Lunch over IP

So maybe spam is not inevitable

2008-11-15T15:48:25+01:00

Unfortunately it won't last long, but if a single journalist and blogger could do this (Brian deserves much applause) maybe a concerted effort could bring cleaner mailboxes and render e-mail useful and reliable again. (First paragraph of a November 12 story by Good Morning Silicon Valley, read the full post here - thx MB for the link):

If your e-mail in-box suddenly seems to be missing its normal quota of spam today, you can thank Brian Krebs, who writes the SecurityFix blog for the Washington Post. In his own personal mission to comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable, Krebs dug up enough dirt on San Jose’s spammer-friendly Web hosting company McColo to persuade its two major Internet providers to cut it off. By the reckoning of some Web security experts, McColo’s facilities were used to spew out as much as 75 percent of the world’s junk e-mail daily and its client list included a Who’s Who of notorious cybercrime gangs involved in a wide range of spamming and scamming. Krebs spent four months building a case before taking his findings to McColo’s providers. Both were apparently spurred to action. Global Crossing wasn’t discussing its response publicly, but Hurricane Electric’s Benny Ng told Krebs, “We shut them down. We looked into it a bit, saw the size and scope of the problem you were reporting and said ‘Holy cow!’ Within the hour we had terminated all of our connections to them.” By this morning, McColo’s Web site and all its IP addresses were unreachable.

Oceans, space, and music: the 2009 TED Prize winners

2008-10-20T20:35:19+02:00

Star oceanographer Sylvia Earle, SETI's director and astronomer Jill Tarter, and maestro and Venezuelan youth orchestra founder José Antonio Abreu are the winners of the 2009 TED Prize. Each wins $100,000 plus "One Wish to Change the World." Their wishes will be unveiled at TED2009 in February. More details here.

Housing, energy, sanitation: the Curry Stone Design Prize winner

2008-10-20T20:32:58+02:00

The Curry Stone Prize for humanitarian design was handed out in Louisville recently. The winners (US$ 100'000 plus recognition at the Venice Architecture Biennale) were Luyanda Mphahlwa and Mphethi Morojele, two architects from South Africa for their design of energy-efficient homes made using timber and sandbags for infill for a Cape Town family.
The other finalists were Shawn Frayne, inventor of the Windbelt, the world's first non-turbine wind-powered generator; Wes Janz, architect and associate professor at Ball State University, Indiana, whose work is inspired by the ingenuity of slum dwellers who build shelters from scavenged materials; Marjetica Potrc, an artist and architect whose "dry toilet" design, which converts human waste to fertilizer, is now used in barrios in Caracas, Venezuela; and Antonio Scarponi, an architect whose project, "Dreaming Wall," casts text messages on a wall in Milan, using technology and design to "jam" conventional social orders and illuminate the socio-political lines that unite and divide us.
Wayne Hall has a great write-up of the award ceremony, full of details.

Announcing TEDGlobal 2009 in Oxford

2008-10-17T17:25:00+02:00

We just opened registrations for TEDGlobal, which will be held in Oxford on 21-24 July 2009. The conference will go under the theme "The Substance Of Things Not Seen" and will feature more than 40 remarkable speakers presenting over the course of the four days. The whole TED team is buzzing with excitement for this event. TEDGlobal is TED's twin conference, with the same focus on identifying novel voices and bringing to the stage inspired ideas, experiences, technologies, and performances -- with an even stronger international perspective.

I'm currently working on the program, designing it to explore and make visible the substance of things that run unseen through our lives. These hidden forces -- social conventions, biological links, cultural frameworks, coded meanings, complex processes, creative impulses, scientific speculations, software, networks, infrastructure -- are the connective tissue that binds societies together and the engines that propel organizations forward. When illuminated, they offer vital insights into our relationship with each other and our world.

Confirmed speakers at this point include two of the world's most celebrated writers; a scholar with a radically new idea about development; a mathematician and a neuroscientist who are redefining the way we see the world; a visionary aviator; a Capuchin monk; a former child soldier; a designer who creates out of thin air; a leading global business thinker; one of the biggest names in contemporary art; a photographer of the invisible; experts from the hottest regions of the world and the underworld; plus many other leaders in business, science, technology, entertainment and the arts. The full program will be unveiled about two months before the event.

