Lunch over IP

links for 2007-03-26

• YouTube video awards 2006 - The winners
  Videosharing YouTube recognized the best videos posted on the site. Check out the "Most Creative", the "Best Series", the "Best Music Video" (she can sing...) and the "Most Adorable".
  (tags: youtube video)
• Ze 1 / Ze Frank's show ended
  The ridiculously funny online video "Show" by comedian Ze Frank ended a few days ago after 365 days of five-times-a-week genius. The archive is still up.
  (tags: ZeFrank video comedy funny)
• Ze 2 / Laptop Celebrity
  "Slate" tells how Ze Frank became a Web video star producing "the best sustained comedy run in the history of the Web" and offers advice on the best episodes to watch.
  (tags: ZeFrank video humor funny)
• Ze 3 / Wikicomedy experiment
  A previous LoIP post telling how Ze Frank tested the idea of a "wit of crowds" - whether a group of Internet-linked writers can be funnier than the funniest person among them (himself, that is).
  (tags: ZeFrank funny wikicomedy)
• Ze 4 / A live performance at TED2004
  Ze Frank's performance, drawn from the TED2004 archive, offers his signature blend of comedy, technology and social theory that made him my favorite philosopher comic. (Video from TEDtalks)
  (tags: ZeFrank TEDconference funny)

A day at BlogCamp Switzerland

What do 200 Swiss bloggers gathered in Zurich talk about? Blogging, of course -- we're all somehow obsessive. But also about concerns with Putin cranking up censorship in Russia, how to get a business started, and living in a monastery in Germany, among many other things. I spent part of the day at the first Swiss BlogCamp, which took place in the premises of the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology and was organized by my friends Peter Hogenkamp and Remo Uherek together with Dominik Tarolli and William Lüthy, all engaged entrepreneurs/bloggers/innovation evangelists based in the German-speaking part of Switzerland. It was the first time I attended an "un-conference" (model: BarCamp), where basically the organizers provide an equipped venue, coffee, and an empty board, and whoever wants to give a talk picks a time slot and posts a notice about her/his talk on the board. (This being Switzerland, Peter said, "we've added a thin layer of organization by putting up a wiki page where people could sign up to attend and to speak", giving everybody some advanced visibility on who else would be attending and on the topics of the talks -- but speakers still had to claim a slot upon arrival).

As always at conferences, it has been an opportunity to catch up with some friends, but also to put a face on people I'd previously come across virtually but never met in person, and to make some new acquaintances. People like Gabor Cselle, a smart software engineer from Google; artist and "perennial expat" writer Julie Galante (an American in Switzerland) and cultural explorer Jens Wiese (a German in Switzerland); Sarah Genner, who writes the Zueri-Berlin and the Blogs und Politik blogs; or Evgeny Morozov, the director of new media at Transitions Online, a Prague-based online publication covering the former Soviet region (I used to be an advisor to TOL); and many others. The "un-conference" format worked out very well, generating a good mix of talks in German and English that quickly filled the board. And the discussions were vigorous. I gave a speech about the BondyBlog as an example of citizen media and a metaphor of how journalism in a p2p world is not about either/or but rather about complementarity and hybridization (I've written parts of that story here and here and here, and Stephanie Booth summarized my talk in English while Sarah Genner did so in German), and the small group of about 40 people that heard it engaged in a very lively discussion afterwards. The same energy permeated the breaks. The Swiss blogosphere may still be searching for its identity, may still be trying to define its contours as a social actor and, as I said during my session, we are still a couple of years behind the US and other countries in terms of the political impact of blog-empowered citizens (I use the word "blog" here as shorthand for an ensemble of tools), but the thoughtfulness and no-nonsense and smart that I saw today was inspiring.

I was so occupied talking with people than I only attended two speeches. Here are my short running notes.

