Future Salon

Video of Stem Cell Future Salon Online

Finally the video of the excellent Stem Cell Future Salon with Christopher Scott is available on the Internet Archive.

All these thumbnails and not one where Christoper is actually on it, but you get a pretty good overview of the crowd. Bummer that they stop to create one after 30 minutes.

You can pre-order Christoper's book on Amazon already. He should come back once it is out and give us an update.

World Premiere: Feedster Tagging Prototype released at the Future Salon

Wow the first ever World Premiere at a Future Salon:

Scott Rafer released the Feedster Tagging Prototype. He introduced it as the next stage of tagging.

To find out why tagging is important check the Wikipedia under Folksonomy or read Clay Shirky's Ontology is Overrated: Categories, Links, and Tags

Not everyone is or will ever have or use a del.icio.us account. The new feedster service makes it easy to extend tagging to everyone who visits your site. Scott posted the code I added it to the Future Salon Blog and you can add it to your site too.

One more great thing is that Mike posted Thursday's chat session transcript. During the Salon people posted most of the good links that were floating around the room to it. It is now really easy to check them out on your own time.

Made me really happy that old Future Salon friend Wayne Radinsky who just recently moved to Colorado joined us on the Webcast and the chat. Modern technology making it possible to have him being part of it. Excellent.

Ode to Dumb Agents

Tomorrow Thursday 19th of May Future Salon with Feedster CEO Scott Rafer: Enough Dumb Agents Get Smart

Feedster really has the finger on the pulse on what is happening in the Blogosphere and this is why Scott has the scoop regarding dumb agents that bring us smart things. If there is someone who can project this out into the Future then it is him.

If you don't live in the Bay Area, or can't get yourself out of the Aeron chair (that reference is so last century) you can also tune in to the Webcast.

Point your Quicktime player to:
http://mfile.akamai.com/14947/sdp/finnern.com/salon.mov?obj=v0002

(If you do it right away 4:45 pm Wednesday you may get a glimpse of the Palo Alto grayness as in the picture to the right. I want my money back, I came to California for the endless Sun now it is the endless: "I'll better bring an umbrella" :-)

We will also have an IRC chat session running for questions:
Server: irc.freenode.net
Channel: #futuresalon

Future Salon Thursday May 19th:  6-7 networking with light refreshments proudly sponsored by SAP . From 7-9+pm presentation and discussion. SAP Labs North America, Building D, Room Southern Cross, 3410 Hillview Avenue, Palo Alto, CA 94304 [map] As always free and open to the public.

Improve your commute by sharing it with a fellow Futurist. Check the Ride Board for opportunities. John Abbe is back from Sri Lanka and is looking for a ride from Berkeley.

Nano Movie without the Mouse

To be honest I could never picture how molecular manufacturing actually would look like, not that I really tried.

How nice that over at Nanotechnology-Now they have a 4 minute animation that shows exactly that. And it is beautiful, it's magic, I want it now. That is the power of animation.

It's a collaborative project of animator and engineer, John Burch, and pioneer nanotechnologist, Dr. K. Eric Drexler.

It reminds me of one of my German television childhood favorites: Die Sendung mit der Maus (The show with the mouse) with cartoons and short documentaries in which they would take you to the factory and show you how for example Maple Syrup is made. That was over 30 years ago and the amazing thing is the show is still running. Wunderbar, life is good :-)

What I am missing in the video is the narration, but may be I just didn't get the audio running properly. [Link from our Responsible Nanotechnology friends with lots of comments]

Also Thursday...

Since this month's Salon is on Thursday, you might also want to check out the weekly PARC Forum right next door at 4pm. This week's topic is the New Design School at Stanford, and the speaker is the head of "d.school", David Kelley, the founder and chairman of IDEO. If you don't know who IDEO is, or why you should care, you might check out this BusinessWeek cover story. And if you're still skeptical, check out the entire current issue of Fast Company.

The New Design School Initiative at Stanford
David Kelley, Stanford University and IDEO Product Development
May 19, 2005, 4:00 p.m., George E. Pake Auditorium, Palo Alto, CA , USA

Future Salon with Feedster CEO Scott Rafer

At a Blogger Dinner over a year ago organized by Ross and Scoble I had the fortune to sit across from Scott Rafer. I was just back from Germany and was super jet-lagged, but Scott was very entertaining and had some really interesting insights into Blogging, Wifi and where RSS is going.

This is why I am so happy that we will be able to tab into Scott's current thoughts at the Future Salon this Thursday the 19th of May.

He will talk about: Enough Dumb Agents Get Smart. Details in my last post. Don't forget to RSVP so that we can make sure we have enough food and drinks proudly sponsored by SAP.

National Youth Leadership Forum

I got asked to present at a gathering of National Youth Leadership Forum. Their goal is to provide high-achieving high school and university students with the confidence to make well-informed career choices and position themselves for today's challenging and diverse job market.

Question number one is where were they when I was 13? Question number two, what should they know now in this Accelerating Times?

• Get inspired by Steve Wozniak (ITConversations rocks)
• Always select doing over consuming, active over passive
• Learn how to transform your ideas via: Personal Fabrication or in Second Life
• Getting Flat Doc Searls Linux Journal article (Part 1, Part 2) Not that this is the most important in this area, but it just stumbled upon it and he is quoting John Taylor Gatto critique of the IQ, the bell curve and our School system: I've come to believe that genius is an exceedingly common human quality, probably natural to most of us. Get your genius out.
• Top 20 things to know Seth Godin. How good are you on these? Number 10: Conversational Spanish: Qué?

