Lunch over IP

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".

Flying Close To The Sun

(I've written the "Business Europe" column for today's Wall Street Journal Europe. The article is on the WSJ website and below. I've added the first picture to this post).

In a big hangar at a former military airfield near Zurich in mid-May, Bertrand Piccard stepped into a prototype airplane cockpit (picture) and began "flying." And kept on going. For 25 hours straight.

The test, followed a day later by another 25-hour dry run with pilot André Borschberg, went well. It was the first real-scale flight simulation for Solar Impulse, an unconventional aircraft designed to circumnavigate the Earth powered uniquely by solar energy, without producing any polluting emissions. Mr. Piccard's team is planning the first real takeoffs in mid-2009, and then a few months later a 36-hour trip aimed at assessing the feasibility of manned nighttime flights – when the energy source, the sun, is "off."

If everything goes according to plan, a five-leg, monthlong tour of the world will follow at some point in 2011 or 2012, with Messrs. Piccard and Borschberg each flying alternating stretches of five days and five nights between landings. "We're not in it just for the adventure," Mr. Piccard told me. The team wants to use this attention-grabbing challenge to inflect energy and climate policies and "to become a testing ground for the development and exploitation of renewable energies and clean technologies" – with an eye also to their future commercial potential.

Crazy? Sun-powered prototype planes have been around for a while. But this would be the first with a man on board; the first to stay aloft day and night; and the first to take off with its own power, after sitting on the runway until the sunrays, and only the sunrays, have charged up its batteries.

In a world dependent upon fossil fuels, the Solar Impulse project is certainly a provocation. But it comes with credentials. It's the brainchild of Mr. Piccard, a 50-year-old Swiss aeronaut and scientist. His legendary grandfather Auguste in 1931 became the first man to reach the stratosphere in a balloon. In 1960 his father, Jacques, together with U.S. Navy Lt. Don Walsh, was the first to reach the deepest trenches of the oceans, the Mariana's, in a bathyscaphe.

Unable to beat them up or down, Bertrand went horizontal. In 1999, alongside Brian Jones of Britain, he completed the first nonstop, round-the-world flight in a hot-air balloon. The duo prevailed over a number of competitors, including Richard Branson.

Mr. Piccard and his team have already lined up €40 million ($63 million) in sponsorship money from Deutsche Bank, Belgian chemical group Solvay, and Swiss watchmaker (and NASA supplier) Omega. The project also has technological and scientific cooperations with French high-tech firms Dassault and Altran, the European Space Agency, and the Swiss Institute of Technology, among others. The project has even received the official patronage of the European Commission, which sees in it "an example of what industry and energy policy makers should be doing to foster energy efficiency and clean mobility."

The first Solar Impulse aircraft, dubbed HB-SIA, is currently under development (picture left: a virtual rendering of what the plane will look like). It will have the weight of a car (a bit less than 2 tons) but the wingspan of an Airbus 320 (about 60 meters; a subsequent version will be 20 meters wider). The wings will be covered with solar cells. Stacks of batteries will store the energy accumulated during daylight to power the four engines at night.

After sunset, the plane will also glide to preserve energy, gradually dropping to 2,000 meters altitude from the cruising level of 8,500, before climbing again. In this scheme, altitude will become a virtual form of energy: The higher they fly during daytime, the longer they will be able to glide during the night. Dawn will be a critical moment: Have they stored enough energy from the day before, and have they been able to glide long enough so that the plane can "encounter" the sun and start recharging the batteries?

The project presents a variety of extreme design and technology challenges, and it may still fly into turbulence. To succeed, Mr. Piccard's team will have to produce or benefit from others' advances in materials and composite structures, which need to be solid and lightweight. They'll also need ultraefficient solar energy capture (cells) and storage (batteries) that don't exist today, along with more-developed aerodynamics and propulsion. "The key is really energy efficiency," explains Mr. Borschberg. "We need to find ways to extract maximal power from minimal energy, and to fly using as little of it as possible."

They will also have to push the boundaries in meteorology, routing and human physiology monitoring. The pilot will be up there alone for days and nights in a row, wearing a special shirt filled with sensors and even a vibrating system that can be remotely activated to wake him up. He will also have to manage his sleep, food intake and other physical needs in a cockpit built to be narrow and spartan, to help keep the airplane light.

Could this technology one day be used on all airplanes? Even Bertrand Piccard doesn't envision solar planes replacing today's aircraft anytime soon. But the Solar Impulse project aims to become a catalyst for the development of solar and other technologies that could lead to future applications in air travel and in areas other than aviation.

A visit to another, sealed-off part of the hangar reveals a skunkworks where cockpit and wings are being assembled, aerodynamics tested, engines miniaturized, software developed, special ultralight and resistant foams shaped into craft parts. Here lies part of the sponsor's interest in supporting the project: The Solvay engineers, for instance, are working on the foams, intended to protect batteries and engines from big temperature differences – and promise significant future commercial applications, should Solar Impulse succeed.