Oxford is a one-of-a-kind environment that for centuries has championed the power of reason, fostered open-minded discussions and forged new directions in the search for understanding. TEDGlobal will be finely woven into the Oxford landscape. Most sessions will take place at the Oxford Playhouse, with special events at the distinctive Sheldonian Theatre, historic Keble College, the Museum of Natural History, and the Malmaison Hotel -- the newly renovated hotel that was once a Victorian prison.

And: During the 24 hours preceding and following the conference, attendees will be offered a series of visits, discoveries and special programs, including a tour of Bletchley Park (think Alan Turing and the Enigma machine) and punting on the river Cherwell. We'll also hold a half-day TED University, where attendees have the opportunity to give short lectures on their areas of expertise.

The registration fee for TEDGlobal is US$4,500. Seating at the Playhouse is extremely limited. Hope to see many of you there, it will be an awesome conference.

Picnic Green Challenge 2008: The Winner

2008-09-25T23:07:00+02:00

The winner of the Picnic Green Challenge 2008 was announced today at the Picnic conference in Amsterdam (I have served as member of the jury and hosted the finalists' presentations today).

The four finalists were:

Greensulate, an insulation material made of agricultural and other organic waste bound by organic resins (fungi) and designed to remplace synthetic products such as styrofoam in construction, packaging and more. Project submitted by Ecovative Design of the US and presented in the finalists' round by CEO Eben Bayer.
RouteRank, a web tool that finds the best routes, integrating road, rail and air transport, and ranks them according to the criteria defined by the users, such as duration, cost and CO2 emissions. Project submitted by RouteRank of Switzerland and presented by CEO Jochen Mundinger.
Smartscreen, a shading system for windows and glass facades built with smart material and which doesn't require any electricity to operate. Project submitted by DeckerYeadon in New York and presented by architect Peter Yeadon.
VerandaSolar, plug-and-play solar panels that can simply attach to windowsills or balconies, allowing anyone even with space constraints to use solar energy. Project submitted by VerandaSolar of the US and presented by co-creator Capra J'neva.

And the winner is ... well, there were two. Greensulate was declared the winner of the PGC08 -- and received the 500'000 euros of the prize, offered by the Dutch Postcode Lottery (the money will have to be used to develop the tecnology). But the jury surprised everybody by creating a special runner-up prize of 100'000 euros that went to VerandaSolar. (In the picture, Bayer and J'neva; Press release here.)

Congrats to the winner(s) and the other finalists!

Picnic08: The Power Of Mass Creativity

2008-09-24T15:20:00+02:00

(Running notes from the Picnic conference in Amsterdam. I will be moderating several sessions, so will be blogging the conference only partially.)

Charles Leadbeater (author of "We-Think" -- watch his TEDtalk) is the opening speaker and talks about the new dynamics of creativity and innovation. He shows a video from YouTube with a kid playing guitar (face of the kid covered with a cap), which got 49 million views. "Imagine this kid trying to get a meeting with the BBC's head of entertainment: he would never get past the entry door". "The traditional media landscape is like a beach with boulders, the BBC boulder, the News Corp boulder; some sometimes join to create even biggest boulders. Now the beach is a rising tide of pebbles, and many people are coming and dropping their pebble on the beach: basically we are all in the pebble business now. The models of the future are about how we link these pebbles together to create added value, to create something that it's more than a loose assembly. Can we match a growing capacity to participate, to contribute, with our ability to collaborate, to build, to make more complex and durable products?"
Charles tells the story of ILoveBees, the viral game/teaser used in 2004 to launch the videogame Halo 2 (see the detailed story on Wikipedia) and which gathered 600'000 participants. "If we take this newfound capacity for collaboration and we attach it to worthy goals, what could that yield? What we've got are new options, new ways of organizing ourselves. Most creativity is collaborative anyway, it comes from people mixing and blending ideas together. But not all collaboration yields creativity". What prompts collaborative creativity?