What are your thoughts? How do I even reach 13 year-olds?

Flickr: Future Salon with Neil Gershenfeld

Neil Gershenfeld presenting
Originally uploaded by Mark Finnern.

The kid in the background is soooo happy that she created her name in plastic in one of the Fab Labs. You can read it all over her face.

That is what you get when you let people create.

I am creating my first Future Salon post our of Flickr and if this works out I am smiling like her too :-)

May Future Salon: Enough Dumb Agents Get Smart

Attention May Future Salon on Thursday the 19th of May. We are happy to have Feedster CEO and president Scott Rafer present:
Enough Dumb Agents Get Smart
Social media is delivering the dream of intelligent agent technology in an unexpected way. RSS, tagging, cameraphones, social networks, and a dozen other point technologies are ganging up to create the benefits we all expected from intelligent agents. Except -- the intelligent agents turn out to be human beings going about our everyday lives, using dumb tools to publish meaningless snippets and anecdotes in machine-readable, sometimes open-standards forms. Each of us becomes the intelligent publisher of many different dumb agents, which we do very easily.

Software applications all over the planet aggregate them in unexpected ways, providing online services of astonishing value at very little cost. What do you get when you combine housingmaps.com, which is based on Craigslist and GoogleMaps, and Dodgeball, the mobile social network which Google acquired this week? Can I suddenly be sure how to find an apartment near (or far from) where people I know drink heavily?

Scott Rafer is president and CEO of Feedster, a fast-growing blog search engine and advertising network. Feedster delivers more relevant, and timely information by continuously collecting data from over 7 million RSS content feeds. Before Feedster, Rafer co-founded WiFinder, the Wi-Fi hotspot directory; BookBroadband, the broadband hotel finder; Fresher Information, RSS indexing way too early; and FotoNation, a creator of connected photography solutions. Previously, Rafer led the Internet products group at Kodak Hollywood and worked in investment banking at Needham & Company. For school, Rafer graduated from the Management of Technology program at the University of Pennsylvania. Rafer's blogs are Free Wireless Soweto and at Feedster.

Future Salon Thursday May 19th 6-7 networking with light refreshments proudly sponsored by SAP . From 7-9+pm presentation and discussion. SAP Labs North America, Building D, Room Southern Cross, 3410 Hillview Avenue, Palo Alto, CA 94304 [map] As always free and open to the public. Improve your commute by sharing it with a fellow Futurist. Check the Ride Board for opportunities.

Free and open to the public. Please RSVP online.

Technology and the Developing World: Boon or Bane?

Our Berkeley friends at the Cybersalon have an interesting event next Sunday the 15th of May 6:00-8:00 p.m. The Hillside Club, 2286 Cedar St., Berkeley:

Technology and the Developing World: Boon or Bane?
Silicon Valley people love to solve problems, but in the process they often create new problems…as in the Third World. While technology can level the playing field for developing countries, it often supplants and destroys the very cultures these societies have taken centuries, if not millennia, to develop. How should we introduce new technologies to developing countries so that we can keep the best of both worlds?
Join us for an interactive panel-audience discussion on this topic. Invited panelists include:

Lee Felsenstein, who built the first portable computer, the Osborne, and has tried to port the Internet to the jungles of Laos using the pedal power of the bicycle.

Eric Brewer, cofounder of spider search engine Inktomi and computer science professor at UC Berkeley, who just led a delegation of open source computing advocates to India.

Richard Komans, who set up an Internet Bookmobile Project in Uganda to download and publish books on the spot, and Jessica Mitchell, a Geekcorps technology volunteer who is working with Ghana’s ISPs. And invited to join the discussion on the other side of the debate:

Claudia Carr, UCB associate professor in Environmental Science, Policy, and Management, who has firsthand experience of the way modern technology destroys ancient cultures. Iain Boal, social historian of science and techniques at UCB’s Institute of International Studies, edited a book called “Resisting the Virtual Life: The Culture and Politics of Information,” which sheds some insights on the damage caused by high-tech, for export or not.

Come join us for an engaging discussion in which everyone is encouraged to participate. $10 gets you drinks and something to whet your appetite. The Hillside Club is half a mile from the Berkeley BART station, and coming south from Highway 80, take the University Ave. exit, go under the freeway along the frontage road and make a right at the 4RENT sign, which is Cedar St. Go up two miles and park.

Future Salon and Numenta

Wow, we are getting quite some traction on Google. The question is of course how warranted that is :-)

If you search for Numenta Jeff Hawkins' super interesting new AI company based on the research of his book On Intelligence our Weblog post is number three right after the company webpage itself and before the Mercury News. Shouldn't that sway him to present at an upcoming Future Salon? Jeff, you will get the best questions from our audience I promise :-)

Über Wikipedia

John Udell's Screencast showing the evolution of the Heavy Metal Umlaut entry in the Wikipedia. (I know you where always asking yourself: "What's up with that Umlaut in Names of Heavy Metal Bands?" :-)

The Screencast shows the history, from small beginnings over sidetracks and vandalism until the early 2005 status. The power of the Wiki model for the creation of an encyclopedia is beautifully demonstrated. I am seriously thinking of going to the Wikimania the first Wikimedia conference (4th - 8th of August in Frankfurt).