists. You just will. You can't get the skills and knowledge you need in just one person, and you're not likely to get everything you need internally.

Second, you'll need somebody who both integrates marketing efforts across channels and communications vehicles and focuses on the bottom line. In packaged-goods companies, this was--and may still be--the role of brand managers, but the basic requirement is that it must be done by someone.

Finally, you'll need absolute clarity in processes, roles, and responsibilities not only within the marketing organization but also throughout your company (across functions and business units) and externally (with agencies and external vendors).

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Metrics are rarely perfect. Yet the volume of data available today should make it possible to find metrics and analytic opportunities that take advantage of your unique insights, are understood and trusted by your top team, provide proof of progress, and lay a foundation for more sophisticated approaches to tracking marketing ROI in the future.

The marketing environment continues to change rapidly and often feels like a moving target that's impossible to hit.

Read the rest here (registration required):

 Measuring marketing's worth - McKinsey Quarterly

Foremski's Take: The advice is good but legacy corporate culture often prevent marketing organizations from making the most of the fragmented marketing opportunities. Which means there's an arbitrage opportunity for the taking, if competitors, or specialized agencies get their act together.

Chief Marketing Officer will continue to be a challenging job for many years to come, maybe more. Because media is the conduit for marketing and our media is not only fragmented but it's enabling our culture to constantly change, too.

This interaction of culture and media and its speed of distribution, and sometimes very short life-cycles, are huge challenges for CMOs at large organizations. 

Knowing what's acceptable marketing within each market sector is crucial. For example, Intel is very careful to shrink its brand logo in its "Creators Project" festivals because market research has shown that the twenty-something demographic "doesn't like to be marketed to."

Yet focus groups, following up after the events, reported excellent brand recognition. Despite the small Intel logos, the marketing was successful and target group felt respected. It's a win-win marketing strategy but that's because of Intel's cultural research.

Staying in tune with cultural trends and sentiments will be vital skills for CMOs to cultivate, and maybe even be recruited on.

Can "big data" analysis uncover cultural shifts early enough to let marketers take advantage of them and hope for a free "pop" as an early trend becomes popular? What if you could have known that interest in Pintrest would suddenly mushroom, three months before anyone else? 

Some place great confidence in algorithmic analysis of media and the surrounding social sharing and sentiment prediction. Plexus Engine from Marshall Kirkpatrick's team is one such algorithmic approach to spotting trends early. And there are many others.

If any of them worked well, we'd know about it because we'd see its effectiveness very quickly.

Algorithms might help filter out some noise but there is a "gut" analysis of cultural data that humans are very good at doing, because we are already designed to think like social creatures, while computers have to be taught through algorithms.

This is the value a good CMO brings to their job -- using their understanding of other people, other groups, to craft effective marketing strategies. The CMO job is part art, part science, and part media publisher. 

Why are we reading about products as a news story and not in an ad?

When I look at the tech press it is heavily focused on product reporting; about gadgets, features in apps or online services, and details about underlying technologies in software, hardware, and Internet.

Product launches, especially by industry heavyweights such as Apple, are examined in great detail, before the launch, in live reports from the launch, and for weeks afterwards.

The product is weighed, it's specifications checked against the specifications insiders thought it would have; it's measured and compared endlessly with other products. It's taken apart and each component catalogued, and journalists report estimates of how much money it cost to make.

Even a product's color is questioned in news stories, as in the white iPhone that some said was more beige than white.

Similar attention is devoted to the reporting about software apps, web services, and Internet technologies.

Vast amounts of product journalism are being produced. Many mainstream newspapers and magazines are beefing up their product news. And multitudes of reporters race to be the first to write up the product specs of a new device.

When did this start?

When did journalists decide that it would be a great job, reporting about products?

When did readers start to think it was cool to read endless news stories about products?

There was a time when we didn't. Reading about products was usually done by reading their advertising - reading news about products was rare. Why did it change?

Tech journalism became product journalism for one simple reason: it was created.

Tech companies spend 40% and more, of their annual revenues on marketing. Their cost of sales is very high and it amounts to billions of dollars in marketing. But the problem with advertising, as we can see thanks to the Internet, is it doesn't work that well.

Over the past two decades tech companies have been steadily shifting their substantial marketing monies into public relations, with the express goal to have news stories published about them and their products.

The reason is simple:

Advertising is only one-third as effective as a news story about a company or product.

PR is much more effective than advertising, you get far more marketing bang.

You sell far more through news stories and that's what public relations firms do, they get your story into the media - and these days - into social media too. They help companies sell.

PR spending continues to increase, every PR company I know is booming, hiring like mad. And it's because the PR firms do their job well, and the tech industry gets what it pays for: lots of news stories about their products.

You'd think the tech media sites would prefer advertising money for product launches rather than reporting them for free. After all, there are far more interesting stories to write.

I'll share some ideas over the next few weeks. The future of tech journalism is certainly not in product journalism.

- The tech industry does not place much value on content -- even the way it calls the subject "content" devalues it. For software engineers, "content" is a database of files that are published via a set of Internet and web protocols, wrapped in an advertising channel.

For example, Google's approach to TV is "search." But is this really the best way to access content? There's no appreciation of the marketing and curation that needs to take place so that people can find good content.

Jordan Kurzweil, head of consultancy Independent Content, notes:

From iTunes, to Netflix, to YouTube, and to Yahoo!, AOL and MSN before them, not a single tech company has been able to build and launch a single media brand that connects in any real way with an audience. They have failed time and again to build awareness and excitement for original shows, live events, new content verticals and new apps with audiences remotely approaching mass.

- The tech industry has no idea how content is created, or how expensive it can be to produce, market, and distribute it.

Yahoo tried many times to create its own content. It used to have a financial news channel with a state-of-the-art TV studio.

It is far easier for a tech company to offer a distribution platform and let the content creators deal with the production and marketing, and let the markets decide what is successful.

- Most importantly: Content production companies aren't very profitable. They don't came anywhere close to 30% to 40% operating profit margins that tech companies enjoy.

Tech company shareholders would rebel if their companies proposed acquisitions of marginally profitable businesses. It would dilute their earnings and affect their share price.

- Why buy the cow when you can get the milk and skim the fat cream. There's no "Long Tail" economics going on here -- it's all creamy short-tail profits to be made. Look at Apple, growing very fat, off of creating what are essentially Media Consumption Devices that need content to exist, yet it isn't the content creators that have amassed a $97 billion cash hoard, or report nearly $14 billion in quarterly profits -- a $1 billion a week.