"We want to show people that renewable energy is not a step backwards but a jump into the future," Mr. Piccard told me. "If we can go around the world in a solar aircraft, that means that we can do incredible things with renewables."

EuroScan: Mapping a Country's Political Face

EuroScan, my monthly column for the Innovation&Design section of BusinessWeek Online, has been published yesterday. It discusses how the Swiss newsmagazine L'Hebdo is reinventing election coverage by sending its reporters to stay at candidates' homes and letting readers follow their travels on Google Earth. Here it is:

Journalistic coverage of election campaigns is in need of reinvention. In many countries, it has turned into a festival of sound bites, an endless exegesis of what a candidate says in speeches, position papers, and televised debates rather than who she is or what he does, which are better predictors of future behavior and policy.

A Swiss news magazine has started exploring a new route by sending its reporters to sleep at the candidates' homes, having them blog about it, and connecting it all with an innovative Google Earth extension.

The magazine is L'Hebdo, a French-language weekly published in Lausanne that became known last year for sending all its reporters in rotation to live in a troubled French suburb. The experiment gave birth to one of the most amazing examples of citizen journalism to date, the BondyBlog, now run by a group of young locals.

Over the past three months, L'Hebdo has applied the same formula to its coverage of the Swiss parliamentary election campaigns. Every week, one of the editors, reporters, or contributors to the magazine, regardless of assigned beat, packs a bag of tech gear (laptop with GSM/UMTS/Wi-Fi wireless connectivity; still and video cameras; cell phone) and travels to a different region to follow candidates around, to stay at their houses—and to tell all on a Web site called Blog & Breakfast.

With the Oct. 21 elections still more than a month away, the Hebdo journalists have already spent more than 110 nights in as many candidates' homes. The blog has texts, pictures, videos, and a particularly neat feature (technically a mash-up): Articles and videos are geo-tagged and can be viewed in Google Maps or Google Earth. Switzerland being a place of beautiful landscapes, of mountains and forests and lakeside cities, this allows readers to "navigate" the country visually, following the reporters via maps and aerial pictures and clicking on red Hebdo logos to call up the corresponding article within its geographical context.

Earlier this year, the editors at L'Hebdo (disclosure: I contribute to the magazine but am not involved in this initiative) sat down to discuss their upcoming campaign coverage of reports, investigations, interviews, analysis—the usual magazine fare. Then they started talking about doing something different, an online diary, getting closer to the candidates—the famous ones, as well as the totally unknown or those who don't stand any chance of being elected—to explore their ambitions, talents, characters, doubts.

At a certain point, one editor suggested the best way to learn about a country is to ask the locals for hospitality. Hence, the Hebdo reporters should sleep at the candidates' homes.

The way Titus Plattner, the editor in charge of Blog & Breakfast, recounts it, first the suggestion triggered laughter (with one wag offering "Embedded" as a name for the blog, a reference to the "embedding" of reporters with U.S. military units in Iraq), then worry ("people will misread that for sleeping with the candidates"), then a serious discussion about the boundaries of political journalism. Some feared losing independence and credibility by getting so close to the politicians. Others warned against the people-ization of politics and the downward spiral of gossip and minutiae. But most defended the idea as an original way to tell the story of politics and to help bridge the growing chasm between citizens and politicians by offering ground-floor descriptions of their days, their lives, their houses, their motivation.

It must be explained that here in Switzerland, elective positions, with very few exceptions (such as the federal president and ministers), aren't jobs. They are part-time mandates carried out alongside a person's regular employment. Some expenses are covered, and a basic salary is paid, but politics is still very much a question of personal motivation and conviction, of public service, and of juggling professional and political commitments. Odd as this may sound to an American ear, Swiss politics is characterized by the normalcy of (most) politicians.

So, mid-May, off went the reporters, working on a weekly rotation. Every day they post several stories and pictures; a video in which the candidate they "shadowed" that day expresses one idea in one minute; and a photo of the guest room or the couch where they stayed the previous night. They tell of tagging along with the candidates at meetings with party members, about discussions with designers on campaign logos, or what it's like being at the office to check the day's work. They describe having dinner with families, driving up mountain valleys to participate in local events (and getting to shake hands), or chasing SUVs with young urban environmental activists. It's sociopolitical reportage in the purest form.

Of course, when asked to participate, some candidates say no. But as Blog & Breakfast has become more well known and election day nears, others are calling up offering hospitality.

Blog & Breakfast "is as much a collective portrait of the Swiss political personnel as it is a journey into the political process," says Alain Jeannet, L'Hebdo's editor-in-chief. In other words, what do politics mean today in a country of advanced direct democracy such as Switzerland? How does it work? What's the life of an idea? What motivates people to run for (unpaid) office? How does a novice candidate negotiate the smooth party platforms?