Diversity.
New and easy ways to allow people to contribute.
Ways to connect people together and to build on one-another.
A shared sense of purpose and some individual sense of payoff, that they're getting something in return as they're contributing to something larger.
Usually there is a core or kernel that's put there to begin with (the initial Linux software for ex)
Structure: these communities won't work unless they can make decisions, so they need to have some elements of structure (think Wikipedia).

Charles describes how the scientific process is developing. "Science is increasingly a hugely collaborative activity, even very specific scientific activities. If you look at the kind of tools young scientists and engineers are using to collaborate, you get a glimpse into the future. What these lead users are telling us is that the future is all gonna be about our activity to collaborate, to pull together the diversity of knowledge and insight that we need to make that possible". What does that mean? "For most of my life, we have worked and being served by organizations that should do things for you but often actually do things to you. The logic of the Web is "with", how to work with people, how to learn together. If you want a very simple way to think of the current shift, it's that difference: from the world of "to" and "for" to the world of "with" and "by"." "Is this just a passing moment, a fleeting fad? Or is it a possible permanent change in how we organize ourselves? And if it is, can we use that possibility or are we going to screw it up?" "Somebody recently asked to Tim Berners-Lee, the creator of the Web: are we asking too much of the Internet, are we loading too much onto it, bearing the weight of this social transformation? Tim answered: the danger is that we will ask too little from it, that we will reduce it to just another tool".

Clay Shirky ("Here comes everybody" - watch his TEDtalk) comes on stage for a conversation with Leadbeater. They agree that this movement won't be instantaneous: "We've lived the first 10 years of a transformation that will take maybe another 50 years to deploy", says Leadbeater.

Aaron Koblin is the next speaker. He is an artist focusing on the creation and visualization of human systems. "Data systems tell stories about our lives", he says. He talks about several of his projects: the Flight Patterns, the New York Talk Exchange (check it out: shows which cities are communicating with New York over 24 hours, very insightful); the "Sheep Market" project, 10'000 sheep (one of which on the image) drawn by random strangers using Amazon's task-distribution mechanims Mechanical Turk. He "collected" 11 drawings per hour over 40 days; the quickest "artist" took 4 seconds, the slowest 46 minutes (average: 105 seconds). Another project: Ten Thousand Cents, which asked people to participate in making a drawing without knowledge of the overall project (it was a reproduction of a 100 dollars bill, but everybody only got to reproduce a tiny bit, a "cent"). He talks about House of Cards, where lasers and sensors are used to scan the band Radiohead into a three-dimensional particle-driven data experience -- a very different kind of videoclip... (see videos here on YouTube, or get the code here and play with it). And finally he shows a recent project mapping out SMS usage in Amsterdam based on KPN data. (BG: great projects, but a little frustration: Aaron doesn't draw any conclusion, any insight from this work and its impacts/meanings).

links for 2008-09-15

2008-09-16T00:01:44+02:00

Spit Party

23andme, the Silicon Valley DNA testing company with investment by Google, seem to have found a new way to promote its services: "Spit parties". They hosted one in the middle of NY Fashion Week, filled with celebrities -- many of whom filled tubes with saliva for a test. The company, says the NYT story, "hopes to make spitting into a test tube as stylish as ordering a ginger martini." Usually, 23andme services are sold online: customers register and pay on a web site — the price of a test was cut by nearly two-thirds to $399 last week — and are sent a testing kit. They spit into a tube, mail it in, and about a month later receive results via a Web account. Now they go to fancy parties, spit into tubes, and discuss "tongue curling".