You can make lots of money off of content without needing to understand, or own the content creators. Google, Apple, AOL, Yahoo, Netflix, Facebook, Twitter, Flipboard, and thousands of startups know this simple truth. If you have to make content to make money, you won't make much of either.

Which is why I wish people would shut up about tech companies buying content companies, they, and the tech companies, are clueless about content companies. Plus, has everyone forgotten the biggest, most costliest, failed merger in US history? AOL - Time Warner. Nuff said.

- - -

BTW, here is a speech given by Courtney Love, twelve years ago. I promise that you will have a completely different view of Courtney Love: her analysis, insights, and trends foresight are remarkable, it's as if it were written today (minus references to dotcoms that no longer exist).

She starts off with a very simple breakdown of a $2 million record deal that a band might be very lucky to get. And she shows how this can result in band members making about as much as they would at a 7-Eleven.

Then she gets stuck into the economics of the Internet and how bands can become the distributors and owners of their music. However, that part of her scenario is still in development, we are getting closer but the record labels are still hanging on, still controlling the business, and still making lots of money while the bands, the content creators get very little.

Courtney Love does the math - Salon.com

To some extent, there is an allegory here that seems to apply to all content creation. Artists, writers, and even journalists, create content for very little money, and that's the way it will stay for the majority. Many will do it for free because they feel compelled, it's their passion, a calling.

However, there is a huge amount of money to made from all the industry that takes place around their content.

In the online economy, money is made from the process of aggregation. This devalues any individual piece of content by placing the value in an aggregate amount of content. The economics of the system is set up that way and set up to maintain things that way.

For example, online advertising rates are essentially set by the main players, largely Google. This keeps rates low but Google can still make lots of money through aggregating lots of content. But this means online advertisement rates are too low to adequately pay for the production costs of individual units of content -- the money is made in aggregating many units.

The system is set up to reward the aggregators.

When I was at school, we studied dynamic systems in equilibrium. Make a change in one part of the system and it rebalances to maintain the equilibrium. The Internet economy is a dynamic system, and systems always move to maintain their status quo, which in this case is of aggregators:creators. By keeping online advertising rates low, it maintains that status quo.

Which is why the content industries continue to be in a tailspin, and why stock markets value content producers at such low levels -- they have a risky future. Flipboard, which produces no original content, has a private valuation greater than that of the McClatchy newspaper group -- with $1.4 billion in revenues.

And that's why tech companies won't be buying content producers anytime soon, or later -- there's no decent money to be made in producing content!

However, at some point, the tech industry's ability to profit off of content will falter, because if the content producers can't cover their costs, then guess what?

These are interesting times.

In this post titled: Android as we know it will die in the next two years and what it means for you, he argues that the splintering of the Android market into many different versions will create an unsupportable multitude of operating systems and mobile hardware that will doom the operating system.

I used to think that, as with Linux and web services in the early part of last decade, Android was going to be the mortar for the Internet of post PC devices...

...three events in 2011 burned it and we're now holding on to a charred corpse that is quite different: an Android so splintered that it will make the glass on your Galaxy Nexus S2 Prime Pie dropped on concrete look like an ice skating rink.

The three events are: Google buying Motorola and thereby competing directly with all the handset manufacturers; Microsoft is able to get IP licensing fees from Android handset makers; and Kindle - a forked version of Android.

He says that the splintering of Android into many different versions will make it very difficult for developers to support them and that this will eventually kill Android, or at least kill the dream of Android becoming the "mortar" for the coming world of post-PC devices.

In many ways we've been here before: the development of Android is following a similar path to the development of Unix in the 1990s and the constantly failing struggle against fragmentation, and the consortia developing standard versions of Unix. And the reason Unix standardization efforts kept failing for so many years was because there were many companies which profited from the existence of a fractured computer market.

The problem with standards is that they make it easier for a large company to dominate a market because scale matters, whereas fragmented markets help defend the status quo.

Android is going to face the same issues, the same political and competitive obstacles that Unix, and other standardization efforts have faced in other markets -- fragmentation is an important objective for established companies. For example, Mr Rodriguez notes a conversation he had a year ago with the product head at a large US telco, "He told me that their ideal world was "5-10 platforms with 10-20% each.""

A splintered mobile handset world is great protection for incumbents. Take a look at what happened in PC markets where the single standards of Intel microprocessor technology, and Microsoft operating systems, sucked out the vast majority of the profits in that market. Intel and Microsoft maintain operating profit margins in the 60% and above level, while PC makers have to contend with razor-thin profit margins in the mid-single digits. That's why the US telco wants a splintered, fragmented market so it won't be commoditized by a duopoly such as Intel/Microsoft.

That's why mobile carriers have consistently rejected Intel and Microsoft's efforts to standardize their industry -- to avoid what happened in PC markets, to avoid becoming dumb bit carriers trying to survive on razor-thin margins.

This is why you can expect to see lots more splintering in the Android world. But Android won't die in two years time. That's because it has a vital role in maintaining a fractured mobile market.

For example, Intel is desperately trying to oust the ARM microprocessor architecture in mobile markets and the common wisdom is that this is a battle where ARM technology is simply better than Intel's and that all that Intel needs to do is make its Atom microprocessors more competitive on power consumption, etc.

But even if Atom were to be technically superior and cheaper than ARM, Intel would still likely fail simply because Atom fails the competitive strategy test of its potential customers. They are well aware of the lessons of the PC market: that standards benefit larger companies allowing them to aggregate the profits of the market as a whole, while fragmented markets support larger numbers of companies and protect their profit margins. The status quo always reacts in ways that protect itself.

And as we know from many examples in history, the status quo is notoriously difficult to change because there are so many with a common interest in protecting it that it seems as if they act in collusion. That group dynamic is very difficult to overturn.

Android won't die because it has found its role: to protect the diversity of mobile markets by making it easier to fragment those markets.

After all, you can't fragment the iOS market because Apple owns that, similarly for the other OSes. But with Android as an open source project, you can fork off many times, creating ever more fragmentation.

The Fly On The Wall And Its Social Effects - A Short Story From The Near Future...

Brent Begin at SF Examiner reported:

San Francisco's new police chief, Greg Suhr, is looking to equip officers with cameras to capture arrests, The San Francisco Examiner has learned.

The department will be looking at several different models of personal cameras that an officer would be equipped with before going into a drug bust or other arrest that requires consent or a search warrant.

It can't be long before the public has easy access to similar video cameras. With wireless connections, such cameras could help protect people from attacks and also put others on their best behavior.

But there will be many social repercussions. You'll never know when you are on camera. You will be guarded in everything you say and do.

Please see: The Fly On The Wall And Its Social Effects - A Short Story From The Near Future...