The mandate of the reporters/bloggers is not to find flaws in the politicians' position papers, nor to immediately seek the reaction of the other political side: It's to observe, listen, and describe. Despite the proximity, they respect the candidates' privacy, except when private stories are relevant to the campaign coverage. "It's clear for us that sleeping at the candidates' is not voyeurism; it's a way to open a different discussion space," says Plattner.

On the trail, ideas emerge, such as the controversial concept voiced by a young candidate from Zurich of giving citizens voting rights at birth, with parents voting on behalf of the child up to a certain age. This provides a way, argued the candidate, of giving more weight to young families in an aging society. Great personal stories are told. Anecdotes are plentiful. Misunderstandings, too: When a female reporter asked a Swiss-German candidate for hospitality, he appeared confused and replied "but…I'm married!"

The ability to read the blog within online maps and aerial pictures offers an additional layer of information, pinning people to places and visually expressing the country's geographical diversity. Plattner believes in the near future all news will be geo-tagged, carrying not only the location and date, but the hour the story broke or was filed, and the corresponding GPS coordinates. "It's a way to improve transparency and make the personalization of news easier," he says.

For now, his and his colleagues' efforts are providing an unusual, highly original, and insightful portrait of both the noble and the prosaic aspects of contemporary Swiss politics. The experience is also turning into a living lab for a magazine that, like every other print publication, is searching for its online future, and for a newsroom where many journalists are still anxious about the new tools. "With a little training, everybody mastered the wireless, the blogging, and the video," says Plattner.

And mostly, they found the guest rooms austere, but clean and comfortable.

Like Swiss politics.

EuroScan: Videobreakfast with grandma and more unconventional skyping

EuroScan, my monthly column for the Innovation&Design section of BusinessWeek Online, has just been published. It deals with the unconventional ways in which people use Skype and similar free Internet-based voice and video communication services. Here the full column:

Give people unlimited cheap or free phone or voice-over-Internet service and what happens? Not much, according to research by sociologists and anthropologists. People don't tend to increase the number or length of their calls significantly. There is only so much time you can spend talking, after all, and a phone call requires more commitment in terms of attention than, say, an instant messaging session—just try handling multiple phone conversations in parallel.

Yet there are exceptions. The rise of Skype, MSN, GoogleTalk, iChat and the other free Internet telephony and videotelephony services out there has led people to use voice and video communication in surprising, unconventional, and creative ways.

Here, for instance, are two anecdotes culled from the Skype Web site:

• An American band that had split up after college wanted to reunite for their 10-year reunion, but three of the musicians resided in California, others in Colorado and Massachusetts. With a few amplifiers and some microphone adaptors they practiced in real-time via Skype, and did the reunion gig.
• A piano teacher in Illinois gives private lessons to students across the U.S., and as far away as Europe and Australia. He mails them the assigned arrangements and then listens to them through his Skype headset.

A few weeks ago I started collecting my own stories and anecdotes through my blog and at conferences I was attending, specifying that I was not interested in traveling businessmen keeping in touch with the office, which I considered a "normal" use of Skype. I was looking for more unpredictable uses, and I found plenty:

• An immigrant family from the Balkans living in Switzerland has a big computer screen in their living/dining room, with a Web cam focused on the dining table. The MSN messenger window is open all day, for incoming messages or calls from family back home or friends who migrated to other countries. And almost every morning they have breakfast "with" grandma (the husband's mother) who lives in Kosovo with a similar Webcam set-up.
• A girl in Switzerland, the daughter of immigrants from Spain, gets regular video-over-Internet tutoring from her aunt, a teacher who lives in Spain.
• Several evenings a week, a retired grandfather in New York reads bedtime stories to his young grandson in California over Skype.
• After hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans, a group of activists from around the world used SkypeIn and SkypeOut (the features that allow Skype users to communicate with normal phone users and vice-versa) to set up a virtual phone bank and messaging center. Collaborating also with ham radio operators, they relayed emergency messages in and out of the devastated region, let people ask for information, or just let them reach a friendly voice. The phone bank was staffed by volunteers from India, Europe, the Middle East and the U.S.
• Kid Lucky, an MC in New York, uses Skype to jam with beatboxer Zede in Switzerland.
• VeeSee TV is a British Web-based TV service airing news and other programs tailored to deaf viewers, using British Sign Language (BSL). Via Web cams, viewers chat freely on the channel's Web site in their native sign languages.
• Parents use Skype as a baby-monitoring application by keeping the Skype channel open on a laptop placed in the baby's room while they are working on their computer in another room.
• Customers are starting to use Skype to call help desks and customer service departments so that, if they receive poor service, they can record the calls using plug-in software that stores Skype conversations as audio files.
• Language schools are offering lessons with native teachers or tutors. A U.S. or European student learning Chinese, for example, can work directly with a teacher in Shanghai. The lessons come as a downloadable podcast, while conversations with the teacher happen over Skype.