(tags: 23andme genetics DNA)

links for 2008-09-10

2008-09-11T00:01:54+02:00

The uncanny valley

Nicolas Nova points to the "Uncanny Valley", the concept coined by Japanese roboticist Masahiro Mori to explain why almost-human-looking robots scare people more than mechanical-looking robots: "Stated simply, the idea is that if one were to plot emotional response against similarity to human appearance and movement, the curve is not a sure, steady upward trend. Instead, there is a peak shortly before one reaches a completely human “look” . . . but then a deep chasm plunges below neutrality into a strongly negative response before rebounding to a second peak where resemblance to humanity is complete. This chasm—the uncanny valley of Doctor Mori’s thesis—represents the point at which a person observing the creature or object in question sees something that is nearly human, but just enough off-kilter to seem eerie or disquieting."
Ecuador voters will decide if nature has inalienable rights

This month, Ecuador will hold the world's first constitutional referendum in which voters will decide, among many other reforms, whether to endow nature with certain unalienable rights. Not only would the new constitution give nature the right to "exist, persist, maintain and regenerate its vital cycles, structure, functions and its processes in evolution," but if it is approved, communities, elected officials and even individuals would have legal standing to defend the rights of nature. It sounds like a stunt by the San Francisco City Council. But Ecuador is engaged in nothing less than an effort to redefine the relationship between human beings and the natural world. (from Current - thx MB for the link)

LiftAsia08: Tending towards beauty

2008-09-05T19:15:00+02:00

(Running notes from LiftAsia08, in Jeju, Korea. I am moderating this session, so only partial blogging.)

Jan Chipchase, designer and researcher and anthropologist for Nokia Design, opens the session talking about his work studying how people use technology and how they're influenced by it. Running notes.
More and more of what we use in daily life becomes pocketable, you carry it in pockets and bags.
Pocketable is a step towards technology becoming invisible: we are going to not see alot of technology; not invisible in the sense that it's disappearing into the infrastructure, but in the sense that you will be using it without other people noticing or knowing that you're using it.
When you have objects in people pockets that have similar functionalities, you're gonna see alot of serial solitary interaction (two people watching the same video each on his cell phone, one beside the other, for instance).
There is alot of buzz about sharing -- about YouTube, MySpace, etc. Sharing is inherently human, is generally socially positive, but when you adopt that technology it can raise a question of whether you're opting out of society.
In an era of mass production, tech is getting into people's hands at a younger and younger age: the distance between their social norms and ours (adults) is widening.

Christian Lindholm (wireless guru from Finland) asks: what do digital nomads tell us about the future? Defining mobility: contextual variables; ergonomic variables; physical variables:

The product-maker has to create beauty. What is beauty? Roman architect Vitruvius in 30 BC said: A structure must exhibit firmitas (solid, rugged), utilitas (utility) and venustas (beauty). Another architect, Leon Battista Alberti, defined beauty in 1435: "The adjustment of all parts proportionally, so that one can not add, subtract or change without impairing the harmony of the whole". But you also have to have "oréos", the greek word for "beauty of one's hour", timely beauty.
The Apple iPhone is beautiful, but it really still feels like a prototype.
To see the future, look at the present. We interviewed a group of "elite nomads", the bleeding edge of global travelling users. Here some of the findings:

Data-roaming costs stifle demand; people downgrade to pure voice; they carry several prepaid SIM cards. Reliable Internet connection is like a shade under a palmtree for these digital nomads, it's comfort. Coffee, wi-fi and friends is an invaluable combination for these digital nomads.
Battery life is a constant worry for them. Battery life is the number 1 enemy of convergence: basically everything already works, except that all-in-one runs out of batteries. Power is the digital water. People go to ridiculous length to find the power. What I see more and more is digital divergence -- a phone AND an iPod, separate devices -- and the main reason for this is to two batteries, so that you don't run out of juice in either (for the same reason many Blackberry users have also a cell phone: in order not to run out of battery in either calls or e-mail). My favorite mobile gizmo from Nokia from the last few years is the USB charger (Apple iPods also have one).
Laptops are the only one that are qualified as "tools" by these leading digital nomads; the phone is a read-only device. All the nomads were carrying laptops, and many had also Blackberries and phones and other devices.
This year is the year of bad touch screens (BG: picture of the iPhone behind the speaker). The reason why Apple is so phenomenal is because they have their own screen technology. But the natural evolution of the iPhone is a small sliding QWERTY keyboard. (BG: totally, totally agree: the iPhone will never become a business tool until the keyboard is there).
The Internet builds a base for stronger ties when meeting physically.