The premise is that our modern society faces new perils because our computer technologies and the communications technologies of the Internet accelerate flaws in our systems. For example, the recent financial crash that was sparked by the mortgage crisis, was made easier by computers and the Internet.

Mr Davidow borrows from his engineering background the concept of "positive feedback". This describes systems that can feed on each other to grow out of control. It is these positive feedback loops that put us in peril, and as our use of computer and Internet technologies increases at a fast pace, this increases our vulnerability to unpleasant effects such as economic crises.

Here are some notes from our conversation:

- Mr Davidow said he first started working on the idea for his book more than ten years ago, following the dotcom bust.

- The rapid fall of Middle East governments is an example of acceleration due to being over-connected.

- The Internet acts to compound effects already in the system. It's like compound interest rates, a 2% annual return means you double your money in 36 years, 5% interest doubles your money in 14 years. Small compounding interest can have large effects.

- Lehman had more than 900,000 derivatives contracts, it could not have managed so many without computers and the Internet.

- We don't plan for accidents. As a society we only act afterwards.

- Stock markets are vulnerable. For example, high frequency trading taking advantage of small differences in prices, now accounts for the majority of trades. I can see 90% of stocks traded algorithmically in the near future. Is this good for society? Does this leave us vulnerable to instability caused by being over-connected? We don't consider questions like "is this good for us?"

- Ten years ago I knew that we would have problems.

- The Internet helps oil the skids, it can encourage mob mentality that can get out of hand.

- The book is aimed at the 2,000 or so policy makers in this country so that they can think about these issues and then plan on ways of mitigating the effects. So far I'm hearing a good response from policy makers.

- I had mentioned that on first look, I thought that the book might be about our over-connected lifestyle: Twitter, Facebook, email, phone, etc. Mr Davidow said he would leave that topic for sociologists. But he did say that like some fish had evolved two sets of eyes, one set looking for predators from above, and the other from below, we might one day evolve two sets of ears, one for the earbuds of our connected devices :)


---

Overconnected | Bill Davidow

Please see:

Silicon Valley Veteran VC Bill Davidow Says "No Bubble" - SVW

Chris O'Brien - San Jose Mercury News (Moderator)
Maha Ibrahim - Canaan Partners
Kevin Hartz - Eventbrite
Lewis Gersh - Metamorhpic Ventures
Christin Herron - Intel Capital
Peter Lurie - American Express

Maha Ibrahim and Kevin Hartz were especially helpful and the rest of the panelists were good, with excellent moderating by Chris O'Brien.

Here are some notes from the panel:

- Credit cards became popular because they offered something that cash by itself was not able to do. That's what startups need to focus on.

- China is a very big market for alternative payments because of its large gaming industry.

- PayPal had to deal with massive amounts of fraud.

- Payment systems are very difficult to set up, it's a chicken and egg situation.

- The regulatory nightmare for payment companies is huge. Different states have different regulations and that applies to countries too. You need to file bonds in many states. Plus new financial regulations can greatly increase costs of business.

- Startups need to be aware of what they are getting into in the payments sector.

- The startups that will get funded have to have a very big idea.

- It is incredibly difficult for startups to succeed in this sector.

- Some of the breakthroughs will come from developing economies where there are few payment options.

- American Express is working on new pre-paid products.

- The cuts in interchange fees creates a massive revenue hole for banks this represents a good opportunity for startups to help fill that revenue hole.

- There is an issue on Facebook where companies pay Facebook for advertising and then also use Facebook's payments systems and pay Facebook 30%. There will be large companies trying to find a way around those payments. It's a bigger cut than Ticketmaster.

- Another problem with Facebook credits is that Facebook gives away some credits which can dilute the value of your products.

- Carriers will have problems handling payments because it is a big customer service issue. Customer chargebacks are an issue and on mobile payments it can be 3 times the normal number of chargebacks.

Making payments easier and secure is a very bid deal. If you look into the history of the world, there were many times when innovation around money resulted in massive economic growth, and conversely, when there was a lack of payment options the result was economic depression.

For example, look at these innovations around money: International banking and insurance originated with the Medici families in Florence and was responsible for an explosion in international trade; the invention of bonds in Renaissance Italy led to massive creation of wealth and the financing of public works (and wars); the invention of the joint stock company in Amsterdam and Paris led to the financing of railroads, vast economic expansion, and much more; and moving off of the gold standard unleashed a ton of economic growth.

Yes, there are many instances of abuse and bubbles galore but that is vastly outweighed by the explosion of industry and creativity that these innovations in money produced. And we are just at the beginning of further innovations that will unleash new waves of productivity and commerce.

[A very good introduction into the subject of money in its historical context is Niall Ferguson's book and TV series: The Ascent of Money: A Financial History of the World.]

Coming up...

In February 2011, Brian Zisk and his team are hosting the Future of Money Technology Summit in San Francisco. This promises to be an excellent conference - more details are here: http://futureofmoney.com/moneyconference/.

Startups worth watching...

One of the startups in this space worth watching is Jumio, founded by Jajah co-founder Daniel Mattes (above). Jumio will be launching its payment service in early 2011.

I met with Mr Mattes earlier this the year and I was impressed by what I heard -- if he can deliver on his presentation then this will become one of the hottest startups of 2011.

Mr Mattes says he has figured out a way to make secure payments that cannot be hacked. He said he discovered a patent filed by two engineers based in Israel and bought it for several hundred thousand dollars. This technology will make it possible to provide payments services at a far lower rate than the credit card companies because the risk of fraud has been removed.

Jumio is currently working on the infrastructure for the payments system but it will also license its technology to large retailers such as Amazon to run on their platform. He won't yet say how he can guarantee that his payments systems cannot be defrauded -- but I'm looking forward to finding out.

Jumio from Jumio Inc. on Vimeo.

Google cannot risk being cut off, or positioned a couple of clicks away because of a future decision by a Telco. If it owned its own network it wouldn't ned to worry about this issue.

Analysis: GOOG Needs To Have Its Own Telco Service More Than It Needs A Phone...

Here are some additional points to ponder:

- One of my readers suggested that Google could make an investment in a Telco that would ensure a couple of board seats -- that way Google wouldn't need to operate the Telco business itself and that would guarantee not being thrown off the network.

I don't see this as working because there would be too many conflicts of interest. Board members are chosen so that they can offer the best possible advice without a conflict of interest. GOOG has many areas of overlap with a Telco ranging from advertising to services such as Google Voice.

- Wouldn't net neutrality regulations protect Google and others?