Stephanie Booth is a blogger from Lausanne and spoke about the challenges of multilingual blogging (she does so in English and French). The Internet collapses space and rubs out borders, she said, but not cultures. How do we know what's going on in the other language-spheres? We need to find a way to "travel". I you don't speak Portuguese, you can still go to Lisbon and walk around the old town and enjoy it. You can't do that online -- walking around the Portuguese blogosphere -- if you don't know the language. She stresses the need for bridgebloggers to fill that gap --  “weblogs that reach across gaps of language, culture and nationality to enable communication between individuals in different parts of the world”, to use a definition by Ethan Zuckerman -- offering some strategies: creating translation networks ("getting people together that are going to translate a couple of posts a month from others in the network"), for example, setting up translation portals; add foreign-language excerpts or summaries to blog posts.
Stephanie actually hits on a problem that's not exclusive to blogs. It actually exists in most information-spheres (including the traditional media, where the role of the "bridgeblogger" is supposed to be played by correspondents and international reporters, who are in charge of "translating" foreign news and cultures for their domestic readership) and is becoming an issue in software. On one hand, more and more of our daily life is being supported by software; on the other, an increasing number of people know more than one language to some extent. Yet most software (and most blogging tools) assume that you are working/writing/reading/thinking/interacting/blogging in only one language.

Remy Blaettler is a young entrepreneur and co-founded three months ago a company called Supertext, which is an online text-tuning agency -- people e-mail in texts, flyers, brochures, etc, and the Supertext network of writers and texters "fine-tunes" them. He and his colleagues found inspiration for how to run the company in a book published by 37signals, a Chicago company that's well-known in tech circles for having developed online tools such as the project management software BaseCamp and the open-source application development framework called RubyOnRails. The guys at 37signals distilled their way to start a company and develop a software product into a controversial book called "Getting Real" (buy it in PDF or read the free HTML version) and Remy's speech was a cheat sheet for people who had not read it (like myself. I know about 37signals and their products, but never came around to read their text).

• The main claim of the book is: Less is more. "Underdo your competition". You cannot outrun Microsoft with more features, says Remy, but if you try with fewer features (but more ease of use, speed, etc), you might succeed. "Use the 80/20 rule: 80% of the users need only 20% of the functionalities, so build for that 80%. Leave out what doesn't matter. Ask people not what they want, but what they don't want: if you implement everything that people request you would have the most complex system ever". It's not against adding new features, of course: it's about adding them only selectively.
• Second point: Feel the pain. Have all the staff in the same place; put developers into customer support (so that they get the complaints about the system they developed); make them use the system they built.
• Third: release early and often. Remy worked with big corporations, developing huge project with cycles of 3 or more years (specifications, testing, etc). What 37signals suggests is: build small pieces, release them, get feedback, then you can develop the next thing. "Never extend the deadline: if you're late, cut features". "Don't wait until you have the perfect product, put it into the wild as early as possible". But of course, doing half doesn't mean doing half-baked.
• Fourth: delete your to-do list. 37signals claims that they read the requests for features that they get from users but they neither log them, track them, nor build to-do-lists based on them. If a feature request is important, there is no need to track it: you are reading them, so it will come back again and again and again, and you will know it.
• Fifth: Easy on, easy off. Let people get into the app easily (most developers focus on that) but also let them get out of the application easily. (He's talking about signup and cancellation; about data import and export: "don't lock people in: build trust instead".)
• Six: Bad news are good news. "Don't fear bad news; don't hide your mistakes, explain them; be transparent".
• Seven: Where is the fire? Know who's talking about you (use Google Alerts, Digg, etc), know if someone is trying to clone your business; talk back, be an active member of the community, monitor and learn from competitors.
• Eight: your idea is worthless ("The most brilliant idea with no execution is worth nothing; a weak idea with great execution is worth millions"; "Don't hoard your ideas").

There are many other points in the book, and most of the above can be challenged convincingly (for example the fourth point: sometimes a really good request only comes in once). My interrogation however is: can these ideas be applied to other fields than software (or software-based services and information)? Can they be applied for example to journalism and publishing? Or to the creation of complex physical products? You can't put a "half car" on the market, or a "half aircraft" in the air, or can you? Maybe you can, actually: after all what EasyJet and Ryanair and the other low-cost airlines basically did is taking costly features out of the traditional airline business, releasing an "essential" version of flying to people for which that was enough.