Needless to say, these are all uses of Skype, MSN, and similar services that the engineers who developed them never intended, and the marketers never foresaw.

There is a whole history of this type of adaptation, stretching back to Edison and Antonio Meucci and probably beyond. More recently, the inventors of the Internet and the developers of the Web didn't set off to create a network that would one day be used to connect avatars, stream videos, and book flights. It's a testament to the openness and flexibility of their inventions that these uses are possible.

This leads to a speculation: Successful communication technologies are those that are designed with this openness at their core, so that their real applications can be figured out not by the developers or the sellers, but by the actual users.

Home truths about telecoms

I have written a story for this week's Economist on how anthropologists investigate the use of communication technology, discussing some of the findings of two of them, Jan Chipchase of Nokia and Stefana Broadbent of Swisscom. The article is on the Economist website.

EuroScan: Reinventing the wheel – and the car

EuroScan, my monthly column for the Innovation&Design section of BusinessWeek Online, is published today here. It reports on a test-drive of the Hy-Light, a zero-emission fuel-cell car developed in Switzerland that drives 130 km/h and refuels at a solar-powered pump that may one day be a household appliance. Here the full column.

While every carmaker in the world is tailing the successful Toyota Prius by developing low-emission hybrid models of various kinds (flex-fuel; gasoline-electric; gasoline-natural gas; gasoline-hydrogen), the real innovation in automotive is taking place in a nondescript industrial building on the outskirts of the Swiss town of Fribourg.

There, recently, Pierre Varenne sat me behind the wheel of a small prototype called Hy-Light (picture right) and told me to drive. I found myself in a silent car with great speed and acceleration and amazing stability, but no gear box, clutch, or anti-roll bar. And it produces zero air pollution. As we stopped beside a group of solar panels, Varenne pointed and said: "That's the fueling station."

Switzerland may seem an unlikely home for the reinvention of the auto industry, since there are no Swiss carmakers. Yet that also frees Varenne from the pressures of domestic car and oil conglomerates, creating an ideal environment for his project. This soft-spoken engineer with sharp opinions believes that the only way to truly reinvent the car and make it sustainable is to also reimagine the system that procures the energy to power it. "We need to create 'clean' cars as well as 'clean' ways to generate the energy," he says.

Working for tiremaker Michelin, Varenne runs a small group of researchers who are really thinking differently about the future of the car and of mobility. And they have a real car to show, not just a concept: The Hy-Light is registered with the Swiss department of motor vehicles (hence, it complies with all existing regulations), carries a regular plate, and has been discreetly travelling the Swiss roads and highways and showing up at specialized fairs for a couple of years now.

The Hy-Light is a car built around a hydrogen fuel cell, meaning it generates electricity through a basic chemical reaction involving hydrogen and oxygen. The gases are stored in two specially developed tanks (the hydrogen is pressurized and its tank can withstand the direct shot of a Swiss Army rifle). Probably the only drawback of the vehicle's design is the need to fill two tanks, which currently takes roughly eight minutes total.

The Michelin prototype is a catalog of clean-tech innovations. The key novelty is its "active wheel": the electric motors (which weigh a few kilos each) and the suspensions are lodged inside the wheels (picture left). "We have designed a system made of a central energy production unit (the fuel cell) and two or four peripheral energy usage units (the motors in the wheels)," explains Pierre Varenne. "In between, there are only electric cables."

The fuel cell used in the Hy-Light prototype was developed by the Paul Scherrer Institute, a leading Swiss research center. What sets it apart from most other automotive fuel cells (such as the one in the GM Sequel) is that it uses pure oxygen from a tank. Most fuel cells suck oxygen from the surrounding air, but that approach requires an onboard compressor and a system for controlling air quality — all of which lowers the efficiency of the power system. According to Varenne, the Hy-Light method increases the efficiency of the fuel cell by almost one-third. Michelin is now working on the next iteration of the fuel cell.

Electric motors have an advantage in that they can become energy generators. In the case of the Hy-Light, when the car slows down or the driver brakes, the kinetic energy produced by the vehicle's motion is captured and stored, to be released when the driver accelerates. The energy is stored in supercapacitors: an ingenious compromise between a battery (which can store a lot of energy but isn't good at delivering bursts of power) and traditional capacitors (which offer phenomenal power but little storage). Made by Maxwell in Switzerland, this technology increases the car's power for acceleration without increasing its energy consumption.

The Hy-Light is packed with sensors that relay data to a central processor controlling the motors and the suspension. When I drove it, I took some turns at high speed, and was surprised by the car's stability. The electronics in the wheels, I was told by Pierre-Alain Magne, the engineer/test pilot, are designed to monitor the stress of rounding a corner and to compensate for brake pitching.

While the advantages of lodging the engines and a lot of electronics in the wheels are clear, the design also raises a question: By putting these systems closer to the ground, doesn't the design expose them to water, snow, mud, and shocks? Varenne acknowledges that that's something they haven't thoroughly tested yet.