Takeshi Natsuno, the father of the first, functioning, successful, large-scale wireless internet system, Japan's i-Mode (there is a whole chapter about it in my book "Roam") also spoke in this session. Unfortunately no time to take notes on his speech.

LiftAsia08: Six Swiss Startups

2008-09-05T15:55:00+02:00

(Running notes from LiftAsia08, in Jeju, Korea)

A session with short presentations ("elevator pitches", really) by 6 young Swiss startups that were selected for a Korea entrepreneurs tour by AlpicT.

Pixelux Entertainment (represented by Raphael Arigoni) started in 2003 and does 3D software for entertainment and movies, based around the physical properties of the objects realized (they call the tecnology "digital molecular matter"). The results are spectacular: think of scenes where anything bends, fractures or breaks: objects realized with Pixelux technology deform and flex in a very realistic way, looking like they would do in the real world rather than looking cartoonish. Arigoni says that the tech also makes realizing these sequences cheaper. They've worked with LucasArt on the "StarWars - The Force Unleashed" game.

Arimaz (represented by Pierre Bureau) works on entertainment robotics. One of their products is Mydeskfriend, a small robot that looks like a Tamagotchi, connected to the Internet; it can read messages and RSS feeds, be a character in games, etc.

Secu4 (represented by Ralph Rimet) develops a protection system for valuables, based on wireless tech. 3300 laptops are forgotten, lost or stolen every week in the 8 biggest airports in the EMEA Europe, Middle East and Africa) zone. The idea of Secu4 is to insert a small bluetooth card, connected with a cell phone. For ex, put the card in your purse. If someone picks up the purse you've put besides your chair; or you forget it there and walk away; as soon as the purse-with-card is out of range (a few meters), the cell phone rings to alert you.

Poken (reprensented by Stephane Doutriaux) is a little keychain accessory. It's a funnily-designed USB key that lets you "touch" another person's poken to connect with that person in social networking sites almost automatically (plug in the USB and automatically upload your new connections, and there you go). It also captures a time stamp of the meeting.

Lighthouse (represented by Robert Tibbs) does security software for cell phones and wireless communications.

KeyLemon (represented by Gilles Florey) has developed an easy-to-use face- and speech-recognition software that can be used through a normal webcam. That allows continuous authentication by face recognition: your computer "recognizes" you. If someone else sits in front of your computer, the software locks it. The software can be downloaded for free from the KeyLemon site (Windows only for now; Mac under development, cell-phone version too, although it needs more powerful processos).

LiftAsia08: Keeping things longer

2008-09-05T12:19:00+02:00

(Running notes from LiftAsia08, in Jeju, Korea)

Raphael Grignani of Nokia Design in San Francisco says: We live in the contrast between infinite human potential and finite Earth resources. There are almost 3 billion mobile phone subscribers in the world, 5 time more than computer.
If there are 3 billion mobile phones out there, there are 3 billion chargers. Energy is lost when the phone is fully recharged but the phone is still plugged into the charger (recharging a phone generally requires less than 2 hours, but many people plug them in overnight for example, or keep them plugged all day at the office). Nokia is testing new designs to automatically switch off the charger after the phone is charged.
Once we have digged all the resources from the underground, we will have to learn to produce with what's already above ground -- recycling, re-making. Is it possible to create a cell phone using nothing new? (He shows the "Remade" prototype).
How do we encourage people to keep things longer? Another project explores how you can update devices digitally, rather than physically; made to last; encouraging a "culture of caring".

On a side note, Grignani announces a new project: Fivedollarcomparison.com, a site asking people to submit example of objects or else that cost the equivalent of 5 dollars. Such as these:

LiftAsia08: Massively parallel, networked, talking cities

2008-09-05T10:25:00+02:00

(Running notes from LiftAsia08, in Jeju, Korea)

