Future Salon

Falling through Dreams. Comics from Scott McCloud

I could have sworn, that after last year's Foo Fest I posted about the great Comics of Scott McCloud, but now I can't find it. Guess life caught up with me.

Loved his presentation at the Fest. He develops comic strips and explores the possibilities that the web is offering him for his chosen art. 

It is a beautiful little trick that he is using in his current strip. A mini version of the next picture is always in the center of the current one. Once you click to get the next frame, it expands from the middle. The effect is, that you feel like you are falling through a dream. A beautiful blue dream in the case of "The right Number". 

I just realized, that part two of the dream is out. Way worth the 25c he charges. He is using BitPass and has locked horns with Clay Shirky about the micropayments issue.

It would be great, if micropayments would work, giving creative people a way to make a living and all of our lives richer.

Would love to have him talk about his experiences and current outlook with micropayments at one of the next Future Salons too.

Words "Hack" and "Hacking" are Blacklisted from Yahoo Group Descriptions

Long overdue, this morning I updated our Yahoo Group Description, announcing that our March 19th Future Salon Speaker will be David Sifry founder and CEO of Technorati.

I loved his Etech Technorati Hacks session and I wrote about it in the Yahoo Group Description, but they would not let me save my text, because it contained a word that Yahoo perceives as not appropriate. The word is "Hack". Who would have thought?

Disruptions in Software Not just about Labor

Last week I was at B&N, on the shelf the following four magazines were in a row. It doesn't take a rocket scientist pick up on the (over-hyped) trend in the cover stories.

1. Time, March 1, 2004 -- "Are Too Many Jobs Going Abroad?"
2. Economist, Feb 21-27, 2004 -- "The New Jobs Migration"
3. Business Week, March 1, 2004 -- "Software: Will Outsourcing Hurt America's Supremacy?"
4. Fortune, Feb 23, 2004 -- 10 Top Tech Trends to Bet On

Wait a minute. "Which one is not like the others?"

At first glance, it appears the Fortune one is the odd one out. But it's the one that really addresses the truly disruptive changes to the software, and other technology, industries even more so than the commoditization of highly skilled labor.

The Fortune cover story highlights China and open source among the top 10 trends. While we are bemoaning the lost jobs to India and Bulgaria, China is quietly setting their own standards in every aspect of technology. They are a big enough market that one day soon, we might be following their lead. Then there is the proliferation of open source. Regardless of your stance on open source, it could well end up having a broader impact on the software industry than cheap Bangalore software testers. In fact, open source as one of the top 10 tech trends the only one that garnered it's own full article in the same issue -- a special report on innovation.

And the same day, I got a link to these articles in my inbox too.

• Tom Peters' Offshoring Manifesto/Rant: Sixteen Hard Truths
  
• Thomas Friedman's NYTimes piece, "Meet the Zippies
  

RSS Tripleheader over at SDForum on Tuesday

What the hey-- since I'm the only person on the right hand side whose bio actually mentions "software," it falls to me to point out interesting software-related talks happening locally.

Like this one: three talks on RSS in one night. It's happening Tuesday (Feb 24) in Mountain View. Chris Pirillo will talk about how RSS enables the next generation of personalized marketing, Thomas Gieselmann will talk about how business models change as web content drifts to a syndication/subscription model, and Kevin Burton will do the deep-geek thing and actually talk about coding to various specs.

Looks like Good Stuff to me.

The Fabric of the Cosmos, The Elegant Universe.

For the Science Junkies beneath us, here an interesting lecture this week at the Herbst Theater:

California Academy of Sciences - Lectures

Wednesday, February 25 Brian Greene,Ph.D., Professor of Physics, Columbia University The Fabric of the Cosmos, The Elegant Universe In conversation with Roy Eisenhardt

In his breakthrough book, The Elegant Universe, Brian Greene popularized string theory to a degree that many physicists thought impossible. Though still a contentious concept, string theory holds the promise for a unified field of the cosmos – an attempt to describe everything from quarks to supernovas. By using accessible metaphors and his razor-sharp wit, Greene is able to clearly communicate the complexities of string theory and describe dimensions beyond our current perceptions. He creates an intellectual handle for non-physicists to latch onto, in order to understand concepts that have been traditionally open only to string theorists. In addition to being named a New York Times Notable Book of the Year, The Elegant Universe was also the subject of the recent Nova three-part PBS series hosted by the author himself.

Greene’s second book on string theory is The Fabric of the Cosmos: Space, Time, and the Texture of Reality. Brian Greene received his undergraduate degree from Harvard University and his doctorate from Oxford University, where he was a Rhodes Scholar. After being a professor at Cornell University, he joined Columbia University where he is currently a professor of physics and mathematics and co-director of the Institute for Strings, Cosmology, and Astroparticle Physics.