In its current incarnation, the Hy-Light weighs 850 kilograms, maxes out at 130 km/h (80 miles-per-hour), can accelerate to 100 km/h in less than 12 seconds, and can travel 300 km on one tank (well, two). This compares to a mass-produced medium-sized car. The key difference: To travel 100 km, the Hy-Light uses the energy-equivalent of less than 2.5 liters, or half a gallon, of gasoline, and its only byproduct is steam, created when the hydrogen and oxygen are combined.

Beyond working on the car, Varenne and his team have their eyes set on something bigger. When it comes to the future of mobility, the really tricky thing is the fueling and charging infrastructure. They see the car as a piece of a larger energy puzzle, and are trying to devise ways to power it in the least invasive and most sustainable way possible. Currently, hydrogen accounts only for about 1% of world energy consumption (industrial purposes count for most of that) and is produced mostly from natural gas, oil, or coal. Less than 5% is extracted through electrolysis—the process by which water is split into hydrogen and oxygen by an electric current.

Given the size of the oceans, water is the most abundant, and most obvious, future source of hydrogen. Yet with current technology, the amount of electricity required to extract the hydrogen makes the resource inefficient. Here lies the paradox: While we know how to mix hydrogen and oxygen to produce electricity and steam (the process of a fuel cell), we can't yet efficiently do the process in reverse—use electricity to split water into H2 and O2. "Unfortunately, no one has been able yet to figure out a fuel cell that could work both ways," says Varenne.

Instead, the Michelin engineers teamed up with the innovative regional electric utility in Fribourg, Groupe E, to install 55 square meters of solar panels on their premises—the "refueling station" that Varenne had showed me. The energy generated powers an electrolyzer that splits enough water into oxygen and hydrogen to run the car for 20,000 km (12,500 miles) a year.

In other words, covering a portion of a house's roof with solar panels would be enough to power the average Westerner's annual driving needs (depending on how you measure them: Europeans drive some 9,000 miles a year; Americans about 13,000), while emitting only steam.

And consider that Fribourg is hardly the sunniest place in Switzerland.

Groupe E is heavily invested in the development of higher-efficiency, smaller-size electrolyzers. The one used for the Hy-Light is the size of a small garage: "We're working on getting it down to the size of a washing machine," says Groupe E CEO Philippe Virdis. The metaphor isn't random: Virdis' vision is that over time "every Swiss will be able to produce the energy for his own home and car," through a combination of solar panels, a home electrolyzer, and a fuel cell. "It's a totally different approach than the current centralized, hierarchical energy production and distribution system: a decentralized, renewable, sustainable one."

It's also a totally disruptive approach. It will take a moment before the Hy-Light and the electrolyzer-as-household-appliance reach marketability. Still, the Michelin engineers set off to reinvent the wheel and, with their partners, they're now showing that it's possible to rethink both the car and the whole energy-supply system.

"Don't speak. Point!" - Three ingredients of the future of journalism

A few weeks ago I wrote an essay for the first issue of Knight Forum, a new online magazine aimed at examining the transformations in journalism and/in communities, published by the Knight Foundation in Miami. Here it is:

At a recent conference in California, Ethan Zuckerman, the Harvard-based co-founder of GlobalVoices and an insightful blogger, was asked whether newspaper and television editors were still relevant in these days of participatory, "citizen" journalism.

He offered the best answer I've heard so far on that question: "Don't speak. Point!" By which he meant: the days of journalists and editors "speaking on behalf of people" or "speaking to people" are over.

"Point to people and get out of the way," he said.

A pretty radical statement. But Zuckerman didn't mean that the days of editors and journalists are past. He was rather suggesting that with facts, information and opinions circulating freely and broadly, their role is changing into that of facilitator, coach, flow organizer.

The new power of editors and journalists will depend on their ability to take on new tasks: to animate a group of people; to develop ways to organize how information is gathered and used, with the participation of what used to be called "the audience;" and to help people navigate an information landscape that's increasingly crowded and constantly shifting.

If it sounds confusing -- and scary to some in the media -- that’s because it is. Nobody really knows how this emerging immediate, unmediated world will develop. But two things seem clear to me.

1) "Old media" and "new media" are not antagonistic but complementary, and engaged in a dialectical exploration that will change both.

2) Nobody holds the recipe for how a local newspaper or a national television network will reinvent itself in an environment of bloggers and amateur video-producers. We're heading toward a chaotic decade and a massive readjustment, with loosely organized groups gaining leverage in a fast-paced, ambiguous media landscape, while structured organizations come increasingly under pressure. We will have to figure out things as we go.

Here’s how Georgina Henry -- who after 16 years on the print side of The Guardian now edits the newspaper’s collective blog Comment is Free -- describes the new landscape: "The randomness, that sense of never quite knowing who's going to post when and what, is both the joy of the new site and slightly scary. It's the lack of control you feel you have at times - and control, I realise, is one of the hardest things for editors to cede."