No, not really because a Telco could decide to put Google's services a couple of clicks away from a cell phone's home screen. It is isn't preventing access to Google but it's not making it easy. It would be impossible to have a net neutrality regulation that guaranteed rights to a mobile phone's home screen.

- Why would Google sell it's own branded phone and compete with handset makers such as Motorola and others?

It doesn't make sense except to make sure that the Android standard doesn't fragment into many slightly different, but incompatible versions. That's what harmed Unix for many years. This way there will always be one true standard, the Nexus One, and that will discourage handset manufacturers from customizing their Android phones with proprietary features.

- What's Google's long term plan with mobile, what comes next after the Nexus?

The Nexus phone shows that Google is very serious about mobile. Eric Schmidt has publicly said on many occasions that the mobile web is a much larger business opportunity than the desktop/laptop search market.

But it's a totally different market where there is a lack of software and hardware standards as in the PC market. And for good reason: the Telcos and phone makers fought against Intel and Microsoft's attempts to standardize these markets in the same way that they succeeded in standardizing PC markets with their proprietary technologies.

In the PC market, Intel and Microsoft managed to aggregate most of the value-add. Their duopoly managed to maintain huge profit margins in the 60% plus range while PC makers, and others have had to survive on razor thin profit margins of just a few percent. The Telcos won't let that happen to their industry.

This means Google has to play by the rules of the Telco industry. It will need to pay for access.

It will pay the Telcos for prominent position on handsets and to guarantee that users have easy access to its services.

The iPhone holds the clues. Google pays to have its search box easily accessed on the iPhone. It also has prime position for its YouTube service on the home screen - you can't delete this icon like you can with downloadable apps.

This is the model for Google moving forward - paying the Telcos for position and access to mobile users.

Making such payments is nothing new for Google. In its most recent financial report it paid $1.59 billion to third parties for access to search traffic. These 'Traffic Acquisition Costs' (TAC) were 27% of its total advertising revenues. This was mostly to third-party web sites. In the future, it will be increasingly paid to Telcos.

This is a far better strategy than owning your own Telco. It's better because:

- It doesn't need to make a very expensive and complex Telco acquisition and deal with the government regulations.

- By not owning a Telco it can hit back at competitors and better control its partners. That's because it can use its money to buy clout. Smaller companies don't have the resources.

If Google had its own Telco it would feel obligated to ensure fair access to all. This way, it can hide behind the self-interest of Telcos and their control over their network and services.

And that's what will be next after Nexus: Google will make deals with Telcos to ensure its mobile services have prime positions.

- The Telcos will agree because Google can monetize the mobile phone screen real-estate -- and the network bandwidth -- better than the Telcos can themselves.

- The Telcos get paid and the business deal acts as barrier to entry for any Google competitors.

What's Microsoft going to do? It will have to follow suit. It has a mobile OS, it has relationships with the Telcos, it has the financial means to muscle in on similar type deals.

The losers will be the thousands of startups that won't have the same easy access to mobile users. They will be forced to partner with Google, Microsoft, or the Telcos, on their terms.

This means less innovation, less competition, and continued high prices for mobile access -- a digital divide far greater than the one on the desktop.

- - -

Advert:

To help subsidize my habit (publishing SVW) I'm now offering business strategy consulting services including media strategies. First come first serve. You should contact me here: tom (at) foremski.com or 415 336 7547.

Is the web truly open when companies such as Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, etc, can close the door to their data, or prop it slightly ajar?

With so many social networks and Web 2.0 applications it helps if third-party applications and services can access each other's data streams, especially if it is users wanting to aggregate their own media activities.

This is done through publishing an application programming interface (API) that specifies how other programs access your data.

But what is to be gained by doing this? Well, lots of pats on the back from the influential geekerati on Techmeme, who love open APIs because they look at the world from a user's point of view.

And there are other advantages, especially in the beginning because APIs allow many other services and applications to flourish, which helps spread your own service.

But open APIs can become closed or restricted at anytime.

For example, Friendfeed aggregates people's blog posts, Facebook activity, Youtube videos, Twitter posts, comments, etc. It does that because it has been granted permission to access user data from all those sites.

Steve Gillmor over at TechcrunchIT reports that Twitter has begun restricting its feed to Friendfeed (recently acquired by Facebook). He says Twitter is trying to "kill" Friendfeed.

Competitors will always seek to restrict their competition.

Of course Twitter turned them off. Facebook is Twitter's self-declared number one competitor. When you own the platform and the protocol you have every right to protect your own arse. In fact they have an obligation to their shareholders and investors.

Open APIs are a key foundation of Web 2.0. Yet this whole industry is being built on a very shaky foundation, one that can be closed at any moment.

If the world of open APIs is temporary then the open APIs are useless.

Why would anyone attempt to build a new service or product that relies on open APIs when that access can be restricted or closed at anytime?

Why would it the web become closed?

Because there's money in proprietary systems. Closed systems make money. It's much more difficult to make money in an open industry standards world.

Look at the PC industry with its razor-thin margins on PCs, while Intel and Microsoft make 60% plus margins on their proprietary PC technologies.

Look at Apple Computer and the fortunes it makes through its closed systems.

It's the traditional way money is made in the computer industry.

Open systems are anomalies.

I remember when email was first out, I started using MCI mail. But I also had to have a CompuServe, and an AOL account because there were no gateways between the systems. It took years before you could send an email seamlessly between systems.

It wasn't because the technology wasn't available, it was. It was because you could make more money by not having a gateway.

There are very few open industry standards that arose because companies agreed, and then only after many years of slogging through a tedious standards process.

The Internet is a collection of open industry standards that succeeded only because the US government financed and supported it. And it still took years to become well established.

But we've always had industry de facto standards. That's because one company eventually won out over all the others, and that's what we all began to use, their standard.

Is the X86 microprocessor architecture an open industry standard? No, it's a de facto industry standard developed by Intel. That's why Intel can maintain 60% plus profit margins.

Why should Facebook, Twitter, Yahoo, Microsoft, Salesforce, Google, or any other company with a valuable data stream, promise to give open access, to anyone, at anytime?

It would be opening itself up to competition. It would be giving up a key competitive advantage and a key competitive differentiator.

Where's the monetary value in doing that?

If open APIs can be changed at any time then they are not open, but ajar. This threatens the entire Web 2.0 sector. This is a very serious issue.

Chris Saad writes:

In the end, the only real solution for all of this, of course, is a return to the way the web has always worked (well). Open systems.

He is right.

But open standards will be years in the making, and in adoption. In the meantime, it looks like we will be heading into a closed web of the like that we haven't seen since before the Internet.

That's going to restrict innovation to a tremendous degree.

UPDATE: Craigslist blocks its data from Yahoo Pipes.