Awesome Salon Last Night

Last night's salon, a discussion led by the fine folks at worldchanging, was fascinating.

To me it was interesting because a lot of the things that were said, I've said in the past. And yet, somehow, at the ripe old age of 36, I've become much less trusting of the ideas of "problems" and "solutions." Somehow, along the way, I became sort of libertarian. Or, as I articulated it later on, "I became a mathematician and learned to distrust pure reason. I became a manager and learned to distrust centralized solutions and hierarchical control." And so I sat there, listening, and taking notes, and thinking "But what you're doing is describing the emergence of new products on a market, not a drastic problem that we must take action to solve."

And then I began to think harder. I still don't think they identified real problems that have to be solved (or, rather, I think the existing mechanisms could solve the problems just fine, and that, in fact, the examples they cited were examples of problems already identified and in the process of being solved). But I'm also starting to muse over thinkcycle -- that feels like something with the potential to transform the way we do things. Collaborative design, done at a distance and over the internet. For things other than software.

In the discussions afterwards, I learned a lot about Steve Jackson games, and what writers do to survive. Good to know.

Soul Made Flesh: The Birth of Our Neurocentric Age

Interesting event at Stanford on Monday: Soul Made Flesh: The Birth of Our Neurocentric Age [Via Corante]

Open the Future Tonight

Jamais Cascio used to come to the first couple of Future Salons almost two years ago. It was always a drag for him to drive down the Peninsula, because he lives somewhere behind Berkeley, if I remember correctly. I loved his insights and I realized, that he wasn't even telling all of what he knew, because he didn't want to monopolize the conversation.

Read his Singularity essay: Open the Future that he just posted and you may understand what I mean.

He got really busy lately, didn't have time to come up the Peninsula. Together with Alex Steffen he started the Worldchanging Blog finished a book or two and who knows what else. (Don't these super productive people make you nervous sometimes, or is that just me? :-)

We missed him and used a little trick to have him back in our midst, we invited him to speak at our Future Salon. He is kind enough to bring Alex two.

As a little sign of our appreciation we meet them half way and having our Salon in San Francisco this month:

Legacy or Mind-Link

I was at the O'Reilly Emerging Technology Conference last week. Before the end of the week I'll post the themes I noticed that emerged that are new and which trends keep popping up from past conferences. I'll be writing from the perspective of an attendee that has been to all the conferences, including the original P2P conferences which were the genesis for the Etech conference. You may also want to check my blog for other Etech write-ups.

I writing now to let you know that Gordon Bell is speaking tomorrow, Feb. 19, at the PARC auditorium on his LifeBits project at Microsoft Research. (More info)

MyLifeBits is a lifetime store of everything. It is the fulfillment of Vannevar Bush's 1945 Memex vision including full-text search, text & audio annotations, and hyperlinks. There are two parts to MyLifeBits: an experiment in lifetime storage, and a software research effort.

It's interesting that at the Etech conference I saw a similar "archival" project presented. Nokia's Christian Lindholm in his session presented the Digital Kazu project (yep, involves the cameraphone, Web, and a Nokia-created PC application).

The digitization of everything implies a coming content explosion, says Lindholm. At first glance I personally couldn't understand why anyone really needs a lifestore of everything. Why record everything?

Lindholm explained that the content explosion trend is driven by two key groups:

1. Young social sharers – teenagers, university kids. They're forming groups. Living very nomadic lives. Living in the now.
   
2. Family-centric recorders. They collect pictures in albums, have a lot of digital capture gear and start recording each new child, new villa, new car, etc.
   

The Digital Kazu project was inspired by a business school colleague (named Kazu) whom always captured his thoughts, sketches, clippings, photos in a journal he took everywhere with him. He asked Kazu why he kept the journals: “This is a legacy for my children.” After the session, Lindholm shared that he has a grainy cellphone photo of his son sitting on a potty for the first time. Looking at that photo evokes emotion - the quality isn't the issue. Memories evoke emotion. Evoking emotion is where the business opportunities are at, he said.

In another session, John Poisson, Sony, conducted a small study of cameraphone habits in Japan. It invariably included a lot of teenage girls. The camaraphone becomes a vehicle to express a current mood or establish what Poisson termed a "mind-link" with close friends or family. It's disposable media. There is so much content with ubiquitous cellphones - most of it will not be captured for posterity. The point wasn't the photo itself but the in-the-moment connection.

Information Overload

In this interview, Jim Gray talks about how storage capacity has exceeded Moore's Law and asserts that "programmers have to start thinking of the disk as a sequential device rather than a random access device". Believe it or not.

A Conversation with Jim Gray

What on earth is all this storage being used for?