PS: As Peter Hogenkamp reminds in the comments, there was a makeshift photo studio at BlogCamp, organized and manned by Christian Leu, where attendees were asked to take a picture of themselves (through a remote control). 140 of them did. The result: the first collective portrait -- albeit very very partial -- of the Swiss blogosphere. It's up on Flickr -- or see them in a 23-seconds animation:

PPS: Who is Christoph Blogger? The question was asked at BlogCamp as an experiment. It's a made-up name that sounds like that of the Swiss Minister of Justice -- Christoph Blocher. Another Swiss Minister, Moritz Leuenbenger, launched a few days ago his blog -- first member of the government to do so. The organizers of the BlogCamp decided to test how fast the "Christoph Blogger" meme can spread around the Swiss blogosphere, created a blog, and let it loose. It's here.

links for 2007-03-23

• Divine disorder on the desktop
  TechnologyReview expands on the "Bumptop" 3D interface for computers that was presented two weeks ago by Anand Agarawala at TED. Critical analysis.
  (tags: Bumptop interface TED07 TED2007)
• Canary island to be powered solely by renewables
  El Hierro, the least-inhabited of Spain's Canary Islands (10'000 inhab.) will get 100 percent of its electricity supply from renewable energy sources (a combination of hydroelectricity and wind) starting in 2009. (From AFP, thx MB)
  (tags: renewables energy cleantech)
• Virtual museum tours: Time for an upgrade?
  From my friend Marc Spiegler at Artworld Salon: "Maybe what’s needed here is a sort of MuTube, where people upload their walkthrough videos of museum shows for those who can’t make it in person."
  (tags: museums virtual art ideas)

How to stop bleeding quickly, unclog the Internet and what to do in Rome

-- by guest blogger Michele Bowman

(Bowman is the chairman of the Association of Professional Futurists and co-host of the podcast FringeHog)

While I’m not a fan of re-blogging, Technology Review’s “10 Emerging Technologies 2007” list (featured in their March/April edition) deserves some (digital) ink if only because the articles tend to be, shall we say, heavy on the geek factor. So, here is the cheat sheet.

Peer-to-Peer Video
The Problem: The Internet is headed toward a giant data traffic jam. Today video content and applications account for more than 60 percent of Internet traffic; some say that figure could climb as high as 98 percent in just a few years, causing downloads to slow to a crawl. In short, the information superhighway is increasingly being clogged up by bandwidth-guzzling SUVs in the form of “Lost” reruns, YouTube videos and webisodes of beer commercials. The Solution: Peer-to-Peer (P2P) “mesh” networks which distribute data across a networks of user’s PCs rather than through a content-owner’s central server, saving bandwidth in the Internet’s core.  P2P networks such as Gnutella, Kazaa and BitTorrent have been hugely successful with users – and maligned by content owners who see them as just another word for piracy.  But several projects underway including Pittsburgh-based start-up Rinera Networks are developing new models, such as adding a “toll booth” for P2P networks for heavy users, that aim to stabilize the traffic flow and ensure smooth surfing.

Quantum Dot Solar Power
The big idea: Quantum dots – tiny crystals of semiconductors just a few nanometers wide – could finally make solar power cost-competitive with electricity from fossil fuels. Arthur Noziak, a senior research fellow at the DOE National Renewable Energy Laboratory calculates that a photovoltaic device based on quantum dots could have a maximum efficiency of 42 percent, far better than the 31 percent achieved by silicon semiconductors used in today’s PV cells. (Ted Sargent discussed quantum dots at the TED conference the other day, see this previous post).

Neuron Control
Key to understanding the chemical imbalances underlying depression and other neurological disorders is identifying which cells are responsible. Researchers have developed a novel way of doing just that by literally lighting up specific neurons in the brain. Karl Deisseroth and his team at Stanford Medical Center have genetically engineered neurons to produce a protein which, when exposed to light, triggers activity in the neurons (literally turning them ‘on’). The “light switch” lets scientists turn selected parts of the brain on and off may open the door to precisely targeted treatments for psychiatric and neurological disorders.

Nanohealing
The ability to control bleeding in an operating room or at an accident site would represent a paradigm shift in medicine, saving thousands of lives and making surgery faster and safer. Today about 50 percent of the time spent in a typical surgery is trying to control bleeding, and the methods doctors use today – such as clamps, cauterization and vasoconstriction – are invasive and often cause collateral damage. Which is why researchers at MIT and Hong Kong University are excited about the potential of a simple biodegradable liquid which has been shown to stop bleeding in wounded rats in seconds. When the liquid, composed of protein fragments called peptides, is applied to open wounds, the peptides self-assemble into a nanoscale protective barrier gel that seals the wound and halts bleeding. Once the injury heals, the nontoxic gel is broken down into molecules that cells can use as building blocks for tissue repair. While the research is considered very preliminary, if tests go well it could be approved for human use in three to five years.