Don't be evil, Craigslist - Startup diaries

Yesterday (Nov 30th 2009), at approximately 2pm PST, Craigslist effectively killed all Yahoo Pipes projects that use Craigslist as a data source.

So what will happen to online advertising, and the "old" media? There's no real-time ad networks right now and none on the real-time media that I see.

The old media (we used to call it mainstream) has barely gotten used to the "Always-On-Media" of blogging, etc. Now they have to jump into the real-time web.

And they can't.

Because there isn't a business model in the real-time web. (Just as there isn't in online media.)

By the time they jump in, there might be a business model then. Maybe. But I bet it won't be enough to support professional work.

For much of my 25 years in Silicon Valley I've been reporting on innovation and what people have been doing in software, IT systems, chips, etc. These days, the innovation isn't so much in technology, but in media communications.

These days I spend a lot of time talking with reporters about the changes in media and PR. There is a tremendous amount of innovation happening in media communications: Twitter, Friendfeed, Facebook, etc, represent just a tip of an iceberg, a tip that barely existed a year ago, what will be there next year?

And that's what's great about all of this innovation in media communications, that we are in the midst of it, and that we get to help create the future. We get to make the mistakes, and we get to discover and create things that no one has ever done before. It's like making fresh footprints in the snow. It's not often that we get to do that.

The saber rattling has been going on for a while but now the battle lines are being drawn. And it is all because news is not free. News has been made available for free, and it has been made into a commodity but that is not its future because there is no future in that model. You will have to pay for it.

That means the end of the news aggregators. That means the end to arguments that the news aggregators send high volumes of traffic to the online publishers.

What is the use of more traffic when it cannot be monetized to support the work of the news organizations?

The only "news" that will remain free will be press releases--but there is little value in that type of unfiltered "news" source.

But, there may be a solution to keeping news free, one that takes advantage of the distribution power of Google, bloggers, and the large number of of social network users sharing content -- while at the same time making some money for the media companies.

In Monday's NYT article: Associated Press Seeks More Control of Content on Web

They [A.P. executives] said they did not want to stop the appearance of articles around the Web, but to exercise some control over the practice and to profit from it.

I have a solution: A content license for any online site that also publishes the content owners' designated ads.

For example, if you republish a news story you also publish alongside it one or more "adtribution" links, simple text ads with live links, designated by the content creator.

In this way, news media companies get a big benefit from having their news stories distributed for free by the news aggregators, bloggers, and online socialistas -- and their advertisers also get the distribution, which would improve ad revenues for the content producer. News would (might) remain free.

Adtribution links would "stick" with the content. These days fewer and fewer people visit a news site, they read news stories in their RSS newsreaders, or on news aggregator sites. News content is ever more becoming divorced from its web site, which means so are its advertisers.

Adtribution links could be sent along with RSS feeds and help reunite content with its supporting advertisers.

It would be simple to automate it, news aggregators and blogging software could be set up to automatically copy a set of associated live ad links, at the same time the content is copied and pasted.

Adtribution links could be attached to any shareable, embeddable media. And they could be widgetized so that their ad content could be changed at any time.

In some cases, sites that republish content might agree to run adtribution links in a permanent part of their page, so they aren't directly next to the content, for aesthetic or other reasons.

Would something like this be enough to appease the newspaper industry and keep our news free?

Will bloggers etc, be willing to republish text ads? Probably not. But they could get used to it. We can all get used to it.

I remember the hue and cry in the early days of the Internet that users would not tolerate advertising on the Internet. We got used to it, and I predict we'll get used to many more online business models. Some will work.

Here's a catchy slogan: "Adtribution supports the source." Maybe the media moguls will catch notice.

- - -

Please see:

Silicon Valley Watcher:

"Google Devalues Everything It Touches" - Wall Street Journal Chief

FutureWatch: The End Of The News Aggregators And The Future Of News

Support the Source: Creating a New Media Business Model and Keeping the Web Open

Virtual cash could save newspapers | Tom Foremski: IMHO | ZDNet.com

Newspapers: 25 things to try before turning off the lights | Tom Foremski: IMHO | ZDNet.com

Interesting quote in Associated Press Seeks More Control of Content on Web - NYTimes.com

One goal of The A.P. and its members, she said, is to make sure that the top search engine results for news are “the original source or the most authoritative source,” not a site that copied or paraphrased the work.

What about all the newspapers that are part of AP and copy the news? Who gets pole position as original or authoritative? AP is funded by the newspapers and it is becoming very competitive with its own members. Interesting.

Murdoch Calls Google, Yahoo Copyright Thieves — Is He Right? | Threat Level from Wired.com

It's unsettled whether search engines have a valid fair use claim under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. The news headlines are copied verbatim, as are some of the snippets that go along.

Newspaper groups step up propaganda war on Google :: Shane Richmond

Guardian Media Group has been lobbying the Government to investigate Google "from the point of view of competition law principles".

Google dubbed internet parasite by WSJ editor | The Australian

...Thomson said it was "amusing" to read media blogs and comment sites, all of which traded on other people's information.

"There is no doubt that certain websites are best described as parasites or tech tapeworms in the intestines of the internet."

..."It's certainly true that readers have been socialised -- wrongly I believe -- that much content should be free," he said.

"They are basically editorial echo chambers rather than centres of creation, and the cynicism they have about so-called traditional media is only matched by their opportunism in exploiting the quality of traditional media," he said.

AP Launching News Industry Campaign To ‘Protect’ News Content | paidContent.org

The first two areas include using AP’s tagging abilities to set up a system to track content online and developing search landing pages. Cross said AP is already “ingesting and tagging most of the newspaper content in the U.S.” Tags would be set up that would help track the progress of stories and even headlines. AP isn’t talking about licensed content. “What we’re really talking about here is much broader use, the commercialization of news that is scraped.”

Interview: Dean Singleton, AP Chairman: Setting ‘The Rules Of Engagement’ | paidContent.org

Singleton didn’t pull any punches during our phone interview—repeating in various ways, “We own the content. We can use it as we see fit because it’s ours.” But he didn’t provide much detail, either. What he did say: print isn’t going away, advertising can’t carry the weight anymore, and online pay models may be on the way

.

The warning is that if it goes on the Internet, Google, in its earnest desire to index all of the world's information, will index all of your embarrassing stuff too. A simple search will easily reveal a checkered past.

But is this really true?

I Googled "Tom Foremski" and came up with a search result of 135,000 links. Each page showed 10 links related to my name. I wanted to see how far I could go, what would be the very last of the 135,000 search results? But after 55 pages, or 552 links, Google could show me no more, and I got this message:

In order to show you the most relevant results, we have omitted some entries very similar to the 552 already displayed. If you like, you can repeat the search with the omitted results included.

