I am so looking forward to our next Future Salon on Tax Day Friday 15th of April: FabLabs: Make Almost Anything. Personal fabrication brought to a garage/desk near you.
The presenter professor Neil Gershenfeld, heads MIT's Center for Bits and Atoms. His ETech talk got written up in Business Week:
Technology, he says, isn't the main obstacle anymore. It's money. There's not just a digital divide, but a tools and instrument divide. He thinks there needs to be "micro-VC," or small amounts of venture capital as lilttle as $10,000, to encourage entrepreneurs around the world to use these personal fabs to create interesting new products.
He is on C-Span right now: Digital Futures Series on C-SPAN 6:30 e.t. talking about Internet Zero: Extending the internet protocol to give every electric device an address.
At an opening event one of the architects of the high-speed Internet 2 project kept coming back to ask how fast data could be sent through the building infrastructure. After being reminded that light bulbs don't need to be able to watch broadband movies, he was jokingly told that the emerging network of everyday devices was part of an Internet zero, not Internet 2. The name stuck. I0 is not a replacement for the current Internet (call that Internet 1); it is a set of principles for extending the Internet down to individual devices.
You can read the draft Internet Zero paper from 2004 on the MIT site.
Neil Gershenfeld's book Fab is not out yet and I talked to Skip Barret from Books Inc today: They are getting 60 books on the 12th which he will bring to the Future Salon on the 15th, so you can be one of the first ones to get it signed. Please RSVP for the event.
P.S. If you are not in the Bay Area or just too lazy to get off your desk :-)
Webcast will be available:
Point your Quicktime player to the following address: rtsp://207.105.30.90/salon.sdp
We will also have an IRC chat session running:
Server: irc.freenode.net
Channel: #futuresalon
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