Future Salon

Technorati: Be of Service

Set strong guiding principles at the beginning when creating an organization, live by them and the organization is going to be strong.

Similar to Google's "do no evil" David Sifry at the Future Salon on Friday said, that "be of service" is probably going to be the main principle for Technorati.

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.

Unhappy objects and RFID

Every now and then, wild-eyed visionaries start talking about artificial intelligence and what could happen when objects get intelligent. But artificial intelligence is hard, and solves problems that don't need to be solved.

In particular, I don't give a fig for intelligent objects. I don't want my stuff to be intelligent. I just want my stuff to be unhappy.

Why? Here's an example. I just spent 15 minutes walking around my house trying to find my coffee cup. It turned out to be behind the rice cooker.

Suppose my coffee cup had a sensor in the bottom, a battery in the handle, and the knowledge that if it starts out full of hot liquid and winds up, 4 hours later, full of cold liquid, it should be deeply unhappy and attempt to complain loudly and vociferously.

We could have an RFID-based system running in the house that looks for all the unhappy objects.

More generally, if my objects had a notion of home (or if the system had a notion of home), wouldn't life be wonderful. Suppose I could tell my house: the date/calendar book should be near the suitcase. And the suitcase should be in the bookcase near the front door.

And when I can't find the suitcase, it could find it. And when I ask it about the unhappy objects, it could say "Dude. You left the suitcase in the bathroom, under the sink again."

I'm serious. I don't really care much for Wal-mart's inventory problems. RFID could solve my inventory problems.

Embedded Linux at the Emerging Technology SIG

Just a quick note. The Future Salon and SDForum's Emerging Technology SIG are similar groups, with similar purposes. The ET SIG is slightly more technical, and geared a little bit more to the short-term future, but people who are interested in one are often interested in the other.

Hence this announcement: The Emerging Technology SIG will be meeting on February 10, in Palo Alto, to hear Rick Lehrbaum (editor of LinuxDevices.com) talk about the state of embedded linux. He'll be talking for a little over an hour (plus questions) on where embedded linux is today, and where it's going. If you're at all interested in where PDAs are headed, and how they're going to get there, this is a talk to see.