Augmented Reality
You’re in Rome, staring at a centuries-old sculpture that has obvious historical significance – but the plaque describing the piece isn’t in English and your high school Italian is more than a little rusty. What to do? Well, if you happen to have a prototype of Nokia’s Mobile Augmented Reality smart phone in your hand, you’re in luck. The prototype sports a GPS sensor, a compass, and accelerometers. Using data from these sensors, the phone can calculate the location of just about any object its camera is aimed at. Users can then download additional information, such as the name of the sculpture (in your native tongue) as well as the location of nearby souvenir shops that sell replicas. While Nokia’s system uses locative sensors to superimpose digital information on the real world, other applications in development use a different approach; Total Immersion in Suresnes, France and Google’s recently-acquired Neven Vision are betting on image-recognition software to do the trick. After decades of lab research “augmented reality” apps are ready to hit the street. Coming soon to a phone near you: your world, annotated. (Note: While TR’s piece focused on Nokia, the company is just one of the players in the emerging field known as “collaborative cartography”)

Personalized Medical Monitors
MIT researchers are developing algorithms to help doctors efficiently interpret electrocardiograms, electroencephalograms and other ever-growing masses of medical data and quickly perceive patterns that might otherwise be buried.  Future applications include personalized medical monitors which can sense – and stop – an oncoming seizure in an epilepsy patient.

Compressive Sensing
Using a technique known as compressive sensing, Rice University engineers have developed a camera that uses a single image sensor to collect just enough information to let a novel algorithm reconstruct a high-resolution image. The technology could produce MRI systems that capture images up to 10 times as quickly as today's scanners, and tiny mobile-phone cameras that produce high-quality, poster-size images.

Metamaterials
Artificially structured metamaterials (composites made up of precisely arranged patterns of two or more distinct materials) are opening up an entirely new approach to optics. By manipulating electromagnetic radiation (including light) metamaterials have the potential to transform a range of industries such telecommunications, data storage and even solar energy. 

Optical Antennas
Who needs Netflix? Researchers have created light-focusing optical antennas that could lead to the development of DVD-like discs that store 3.5 terabytes of data – the equivalent of 750 of today’s recordable DVD’s. 

Single Cell Analysis
Norman Dovichi’s lab at the University of Washington is pioneering the science of single cell biology.  The techniques he and his colleagues have developed to isolate cells and reveal specific molecules inside are exposing the differences between individual cells and could lead to better, more precise diagnosis and treatment of diseases such as cancer and diabetes.

links for 2007-03-21

• MacHillary
  Remember the "1984" commercial that launched the Apple Macintosh? Well, here is an edited version (lots of mystery about who created it) offering a taste of what's to come during the US presidential campaign. Do check it out, it's only 1 min. (Thx IW)
  (tags: advertising Apple politics Clinton 1984 2008)
• Switzerland to have English-language national radio channel
  I've argued for a while that Switzerland is ready for a national English-language media outlet. By the end of the year Geneva-based radio station WRG will become World Radio Switzerland, and cover the whole country (David Spring in L'Hebdo - in French).
  (tags: Switzerland languages radio)
• An idea to increase the blogosphere's "conversationality"
  Stephanie Booth picks up on an idea I had a while ago to "help" conversations online, expands and specifies it, and calls for someone to develop it: a feature allowing bloggers to "promote" all or part of a readers' comment to the main page.
  (tags: blogging features conversation conversationality)

Google and sword-swallowing demographer team up to think outside the X and Y axes

Google has acquired Hans Rosling's Trendalyzer software, which the Swedish demographer and his team at Gapminder have developed since 2005 to generate more useful visualizations of facts and figures. Rosling has met the Google founders at TED2006, where he gave a thought-provoking speech on the nature of statistics and the general misinterpretation of them (see short summary and video of that speech). At TED2007 ten days ago he gave another insightful speech, ending it with the now-famous sword-swallowing moment (yes, Rosling is a serious demographer but also -- another deadly serious activity -- one of the few sword-swallowers active in Sweden). Photo Robert Leslie/TED:

Marissa Mayer of Google comments the acquisition on their blog: "Gathering data and creating useful statistics is an arduous job that often goes unrecognized. We hope to provide the resources necessary to bring such work to its deserved wider audience by improving and expanding Trendalyzer and making it freely available to any and all users capable of thinking outside the X and Y axes." The Trendalyzer team will join Google in Mountain View to work on developing the tools; the non-profit Gapminder Foundation -- whose goal is to "to promote a fact-based worldview by bringing statistical story-telling to new levels" -- will instead continue operating out of Stockholm.
(Via IHT Metamedia)

Technorati Tags: Hans Rosling, Google, Gapminder, TED2006, TED2007

links for 2007-03-20

• The Internet is broken / 1: Stanford researchers want to redesign it
  The Internet has changed society, but there are still basic things it doesn't do well. Stanford researchers are starting a project to completely redesign the way it works. "If air-traffic control was carried on the Internet, I wouldn't fly". (TechReview)
  (tags: Internet infrastructure network cleanslate Stanford)
• The Internet is broken / 2: Stanford's "clean slate design" site
  The site of Stanford's new "Clean Slate Design for the Internet" project: "We believe the Internet's shortcomings will not be resolved by the conventional incremental and 'backward-compatible' style of research ... need to be bold, unconventional".
  (tags: cleanslate internet network Stanford)
• The Internet is broken / 3: The other initiatives to fix it
  "We are at an inflection point, a revolution point ... We might just be at the point where the utility of the Internet stalls - and perhaps turns downward". A Dec 2005, very detailed article from TechnologyReview on the initiatives to fix the Net's flaws.
  (tags: Internet network infrastructure cleanslate)

links for 2007-03-19

• Seven things you should know about Creative Commons
  What, who, how, why, and 3 more questions, in easy-to-understand form, about Creative Commons, the alternative to traditional copyright that you should know about. Clicking on the link downloads a PDF file. (From Educause)
  (tags: creativecommons copyright)
• Good Day Sunshine
  Good photo essay by TechReview on large solar power plants in Serpa, Portugal. Owned by GE, 90 acres, 52'000 panels, investment $75 million, generates at peak 11 MW of electricity. Panels high enough off the ground for sheep to graze underneath. (thx MB)
  (tags: solar power, alternatives, photography)
• Wireless: Old Europe is thinkin' way outside the box
  Innovation on display at CeBIT: lederhosen with a built-in cell phone. "The lederhosen feature a mouthpiece embedded in the suspender straps and a row of unobtrusive olive green buttons down the side of the leg." (with picture, from Textually.org, thx IW)
  (tags: lederhosen cellphone wireless mobilephone outofthebox oddities)

Bots in Beijing

Symantec has just released its newest Internet security threat report, covering the second half of 2006 (thx Isaiah for the link). Among the findings, these two:

China had the highest number of bot-infected computers, accounting for 26 percent of the worldwide total ("bots" are programs that are covertly installed on a user’s machine in order to allow an unauthorized user to control that computer remotely and use it to launch attacks on other machines). This is a measure of how unprotected computers are. Beijing was the city with the most bot-infected computers in the world, accounting for just over five percent of the worldwide total:

The United States accounted for 31 percent of all malicious activity during the analyzed period, more than any other country, but when adjusted for Internet penetration, Israel was actually the highest-ranked country for malicious activity, followed by Taiwan and Poland:

links for 2007-03-18

• Remaining in the flow
  Summary of a speech by Stowe Boyd on overload: "We are switching to a time in which the dominant mode will be flow, not focus"; "Productivity is second to Connection: network productivity trumps personal productivity".
  (tags: flow productivity attention overload)
• Now you wanna be careful with USB drives
  Snoopstick looks like a normal USB stick, but if you plug it into a Windows PC, it installs hidden software that allows remote monitoring of what's being done on that PC.
  (tags: surveillance privacy usb gadgets snoop)
• Gender diversity at web conferences
  How many women are among the speakers at conferences such as TED, LIFT, PopTech or the New Yorker's? (From Kottke)
  (tags: women conference diversity statistics)