Adam Greenfield, of Nokia Design, talks about "the long here, the big now and other tales of the networked city". It's not a tech talk, it's about the emotional aspects of living in a networked city: what it's gonna feel to live there?
I think we can get a decent idea about it by looking at the way people right now are using mobile phones and other contemporary digital artifacts. With mobile we are edging already into a truly ubiquitous experience, "mobiquity".
One of the very first things that I think we can get rid of is the notion that the physical element is the sovereign element in our life. No longer are our choices dictated by the physical space. Think at when we walk around in a shopping mall talking on the phone: our movements are not determined by the architecture around us: it's determined by "where we are", that is, on the cell phone.
Dogma: that which primarily conditions choices and actions in the city is no longer physical, but has become the invisible and intangible overlay of networked information that enfolds in the city.
These are some of the potentials that I see happening:
- the long here: layering a persistent and retrievable history of the things that are done and witnessed in a place, onto that place (example: Oakland Crimespotting project; Flickr geotagging, giving geographic coordinates -- GPS -- to pictures),
- the big now: locally, making the total. real-time option space "massively parallel", giving you a sense of all the potential of a city (examples: London's Making bridges talk, by Tom Armitage: hooking up bridges with sensors and interfaces to the web so that they can twit -- Tower Bridge twittering and blogging when it's opening and closing; the idea is for the city to tell what the city is doing; or the New York Talk Exchange, mapping incoming and outgoing phone traffic from and to NY.
- the soft wall: there are less happy consequences, inevitably these technologies will be used to deny or degrade a space, to exclude people, to make them difficult to find, to put them under surveillance, for differential permissioning (some are allowed in, others not).
We will see new patterns of interaction: information about cities and patterns of their use will be visualized in new ways made available locally, on-demand and in a way that can be acted upon (ie. via mobile devices). Nothing in the world is as interesting and useful as information about one place, when you are actually in that place.
We will also see the emergence of addressable and scriptable surfaces around us: façades as interfaces, etc.
We are moving from browsing urbanism to search urbanism. That's really gonna change the way we use the city, from passive consumers of reality to active users of it. What kind of places will those cities turn out to be will be up to us.
Where will this happen first? As Mimi Ito says, every culture has an "alternative technologized modernity", which is proper to it. Each place needs to have to make its own choices about this. Every bus in Helsinki for ex is a Linux server that is constantly broadcasting information about the bus' whereabouts.

Interactive cities visionary Jeff Huang (from EPFL) asks: how can we merge digital/social/interactive technologies with our physical cities to foster better communities? This is a fundamental design question. Good cities is an emergent phenomenon if you get the design of the underlying architecture right. What is really lacking is the way technologies are applied in cities, they're often wrongly designed. The most obvious appearance of ubiquitous technologies are essentially surveillance cameras and media facades (big electronic billboards used to bombard people with commercial messages -- see Times Square). You can compare what's happening in cities with the first generation of what happened on the Web: at the beginning companies had web pages to advertise their products to users; but the Web has moved along. If I had to summarize in one sentence what we have trying to do when we are designing a project for the interactive city, is to push it towards a more empowered, social medium (from passive consumer to empowered urbanite).
Project Listening Wall: a project to give walls ears, so that they can listen to what's happening in the room.
Project Swiss House/Swissnex: a network of 22 "nodes" around the world for Swiss scientists/researchers/creators abroad to connect back to the homeland: each of the buildings are connected, and even "collapsed" (looking at the wall in one is like looking into the space of the other, because that wall is a connected big screen).
Project Seesaw connectivity: learning a new language in airports.
Project Beijing Newscocoons (in the picture above): a set of pulsating objects that live and breathe, displaying user-generated video clips, pictures, stories, and blogs from geographically distant sources and that interact with the people surrounding them.
So the answer to the original question (how to merge digital/interactive with physical cities to foster better communities?): go beyond the passiveness of media facades and surveillance cams; go from passive to interactive, to social, to co-creator; tap into the social and tactile dimension; there are issues (good business model or public good?) and sustainability questions.