So I clicked on "repeat the search with the omitted results included." This time I only got 20 pages of results or 196 links. I got less instead of more.

Either way, the most web pages I could find with "Tom Foremski" was 552. Yet Google had indexed 135,000 pages with my name on them. This was just 0.4 percent of the total.

If someone were checking up on me, they would only be able to see 0.4 percent of everything on the Internet that is indexed "Tom Foremski."

So while it may be true that the Internet will store everything forever, it is not true that an employer or anyone else, will be able to Google you and easily find things you wish weren't there.

My advice to anyone that is worried that others might judge them for youthful or other indiscretions, is to make sure to be very active on the Internet, because only a small fraction will be accessible if you get Googled. Anything bad will be diluted into the long tail of you.

Of course, in the future Google might be replaced by superior search engine that will provide access to all of its index. But even then, slogging through tens of thousands of links would discourage the most diligent of employers.

However, watch what you post is still good advice.

Earlier today, Ev Wiliams, co-founder of Twitter was on Charlie Rose, and there have been many favorable news articles discovering Twitter as if for the first time.

The next stage in the media landscape for Twitter is to knock it down. I already see the seeds of the pushback in conversations I've had with people in journalism, PR, marketing, communications, etc.

The popular point of view is that the 140 characters that Twitter allows is not enough to express much of anything. But that's not my point of view.

When I first became a journalist blogger nearly five years ago, my buddy Om Malik would say, "Dude, you write too long." And Om was right. I came from a newspaper background where we were taught to fill space. Working at the Financial Times our editors would tell us how long our news stories should be. And we would try to fill that space.

We would often get calls from our desk editors asking us to come up with another 100 words or more for a news story because the page had been redesigned for a later edition. We were filling space.

But when I became a "journalist blogger" I realized that there was an interesting switch. Writing for a newspaper, where there was always a finite amount of space, I was often asked to stretch a story to fill the space. Yet online, where there was an infinite amount of space, writing less was always better.

That was one of my many "aha" moments regarding blogging, that less is more. And over the past few years the trend has been towards even less.

So, at first glance, Twitter critics might seem right in saying that 140 characters is not enough space to communicate ideas.

But if you can, I can guarantee you will be a far more successful communicator.

And if you want to go viral, expressing your idea in 120 characters or less is even better (so that others can retweet:)

Like it or not, 140 characters or less, is currently a new container for ideas. And that makes things interesting.

- - -

Please see Twitter co-founder Ev Williams on Charlie Rose:

What was especially interesting about our conversation is that he doesn't see green/clean technologies as a disruptive technology. Yet Silicon Valley leads this nascent industry.

Mr Coleman says that green technology doesn't follow the Peter Drucker rule of being a disruptive technology, which means being 10 times better or cheaper than what was there before.

"In the green market, what we're displacing is cheaper per unit than what is displacing it. It won't be driven by a tsunami of adoption." He says companies and individuals will take their time before adopting more expensive green technologies, especially with the current economic condition.

However, this could change if President Obama's administration adopted a plan of offering incentives for the development and use of green technology. He says this would be a far better stimulus package.

"There are lots of benefits for humanity, but the economics of the green market won't drive a rapid adoption unless there are incentives."

Mr Coleman is a critic of the current government stimulus package, that focuses on physical infrastructure projects. He says that incentives for green technologies would create better quality jobs and have a longer term economic stimulus effect than pick and shovel jobs that end after the project is done. Green technology jobs have a longer life span than bridge or road projects.

Plus, infrastructure projects slow capital formation, he says, which is needed to fuel the next recovery.

Cloud computing, biotech, and nanotech are examples of Silicon Valley's best disruptive technologies, and they don't need any government incentives, says Mr Coleman. And these are industries where Silicon Valley leads.

The recession will hit hard, says Mr Coleman, but Silicon Valley will survive because it reinvents itself every ten years.

You can read the rest of the interview here:

Thought Leader: A Conversation With Valley Veteran Bill Coleman About The Economy And The Business Of Disruption . . .

Mark LaPedus at EETimes reports:

Worldwide semiconductor revenue is forecast to reach $194.5 billion in 2009, a 24.1 percent decline from 2008 revenue. Market research firm Gartner also warned that its ''negative scenario'' could reach a 33 percent decline in 2009.

The chip industry is expected to start growing in 2010 but even with three years of growth, 2012 revenue will still be below 2009 revenues.

Worldwide IC revenue is expected to fall by at least 17 percent sequentially in the first quarter of 2009. There is a strong possibility that the first quarter of 2009 could be worse, and if the market continues with moderate declines in the second and third quarters of 2009, the industry could face a record annual decline.

EETimes.com - Gartner cuts IC forecast, sees 24% drop

The decline Information Technology (IT) markets will be relatively modest compared with the chip market. IDC expects growth of 0.5 per cent in global markets. Hardest hit will be hardware spending on servers, printers and PCs, which are expected to drop 3.6 per cent in 2009. Software and services are forecast to grow 3.4 per cent.

IDC also said that global server sales plunged 14 per cent in Q4 2009 compared with the year ago period. This also marked the first time sales were lower in all three server sectors: volume, midrange, and high-end.

Tech Trader Daily - Barron’s Online : Global 2009 IT Spending Will Barely Grow, IDC Says

Foremski's Take:

Lower chip and hardware sales will affect Silicon Valley companies such as Intel, Hewlett-Packard, and Sun. Spending on software and services will benefit IBM, the world's largest computer services company.

Although the chip industry will be down significantly this year, chip companies are used to a four year cycle of boom and bust. It is in the bust part of the cycle that chipmakers such as Intel (Intel is an SVW sponsor) invest in building chip fabs so that they are ready for the next boom period. Intel recently said it would invest $7 billion new manufacturing facilities in the US over the next two years.

Intel to invest $7 billion in U.S. facilities - MarketWatch

Among Mr Chambers comments, he said that our local school system is broken and can't be fixed.

I was on a panel with Mr Chambers two years ago. I spoke about how Silicon Valley's public schools are basketcases when they should be showcases.

It is embarrassing. Silicon Valley says to the world we are inventing the future yet our communities suffer from terrible public schools! Is this the future?!

He said Tom, we tried to tried but the system is broken and can't be fixed. And he said the same thing last Thursday too. Cisco was a big supporter for school vouchers, a controversial proposal designed to let parents help pay for private education with public school funds. I'm not sure if this initiative is what he was referring to.

