Lunch over IP

links for 2008-06-29

• Dissecting The Chain E-Mail About Obama
  Danielle Allen has dissected the rumor about Barack Obama being Muslim, trying to trace a chain e-mail to its origins and learning alot about how political info circulates and mutates in the digital age. If you're short on time, read parts 1 and 4.
  (tags: politics barackobama interesting)
• The Nietzschean Superdork And The Battle For Facebook
  Long but very interesting story by Rolling Stone mag about Facebook, its rise, and the legal dispute about its origins. Including the question: Is Mark Zuckerberg's social-network site, like so many other great fortunes in history, founded on a crime?
  (tags: facebook socialnetworking)

50 million TEDTalks

TED.com, the site of the TED conferences, has just past a major milestone: in the two years after its inception, it has "served" 50 million videos of speeches from TED and from partner conferences. Undoubtedly, as the TED blog says, TEDTalks have become a cultural force and a powerful platform for sharing ideas that matter (changing, in some cases, the speaker's lives: just read this NYTimes story about Jill Bolte Taylor, or this Time entry about Jeff Han -- the "presentation" mentioned was his TEDTalk).

Here are the top 10 TEDTalks so far (there are about 300 more on the TED site, for watching and downloading for free) and, below, a video with highlights of the same talks:

1. Jill Bolte Taylor: My stroke of insight
2. Jeff Han: Touchscreen demo foreshadows the iPhone
3. David Gallo: Underwater astonishments
4. Blaise Aguera y Arcas: Jaw-dropping Photosynth demo
5. Arthur Benjamin: Lightning calculation and other "Mathemagic"
6. Sir Ken Robinson: Do schools kill creativity?
7. Hans Rosling: The best stats you've ever seen
8. Tony Robbins: Why we do what we do, and how we can do it better
9. Al Gore: 15 ways to avert a climate crisis
10. Johnny Lee: Creating tech marvels out of a $40 Wii Remote

Even if you've seen all these talks, this highlights video is well worth a watch.

links for 2008-06-24

• The man who started building the Web -- in 1934
  Interesting NYT story about Paul Otlet, a Belgian scientist who in 1934 sketched out plans for a global network of computers to allow people to search and browse through millions of interlinked documents. Sounds familiar? (Thx LN and IW for the link)
  (tags: paulotlet, web, www, internet, history interesting)
• Brian Cox on the world's biggest experiment
  Must-read essay by Brian Cox on the Large Hadron Collider (it will go live in late August). Favorite quote: "The particles have been around for the entire life of the universe. They are spending the blink of a cosmic eye in the pattern known as 'you'".
  (tags: LHC, CERN, physics, science, Higgs)
• Software Company Ditches Google AdWords for Kiva
  As in Kiva.org, the site channeling microloans. "In the pursuit of growing our own business, we decided we'd much rather help a small store owner in Uganda feed her village than support the Google billionaires' hobby of flying to space."
  (tags: kiva, advertising, marketing, interesting, original)

Word clouds

It's a different way of looking at text: Wordle, a new (and addictive) Web-based tool, turns any text into a word cloud (via TEDblog). Here is the Wordle version of my recent Wall Street Journal article about the Solar Impulse project:

Put in a list of tags (in this case, my del.icio.us tags) and here is the result:

And the lyrics of John Lennon's "Imagine" produce this:

links for 2008-06-19

• How The Web Was Won
  Very interesting Vanity Fair article on the history of the Internet -- from the invention of packet switching to the dotcom boom -- told by the people who made it, long but really worth reading.
  (tags: history Internet)
• Is Google Making Us Stupid?
  Great essay by Nick Carr: "Over the past few years I’ve had an uncomfortable sense that someone, or something, has been tinkering with my brain, remapping the neural circuitry, reprogramming the memory".
  (tags: google Internet insight brain)
• The Guardian: In praise of TED
  The Guardian wrote a generous editorial about the TED conferences and particularly TED.com: "TED is proof of the appetite for knowledge and debate that confounds cynics who dismiss video-sharing as a spiral of aggression and idiocy".
  (tags: TEDconference)

links for 2008-06-13

• LIFT's Asia Venture Trip For Swiss Startups (incl. free travel etc)
  For tech startups based in Western Switzerland: LIFT is organising with Alpict an Asian Venture Trip. Six companies will be selected, get intros to potential partners and clients, present at  the LIFT Asia conference (early Sept.) plus free flights etc.
• European film treasures
  Great resource: movies and footage from decades past, from two dozen national film archives around Europe, in streaming and subtitled, and more added regularly. (Thx CJ for the link)
  (tags: movies film archives europe)

Picnic Green Challenge: 500'000 Euros For An Eco-Friendly Idea

Have an idea for a product, service or technology that can contribute to an eco-friendly lifestyle, directly reduce greenhouse-gas emissions, is developed enough to be realizable within two years, and also scores well on convenience, quality and design?