Soo-In Yang, a Korean architect working in NY, works on how buildings communicate with each other. Talks about his "Living City" project, a project to link buildings to one another so they can "talk" and share information and even sometimes take collective action. For example we know that in Korea the sand blowing over from China are a problem: so imagine if the buildings on the eastern part of the city could "warn" the buildings downwind so that they could "get ready". These things are possible because of advancements in ubiquitous computing, sensors and chips and wireless connectivity are becoming cheaper, etc.
Other idea: experiment with air and building facades as public spaces. Air is something that everybody shares in a city; measuring and communicate its quality allows to take action. Buildings can be owned by individuals but facades are more difficult to "own" because it belongs in the street. Facades could really become alive and sense things and communicate things and become interactive, that's a further space we could become an ecology of information and interaction.
(Seoul, btw, has sensors measuring air quality, and public information diplays and maps sharing the information in real time).

LiftAsia08: Gadgets, energy, walking

2008-09-04T19:37:00+02:00

(Running notes from LiftAsia08, in Jeju, Korea. I'm moderating this session, so only partial blogging.)

Dan Dubno -- technologist, broadcaster, producer, conference host (the invitation-only Gadgetoff), blogger (Gizmorama), pioneer in the use of graphic and visualization tools on television, and more -- is Mr Gadget. He is the opening speaker of the sustainable development session which, sponsored by WattWatt, is becoming a permanent feature of the Lift conferences. So Dan talks also about (and shows) "green" gadgets -- although, he says, clearly no gadget is really sustainable. Among the things he shows: Brunton solar displays, Solio solar charger ("Much of these things are not totally efficient, but they are symbols for what's possible"), the Kill-a-watt to monitor energy consumption, the Lightcap solar-power bottle, the Steripen to purify water, a GPS cell phone for kids, the Clocky alarm clock for kids, a cell phone signal jammer, the TV-be-Gone that turns off all the remote-controlled TVs within range (imagine doing that in a sports bar in the middle of the action), a USB microscope, the bluetooth sunglasses by Oakley, the Pleo animated dinosaur (image right), a handheld infrared camera, and the Celestron SkyScout telescope, a handheld device that uses GPS to point you to stars -- or to tell you what star you're looking at. "The only one you really need to get", Dan told me.

Philippa Martin-King is one of the people behind WattWatt, a community devoted to discussing and promoting energy efficiency, backed by the International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC) and which features the competition for schoolchildren Care4it. Energy efficienty is the topic of her talk. Running notes: Korea is the seventh biggest consumer of energy in the world (after US, China, Japan, Germany, Russia and India). How do we waste electricity? Stand-by devices, lighting, air conditioning, refrigerators, lights on at home and at work, air-conditioning, refrigerators, etc. Almost 4% of energy in Switzeralnd is produced through burning waste. (BG: this surprises me, it's a rather high number).

Swiss adventurer Sarah Marquis has traveled the world by foot. Europe. Latin America. Australia. She's been walking, solo, for 17 years now, alternating one or two years of travelling and one or two of preparing for the next one, telling her story, and finding sponsors. She crossed Australia (the subject of her first book), traversed Latin America, went fom Mexico to Canada. Her talk is about reconnecting with nature and how to be autonomous when, say, walking across the Australian desert or the Cordillera Andina alone for weeks -- including, because of the many techies in the audience, how to travel in energetic independence. The picture behind her shows a flower in the Australian desert:

Running notes: My trip from Alice Springs to Alice Springs via a tour of Australia took me 17 months for 14'000 km. You cannot carry water and food for that much food, so you have to find it there, catch your own food (lizards, etc). You must be open, but you also need to be a bit hungry, and when you're really hungry you realize that you can do things, because you're ready for something else, for making a further step, even if you don't know what happens there. A journey in the bush starts with nature. After 4 months I get to a stage where I need to change my gear, I need to shower, to eat. So my brother came to meet me at a checkpoint. Why am I going alone? Because that journey is about understanding. When you are in those desert areas, where there is nothing, you learn step by step about yourself, about life, after one month I don't think the same thing than after two months. You can learn tricks before leaving (wrap a tree branch with a plastic bag, and harvest the condensed water; etc) or by observing the way animals do it. I started when I was 17, I did 30'000 km since, but it's not really about distance and performance: it's about what happens there -- hunting with the Aboriginals, for example. There is no real reason for walking -- but no reason for not walking, either. I carry camera, videocamera, GPS, flexible solar panels, I need technology. When you get to the end of a multiple-months 7000-km trip, after all the energy that you've put into it, you don't really want to get there. Next plan: from South Siberia walking across Mongolia, China, the Himalaya range, Nepal, India, Birmania, Malesia, Indonesia, and then back to Australia. I have one year to get ready. (BG: and she's looking for sponsors).