I was told by his PR person that Mr Chambers has done a lot for education around the world. And I applaud his work and the medals and awards his work has earned. However, I'm surprised that he would give up so easily with improving Silicon Valley's local schools.

A "CraigsList" for schools

There are many things that could be done for schools, especially in applying the tools for building social media communities. This is a key emerging business for Cisco it would be a great demonstration of its tools and technologies.

Within walking distance of every local school in the Silicon Valley/Bay Area there is a tremendous amount of resources that could help raise the standard of education for all, regardless of income. This area is the 10th richest economic region in the world.

Why not build a type of "CraigsList" around every school? It would bring the local community closer to its local schools. If a teacher needs a box of pencils or a volunteer to explain rocket science, they could post it online.

This "CraigsList" for schools could also offer a collaborative platform for the teachers, students, and parents. It could offer online tutoring. It could fund free broadband for the schools. If set up as an independent venture, it could possibly fund these activities by offering commercial broadband services to local businesses. It might cost a few bucks more per month but the local businesses would know the money is going back into their communities.

Silicon Valley/Bay Area schools could very easily, and inexpensively become wonderful showcases for the transforming power of the technologies being developed here.

I refuse to believe that our local school system cannot be fixed. And I refuse to believe that John Chambers and our other local captains of industry cannot find a solution to this problem.

We have world class leaders here in the Bay Area, there is nothing that they cannot accomplish.

Where there is a will there is a way, and hopefully my humble post might renew Mr Chambers interest in revisiting this challenge.

Silicon Valley Watcher Challenge: $10K for schools

And in the meantime, I challenge my readers to help raise $10,000 for schools through a challenge on DonorsChoice.org. There are many classroom projects to choose from. This is part of the Lit Liberation challenge established by Tim Ferriss, the author of "The 4-Hour Work Week."

Tim asked Silicon Valley Watcher and a small group of other online publishers to help raise a total of $1m for schools around the world. More details are here, from Brian Solis:

Tim Ferriss Forms LitLiberation to Raise $1 Million in One Month

Take a look at some of the school projects on this page and help schools here and elsewhere:

Help Public School Kids by Funding Silicon Valley Watcher Challenge at DonorsChoose

Technorati Tags: litliberation, puppy

Sending out friend requests on LinkedIn or FaceBook is fairly easy for Americans but I bet it is less so for other, less gregarious cultures.

For example, I would guess that in Japan there would be fewer "friends" requests coming out of the blue. Same in Europe, especially in the UK, where I'm from.

Here in the US there is a culture of acquaintances which is not as developed as in other countries, or at least the countries I am familiar with. The culture of acquaintances is that I know a lot of people, and I like them, but I don't know them quite as well as my friends.

But that distinction doesn't matter much in the world of the social networks, and in the world of blogging, and Flickr, and Twitter--the whole trend to share oneself with the world...

But what if you are shy, what if you don't want to be AlwaysOn, always in conversation, what if you want to listen to your internal conversation, what if you value your privacy, your personal moments that you share carefully and uniquely? Will those people be at a disadvantage in this new world?

http://blogs.zdnet.com/Foremski/?p=188

The other day I was at Matt Greeley's Second Friday when I met with an entrepreneur of what Matt calls: "Socially aware clothing."

It's a T-Shirt that text messages, he told me. What do you mean, a T-Shirt that text messages?? I got to talk with the inventor and it is a T-Shirt that has an SMS address printed on it and if you are curious you can send a message to a stranger.

The T-shirts can be used by all sorts of people such as DJs in nightclubs I was told. I asked the inventor if the inks were UV reactive, no, but the rest of the shirt was, because it is cotton and has starch in it...

I generally dress up a bit when going to clubs, doesn't that renegade the T-shirt-with-a-text-message concept to sports bars and frat parties? I was told that in America things are different, people wear T-shirts to clubs all the time. (I don't think so.)

"I only need five percent of the market to be profitable," I was told and I've heard that line before. "Our templates for our T-Shirt designs are copyrighted," when I asked what was the secret sauce.

I said that you could put the same message on a business card, it doesn't have to be a T-shirt. I seems that that idea had already been nabbed by someone else.

Check out Reacted

These have been frustrating weeks but I am reassured with a vision of the future. We are almost at that cusp in history when technology will matter less. It'll be what we do that will matter more than how we do things. And then I'll be able to focus on content instead of technology.

A 1-click future

Right now, I am suffering the multiple agonies of dealing with resuscitating two notebooks, a failed external backup drive, and setting up up a completely new notebook--plus learning video and audio editing for Podtech.net related projects.

One of these days very soon, these types of things will be all one-click problems because we'll have pushed so much of our lives into the cloud where such problems are cheaply outsourced.

Standards get wrapped

Much of my week has been spent with either trying to revive my old hardware or getting to grips with new hardware such as Sony hi-defintion video camcorders. The puzzle is that Sony and Panasonic have adopted a high definition video compression format that has no editing support from the major video editing software vendors.

Are Sony and Panasonic so bad at evangelism that they couldn't get support for their video format from dozens of software companies a year before launch? It's been six months since the launch and there is only a trickle of low-end video editing software coming out. Corel's ULead DVD MovieFactory is one of the first to offer some limited support for AVCHD.

Lost in Video Translation

Because of my Podtech.net deal to produce a Silicon Valley Watcher show I've gotten to shoot lots of video but translating and publishing the video content takes hours of computer processing time, and that's without the editing time.

I would like a magic button that automatically takes the video from the camcorder and loads it into my editing software and then when I'm finished, in the time to make one-click it publishes my video interviews all over YouTube, PodTech, AppleTV, iPhone and wherever else. That's a fantasy because right now, just getting the video content out of the camera and into a format for the editing software takes about 7 to 8 hours per hour of footage. And then exporting it into different publishing formats can take another 3 to 4 hours per hour of footage. That's way too much time lost.

Why can't we have inexpensive video co-processors specifically designed to zip through such tasks? A general purpose microprocessor is good at many tasks but not as good as a specialized processor at specific tasks. We already have DSP chip technologies and powerful graphics co-processors that process many similar tasks within PCs. It would be good to get some video co-processors, too. I should thing there must be some on the way...

Link to: This Is Why Online Ad Nets Can't Save Media Companies

I noticed that there is an interesting conflict of interest emerging at the heart of Google's business model.

Please check my reasoning:

Google makes almost all of its revenues from two ad networks:

-AdWords: Customers advertise on Google web sites.

-AdSense: Customers advertise on Google partner sites, which includes many media companies.

Google's revenue in 2004 was about evenly split between AdWords and AdSense.

Since then, Google's revenue from its own sites has grown by 24 percent to 62 percent of total revenues. AdSense has fallen.