That's the brief that the organizers of the second Picnic Green Challenge have put forth a few days ago -- accompanied with a prize of 500'000 euros (plus appended things such as coaching and business introductions) for the winner.

The Challenge is open until July 31st (detailed competition criteria and entry form). From the entries a preliminary jury will select three to five finalists, who will then present their ideas publicly on September 25 at the Picnic08 conference in Amsterdam (Disclosure: I'm a member of the jury and will host the final presentation). The jury is chaired by Sir Richard Branson. The prize money comes from the Dutch Postcode Lottery.

Last year, out of 439 green ideas the prize went to Dutch startup Qurrent, which has developed both a technology and an approach to favor local generation of renewable energy. I've e-mailed Igor Kluin, its CEO, for an update.

What happened to Qurrent and the QBox after you won the Picnic Green Challenge 2007?
The impact of the PGC has been, and still is, enormous. The publicity has made the biggest impact, although the money has clearly helped too. The press has exposed Qurrent -- a startup -- to the world which has resulted in distribution requests from over 40 businesses from over 20 countries. Also, the PR has given us credibility which in turn opens doors that would have remained closed. Our goal was to realize 3 to 5 pilots in 2008 and we already have 4 signed and many more in the pipeline. The money has allowed us to scale up, speed up and really get of the ground. Since we will require more cash in the future, it has also favored our position with potential financiers.

Has the first project been realized?
We started installing the first Qboxes just three weeks ago so I don’t have many details just yet. It is thrilling though to see the product come to life, in action on location.

What are the first results of these deployments, from the perspective of the users?
In the first pilots we are concentrating on testing the stability of the core of the system. The end user is not yet involved in the current pilots. This will follow at the end of this year. We expect to start implementing real projects at the beginning of 2009, ahead of the PGC target of two years.

Among the other finalists of last year's Green Challenge, Damian O'Sullivan's Solar Lampion was featured in the NY MoMA exhibit "Design and the Elastic Mind", which closed just a couple of weeks ago, while The Green Thing continue to nudge people towards a most sustainable daily behaviour. Co-founder Andy Hobsbawm e-mailed me this update:

The Green Thing's video content has been viewed 1.25m times on the  web and the site has had 112,152 unique visitors from 162 countries doing 23,118 different green actions and saving 2,808.56 tonnes  of CO2. (We believe the actual figure is higher because only a small percentage of people who come into contact with Green Thing or subscribe tell us they've done stuff but our research shows it does influence wider behaviour). All people powered by love rather than money, and word of mouth: not a penny has been spent on marketing so far.

We've just started Green Thing Groups which allows corporates to set-up employee groups on the site. Companies who have agreed to do this so far include Nokia, Carphone Warehouse, Betfair, McDonalds and TBWA. It's a good way to engage individuals within corporations. We've high hopes this will increase reach and eventually generate donations/contributions from the brands.

For more on last year's finalists, read Susan Kish's report on their final presentations in front of the jury.

Fiction: The Google Apocalypse

I've written a short fiction, situated in 2013, speculating about what would happen if everything that Google knows, and could conceivably know, about the users of its services became public. It's in German, it's inspired by a past blog post, and it is published in the newest issue of NZZ Folio, the very sharp magazine of the Neue Zürcher Zeitung -- full summary here, the issue is devoted to the Internet. The editors titled the story -- illustrated by the drawing at right by Anna-Lina Balke -- "The Google Apocalypse".

links for 2008-06-03

• The Greenwashing Index
  Tired of all those ads where cars don't pollute and drive only through pristine landscapes and oil&energy companies are greener than green? Check out the Greenwashing Index.
  (tags: sustainability advertising hypocrisy)
• Registrations for LIFT Asia 08 now open
  The conference will take place at Jeju Island, South Korea, on September 4-6 and be a bridge between East and West. Among the speakers: Takeshi Natsuno (creator of DoCoMo's iMode) and Christian Lindholm (mobile-phone visionary).
  (tags: LIFTconference)

links for 2008-06-02

• The Unbeatable Cheapness Of Trying
  Clay Shirky: when someone suggests "the next great big collaboration idea that will cost a million USD, ask them to go for a walk and come back when the price tag is closer to 100,000 USD"; social networks are "transaction costs lowering machines".
  (tags: clayshirky web2.0 innovation socialnetworking)
• The Science of Irrationality: Why We Humans Behave So Strangely
  MIT's Dan Ariely (author of "Predictably Irrational") discusses his research in behavioral economics and explains how to deal with our brain's flawed decision-making process. (Scientific American)
• Dyson On The Question Of Global Warming
  Physicist Freeman Dyson's insightful review of two new books on global warming -- his prologue is as interesting as the body of the review, and very interesting takes on Al Gore's and Sir Nicholas Stern's approaches. (Thx PM for the link)
  (tags: globalwarming sustainability)
• 67 Random Thoughts On Design
  By management consultant and leadership guru Tom Peters.
  (tags: tompeters design)