Here are three ideas of things to come, three likely ingredients of the future of journalism. I have no pretense of being exhaustive (there are many more), and of course I'm totally open to contradiction. But as we work on figuring this out, these are the kind of trends that will transform the profession and its place in society in ways that are radical, risky and exhilarating. They demonstrate that journalists are not going away -- but also that they need to change.

THE ASSEMBLED MEDIA - The video below shows The New Yorker's Malcom Gladwell speaking at the TED conference. Gladwell discusses spaghetti sauce. That's not what's relevant here (although do watch the video if you have time: it's 18 minutes of fabulous storytelling and you will learn a lot).

The reason why I'm showing this video is because I want to briefly discuss the importance of embedding and, through it, describe a critical structural shift in the media. The dictionary says that "embedding" means "to implant something within something else so it becomes an ingrained or essential characteristic of it." As you can see, Gladwell's video appears as an integral component of this article, and it can be played within this web page just by clicking on the "play" button.

Yet, it is not hosted on Knight Foundation’s server. We have not had to upload it, we have not shot nor produced nor edited it. You don’t need to download it or follow a link or do anything other than click "play." That's because the video is an embedded element. Despite the fact that it appears as part of this page, it actually comes straight from the TEDtalks server. All we had to do to include it in Knight Forum is copy/paste a string of code. That's it. It doesn't get much easier. And we could have picked millions of other videos from hundreds of other sources.

This is a powerful illustration of what is currently happening online: leveraging the full potential of the Web by building coherent ensembles from disparate elements. That's what techies call "Web2.0." This brings us back to the original vision for the Web of its inventor, Tim Berners-Lee: "anything being potentially connected to anything."

For bloggers, or for MySpace users, and for everyone having a presence online - including the news media - suddenly it has become extremely easy to incorporate features from other sources into their sites. Embedding one element within another is only one of the multiple ways of doing this (mashups and remixes would be others, for instance), but it makes linking look old school.

Embedding is a win-win situation: You upload something and embed it in your blog: Somehow it becomes "yours" --part of your own blog, of your story, of your online persona -- while remaining "theirs." It maintains their format and branding and extends their reach into your audience. Whatever way you turn it, that's extremely powerful. And—regardless of whether you're an individual with a laptop or a large media organization—it heralds a new way of creating, of assembling really, a news or entertainment product. The potential is virtually infinite.

THE READ-WRITE MEDIA - The collision of new technologies and media is making the "audience" more involved; the tools to gather, treat and distribute information are now in the hands of multitudes. This is transformative.

The media, in the words of Dan Gillmor, founder of the Center for Citizen Media, are shifting from a "read-only" system to a "read-write" one. The most remarkable aspect of the interactive digital environment is indeed the progressive vanishing of the lines dividing the producer and the consumer of information, the writer and the reader. People with cameraphones are always more likely than professional journalists or photographers to be where the news happens, when it happens (witnessing, for example, 9/11, the tsunami and the London bombings, pictured here - photo Alexander Chadwick/AP).

The phenomenon is not exactly new: one of the most famous video footages, the Zapruder film of John F. Kennedy's assassination, was exactly that: an act of random, amateur journalism. Nowadays people routinely carry photo and video devices and have access to the Web. The Zapruders of our time populate YouTube and MySpace and blogs and other similar places that are capturing their creativity and allowing its expression. Says Gillmor: "Imagine if we had 500 video witnesses of Kennedy's motorcade, and they were all connected to a digital network. We would have a very different understanding of that event. Well, that's what's coming".

But it's not coming by self-assembly. It needs nurturing if it is to make social sense and do more good than harm. In a recent game of "oldthink vs newthink" prompted by Mark Glaser at PBS MediaShift, Erik Sundelof, a Reuters Digital Vision Fellow, submitted the following:

Oldthink: We [journalists] create the content on our websites.
Interimthink: Everyone contributes to the site.
Newthink: Everyone can contribute to a site with "some slight editing." This "slight editing" can be done either by the community or by a selected group of editors [chosen] from the contributors. Many forms are available but still the editing part is crucial for most websites.

Sundelof offers here a crucial insight in the way media are developing. Despite the rhetoric of participation, most of the successful websites or blogs (and even some print publications) that have leveraged the participative model so far have done so by introducing some "soft structure."

The same is true, by the way, for all successful open-source software projects. "Just getting a lot of people posting [or writing code] is in itself not the solution," writes Sundelof. It just increases the level of noise, drowning the signal. So it seems that we're heading toward different forms of hybrid media, where a thin layer of structure is put on an expanding boiling pot of ideas, opinions, analysis, fact-gathering, fact-checking, reporting and creativity done by both professionals and amateurs.