And this makes sense because Google makes far more money from its own sites than from partner sites. It is better for Google's shareholders that it channel more of its revenues through its own sites because:

-Google gives back about 80 per cent of AdSense revenues to its partners.

-It keeps all of its AdWords money.

And this is where it has a mammoth conflict of interest:

Which advertising network should Google invest in?

-A dollar invested in its AdWords produces far more profit than invested in AdSense, its partner network. Management has a fiduciary duty to its shareholders to maximize profits.

-Google can boost overall profits by undercutting AdSense at anytime it wants, say  by offering a discount on AdWords compared with AdSense. A 20 percent discount on AdWords would make more money for Google than the corresponding loss of business through AdSense partners.

-Google can undercut AdSense in other ways, and is already doing it, by investing in technology that improves AdWords conversions over AdSense. Google can apply technologies to its own sites that make them more efficient at selling ads. It can't do that with partner sites. And partner sites don't have the resources to improve their advertising conversions at a similar pace.

Which means AdSense revenues for media companies will continue to fall because AdWords is more efficient.

---

Media companies that partner with Google in its AdSense program do it because they don't know what else to do. The economics of partnering with Google are poor and the relationship is unsustainable because of the inherent conflict of interest.

Why Would GOOG Maintain AdSense?

-There are strategic purposes, it forces media companies in its network to compete with its far more profitable business model which weakens them as potential competitors.

-Also, it keeps third-party sites out of rival ad networks.

-AdSense is a great "cookie jar" because if GOOG ever needs to meet its numbers for its quarter, it can push more ads through its own sites rather than through partners.

UPDATE: Independent Advertising Network Advantage 

Independent advertising networks, which don't compete with their publisher partners, such as Blue Lithium, Federated Media, and others, will be able to attract partner sites away from Google because they can invest in technologies to improve revenues for the entire network.

But how much freedom do large publishers have in leaving the Google network? Some have contracts with Google that could tie their hands for years.

LonelyGirl15 was found out to be a fake video blogger--scripted by a Hollywood production team--many millions had watched it, and many thousands tried to find out who was behind it.

What happens in a future world where phishing is applied to news sources rather than spoofing banking sites? And where there aren't enough watchdogs to spot the fakes?

Today's LA Times has a front page story about the "new lonelygirl15."

GreenTeaGirlie innocent vidblogger or sinister marketing hoax - Los Angeles Times

Again, my son Matthew Foremski was involved in this story. But this time in another way, testing the viral nature of trust and mistrust. It's a fascinating account pulled together by Los Angeles Times staff writer David Sarno.

In late March, a striking young brunette going by the nom-de-Tube of 'GreenTeaGirlie' posted a 10-second video on YouTube.
"Hey YouTube viewers!" said the hopeful ingénue, "I'm new. I hope you welcome me. I'm actually going to be making some videos, and I hope they're going to be really neat, so I hope you check 'em out."
Before anyone knew what was going on, "I'm New" had rocketed to the front page of YouTube's daily Most Viewed section, where it raked in more than 170,000 hits on its first day — an extraordinary showing for a maiden video blog.

Again, it is worth asking the question, what happens when there aren't enougth watchdogs to spot fakes and test the veracity of online content?

Will the viral nature of mistrust be our only protection? Or should there be a clear way to test the source of anything published online?  Is it even possible?

During a panel discussion, Rahul Sood, chief technology officer at HP Gaming, and founder of Voodoo PC said that next generation PC games based on Microsoft's new DirectX 10 technology will do more to drive sales of Vista than anything else.

"DirectX 10 is going to provide a dramatically improved gaming experience that will drive adoption of Vista," said Mr Sood.

Some of the technologies on display or discussed were:

... a curved, seamless display that fills a gamer's field of view for an incredibly immersive visual experience and a way to superimpose multimedia digital experiences on physical landscapes so people could, for example, play a game throughout a city using wireless handheld devices. The company also demonstrated a "super projector" capable of high resolution, brightness, deep contrast and a wide color gamut, ideal for projecting games for multiple players on a big screen.

Panoply and Pluribus- using multiple projectors to create a seamless giant screen for game playing or other "immersive" applications. It doesn't require precise projector positioning, all the calibration and focusing is by computer.

Memory Spot - This is an intriguing technology, a small coin sized device that can store about 4MB of data and can be read by a computer. That's about all HP was willing to say about this technology, but promised more information and applications later this year.

Coffee Table Display - Imagine a large rectangular coffee table with a huge high definition touchscreen that lets users manipulate images, drag around virtual puzzle pieces, and also transforms into a virtual aquarium! Where do the coffee cups go, I asked Susie Wee, Lab Director of the HP Labs Mobile and Media Systems Lab (video will be posted soon.)

Also:

HP TouchSmart PC
» Fact sheet
» Image

»
HP Labs Gaming Demonstrations

HP Labs researcher Mike Harville tries out a race car video game on a special curved screen designed to increase the realism and immersive experience for gamers.
» Image

Notes: Interestingly, I tried to video a panel discussion between representatives of Intel, HP, NVIDIA, Trion World, and Microsoft but after a few minutes I was told no videos were allowed. I asked why and was told that video camera made some of the panelists uncomfortable, yet they were in front of about 80 journalists(!)

They promise that there will be no product demos (how about no PowerPoints too...)

"The software industry is consistently in a state of flux, yet developments such as globalization and outsourcing are altering both the tempo and the type of change taking place," said James Morris, dean of Carnegie Mellon West. "We are entering a period of profound change, and we all need to know what's happening and what we can expect going forward. This conference draws on some of the best and brightest minds in academe and the software industry to answer those questions."

Added Jack Grantham, executive director of the Haas School 's Fisher Information Technology Center , "This conference presents a rare opportunity for vendors to check their sales and marketing hats at the door and settle into discussion and debate over the future of the industry with attendees, academics, and other industry thought leaders."

For more information on the conference, visit http://west.cmu.edu/sofcon/5404216.html and at http://west.cmu.edu/west_connect/events_news/news/6731936.html.

It seems clear to me where the software industry is headed:

•  it is about software as a service.
•  it is about moving away from running apps on your own hardware.
• it is about roll your own apps.
• it is about offshoring as much development as you can get away with.
• it is about integrating as much open source software as you can.
• it is about moving away from a database model of software towards a search-based apps type of approach.
• it is about creating apps for the small and medium business sector.

To register for the "The New Software Industry: Forces at Play, Business in Motion," go to http://www.acteva.com/booking.cfm?bevaid=128819. The early registration fee of $395 is available until Friday, April 6, 2007.