The challenge, of course, will be to create that structure, to do that "slight editing" without choking the energy and the creativity in the boiling pot.

THE MEDIA AS PLACES - One of the most abused terms of the last decade is certainly "community". Everyone from paperclip manufacturers to Microsoft these days wants to "build a community." The news media too. What's getting lost in the marketing jargon is the most obvious thing: you don't "build" nor "own" a community. You're part of it, or you're not. The best you can do, as Steve Rubel suggests, is to provide the "operating system" for it -- the context for people to meet and share.

For the media, the direct implication is that the newspaper and the television/radio channel are no longer a mere product --and that they have to relinquish their self-representation as "beacons" or "heralds." They have to become places. Places where people from the community converge, stop by, make connections and come back again to build a common future. Places where most of the social, informational, entertainment and economic value is created not by the journalists and publishers, but by the members of the community.

This is an idea that I've already expressed almost 10 years ago and that many others have also developed. It applies both online and offline: I'm stressing this point because I hear too many unwarranted obituaries for print and for broadcast.

What happens in these places is only partially defined by the "space managers"—the media outlets—and mostly defined by the participants (If you want to study how this works, the "Second Life" synthetic world is a good nascent experimental ground). Providing news and information is part of it, and the tools also matter, but mostly it's about allowing connections. Content has a social role; it becomes a pretext to create social networks. People don't connect in a void, they connect by sharing experiences or objects, and content (news, videos, pictures, music, links, books, games, opinions, etc.) is an extremely powerful social object.

This, by the way, is the intent of Knight Foundation's 21^st Century News Challenge: encourage the exploration of ways to connect communities using digital media. Because, of course, the most powerful content of all, is people themselves. A key role of the media in the future will be to provide the places—to become the platform—for people to link what they know with who they know, and to expand both their knowledge and their network.

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What does all this say about the future of journalism? At least three things. First, journalists will be around for a long time. Secondly, they need not fear what's coming because it will be exciting and vastly expand their possibilities. But, thirdly, they will need to reinvent themselves as a skilled part of a crowd rather than as lecturers, to become more tolerant of ambiguity, to become fluent in both the tech innovations and the shifts in social dynamics that are driving the development of media.

There is a whole new media ecosystem growing around us. Its contours are still fuzzy, and will remain so for a long time. Its operating words will be social, hybridization, sharing, complementarity. If we do this right, the quality of information will go up. And so will the quality of public debate. What else is journalism here for?

UPDATE 19 April -- Peter Childs at Pete's View links some of these thoughts to those expressed by Ethan Zuckerman in a recent video posted on the P2P Foundation site. Interesting.

The design of solar

EuroScan, my monthly column for the Innovation&Design section of BusinessWeek Online, is published today. It discusses a beautiful lamp that runs on solar energy -- and how it was designed. Here it is:

I recently moved into a top-floor apartment and have been looking for solar lamps that I could use on the roof deck, which is bathed in sunlight all day—a never-ending source of free energy. I wanted a lamp that would store power during the day and release it at night, when I may be having dinner with friends or reading a book in the evening's breeze. Yes, I know solar lamps don't come cheap, but at least there's no need to run wiring, and maintenance requirements are low.

What I found was initially pretty disappointing — uninteresting and tacky plastic or metal objects made to be tucked away in garden corners and along walkways, installed on posts or pedestals, or mounted on wall fixtures, making their presence felt only when they lit up.

Moreover, most of the available options featured only a small area of solar cells, and hence a relatively modest battery duration. When I found ones with bigger solar-cell surfaces, they looked like upside-down shovels. While there are now several LED lamps by world-class designers—such as Yves Behar's Leaf and Richard Sapper's Halley — solar lighting seemed stuck in the realm of engineering.

Then I discovered Damian O'Sullivan's prototype for a "Solar Lampion" and I'm wondering how fast he can get it into production. I want one. It's the first example I know of great design applied to solar lamps. The pictures below show how it looks. The design is visibly inspired by natural organic structures such as pine cones, but it is somehow reminiscent also of Chinese paper lampions—which he has explored in a great many successive sketches that he made available to me.

The most innovative characteristic of the design is that instead of combining a lamp with a solar cell, he has created a lamp made of solar cells. This not only provides a large surface for capturing the sun's energy but gives the lamp its distinctive look.

The lamp's 30 off-the-shelf, 25-sq. cm solar cells are mounted on injection-molded plastic crowns stacked on top of each other. Each crown holds six cells inclined towards the sun, and is rotated 30 degrees from the layer above, creating the faceted cylindrical form that ensures the lampion will catch the sun's rays no matter which direction they are coming from. Each cell is then coupled with a white LED tucked under the frame along the cell's top edge. The rechargeable battery, which stores the energy, is hidden inside this frame, which is otherwise empty. And a simple handle allows it to be carried easily or hung from a tree branch.

A 38-year-old Franco-Irish designer living in the Netherlands, O'Sullivan has created bags and tie racks for French luxury brand Hermès, tech gadgets for Dutch manufacturer Philips, and shoes for Spanish brand Camper, among others. He said during a phone interview last week that in its current stage, the Lampion can collect enough energy on a sunny day to give light for 24 hours.

Not only is it a beautiful object, it's the first lamp design that makes the solar cells an integral part of the form. It also suggests that solar lighting—that "alternative" technology typically housed in ungainly forms—is starting to be considered a dignified field for cutting-edge designers.

EuroScan: Zattoo, the new kid in online TV

EuroScan, my monthly column for the Innovation&Design section of BusinessWeek Online, is published today. It discusses a Swiss startup, with a service currently in beta, that has so far remained discreet but is getting ready to enter the soon-to-be-hot field of online TV. Here it is:

I don't own a TV set but I do have the BBC and CNN and the major channels from various European countries running live on a corner of my laptop screen -- thanks to Zattoo.

Online video is one of the hottest trends of the moment, pushed by the convergence of broadband, compression algorithms, and sites for sharing clips and more. Yet so far, TV broadcasters have viewed the Internet with lots of skepticism, for example asking YouTube to remove files of broadcast shows, despite the fact that such user-led, viral marketing tends to boost a show's popularity.

Rare are the broadcasters, in Europe or the U.S., that let you view programs in full online. Their often sophisticated Web sites are meant to attract online ad money, rather than to deliver video feeds to the online audience.

But here's a safe prediction: That will soon change as demand for longer, high-quality, online video content grows. And the technology that will make it happen may come from Europe.

Unless you've been on an extended exploration of the deep sea for the last couple of months, you've probably heard of Joost, the online TV venture. Founded by the Swede Niklas Zennström and the Dane Janus Friis (the pair famous for having disrupted music distribution with Kazaa and telecommunications with Skype), Joost is being generously covered by "old" and "new" media alike. The startup is currently running an invitation-only beta test with a few thousand people (it runs only on PCs and Intel-based Macs for now) and is busy signing licensing agreements with content owners, such as broadcasters.

Zattoo is a similar effort. The legal service streams live TV content (including everything a channel airs) to your computer. And while the one-year-old startup, based in Zurich, may be the underdog, it deserves some ink as well. Their service is currently in beta too (so the images sometimes flicker, depending on your bandwidth) and for legal reasons it is geographically limited.

If you're not based in Switzerland, you won't be able to download their software yet (though you can sign up for an e-mail alert when it's made available in other countries, which I'm told will happen within days, starting with Britain and Denmark). If you are in Switzerland and want to try it out now, just go to their site and register, download the software, and start watching (it runs on PCs and all Macs and soon Linux).

The Zattoo interface is a simple window with a volume controller, a stop button, and a menu of channels; to change the channel, click on the one you want. The technology behind it is, in contrast, rather complex. It was originally developed at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor by professor Sugih Jamin to distribute scientific conferences online, and is based on a real-time, peer-to-peer design.

The software that users download is both a client (it allows users to view content) and a proxy server (if the central server is overloaded with requests, the system "rebalances" the load by streaming some video directly from one user's machine to another watching the same channel). This is very similar to the Skype approach, which transforms some users into "supernodes." Joost is based on this principle, too.

Unlike Joost, Zattoo offers no time-shifting, no search, and no tagging: just old fashioned TV channels -- live and unedited. These will be complemented by additional offerings, such as channels devoted to music, festivals, movies, and so forth. Some will be offered for free, some will be bundled and sold to subscribers á la the cable model. It will also be possible to subscribe to individual channels. Content owners will feel that their rights are adequately protected because no part of the encrypted stream is stored anywhere, and they will receive a fee per user, just as cable operators do today.

Neither Zattoo nor Joost will allow programs to be recorded, but given the TiVo experience, I suspect that a "save as MPEG" button will be very high on the list of future features requested by users or future plug-ins developed by independent programmers. Although for either company, implementing the feature would create a legal minefield.

With both Zattoo and Joost, TV is uncoupled from TV sets. Get Zattoo and you can watch a local or national channel at the office or on the go -- basically anywhere you can establish a broadband connection. The word "zattoo" means "big crowd" in Japanese. For now, it has about 150,000 beta users in Switzerland with other countries, including the U.S., on tap.

When both services exit beta testing and are released to the world, Joost will have a huge advantage: The 100 million-plus people already using Skype will almost certainly receive an unsolicited e-mail from the founders. That will make for an interesting big vs. small, fast vs. faster race.

EuroScan: A Big Bang of innovation

EuroScan, my monthly column for the Innovation&Design section of BusinessWeek Online, is published today. It describes a visit to the site of the world's most powerful particle accelerator, at CERN in Geneva, and discusses the technology of this most ambitious scientific experiment, aimed at re-creating the conditions of the first moments after the Big Bang and possibly finding an elusive particle.