LiftAsia08: Beyond the browser

2008-09-04T17:37:00+02:00

(Running notes from LiftAsia08, in Jeju, Korea)

I'm spending the week on the island of Jeju, in Korea, for the LiftAsia08 conference. The volcanic island has spectacular sites -- lava tubes, tuff craters, dark-grey beaches, and a Unesco heritage mountain right in the middle, mount Hallasan -- and the population is inclined to kindness: the first street sign that you see upon leaving Jeju airport says "We love having you here". The slogan is repeated on billboards around the island, but this first one is not a billboard: it's a blue highway sign, suspended above the lanes, in three languages (English, Korean, and I guess Japanese), as if to indicate a direction.

The island is booming. The hotel we're staying at, on a cliff above the ocean, looks like a spaceship (it might be one: the toilet, called LooLoo, has an electronic command keyboard with 14 keys). The congress center is gigantic. The region proclaims itself "autonomous self-governing", and that's what the local authorities are trying to achieve: become to Korea something like what Hong Kong is to China. The food is an adventure -- and in this domain I'm of the non-adventurer, stick-to-Mediterranean-cuisine type, so I haven't got into the mood for live octopus and other similar delicacies yet. Nor I plan to.

The conference's theme is "Beyond the web browser". The room is full, there are about 400 attendees. After a welcome message from Jeju's governor Kim Tae-hwan, and a short introduction by Seo Young Roh, of the Art Center Nabi in Seoul (which has created some spectacular installations here, under the moniker "Lift Experience", Laurent Haug and Jaewoong Lee give the opening speech, offering an introduction to the conference and discussing "what a mature web will mean for our society". Haug is the founder of Lift (which takes place in Geneva every year, and of which I'm an adviser); Lee is a Korean entrepreneur, CEO of Daum communication, one of Asia's largest Internet platforms with over 40 million users -- Daum is one of the main LiftAsia sponsors.

Haug: The web is now mature, we have one billion user. Alot of things are happening; we have experiencing an overload of information and innovation; "relevant" is the new "new"; we're back to forms of hierarchy; we enter "casual everything", casual gaming, casual e-mail, casual news reading; etc. In a way, there is less innovation happening inside the browser.

Lee: The innovation today comes at the intersection of the individual, the computer and physical space. The online-offline frontier is blurred.

Eric Rodenbeck, of Stamen Design in SF, talks (and shows plenty) about the evolution towards "richer" media forms through the use of new types of information visualizations. Running notes: French physiologist Etienne-Jules Marey, mid-19th century, studied movement, juman and animal, particularly birds (he invented a "photographic gun" and other devices to capture movement). Things are different now, we deal with systems of organisms and not with individual motions, like the 1K Project, 1000 cars racing in 1000 videogame racing sessions and recorded all together. There is a vast amount of data that it's now generated "live" by each one of us. Eric shows DiggLabs' "Swarm", showing what's happening in real time, what stories "grow" when people "digg" them, etc; Cabspotting, which tracks cabs in San Francisco, creating a map of the city (example at right) that's not based on the street grid, but on the actual activity of the taxis (based on the idea that the city is an organism, you can take the data, take the flows, and reveal the patterns that are hidden inside them).

Chang Kim, CEO of Korean blog hosting company TCN, talks about the future of the social web. (Korea btw has a 64% penetration of broadband). Running notes: The future of social media is a better homepage. Today there are too many destination sites (Facebook, MySpace, etc), but none of them are really mine or yours. To make matter worse, there are now apps and widgets. Before I just consumed content; now I'm creating content, and my content is scattered all around, and none of these sites are mine. It's like a hotel vs home experience. Today you check into these different "hotels"/destination sites managed by others; what we need is ownership, "home business", a true home where I can start and end my journey. The second problem is that data aren't really portable, copy/paste is not really efficient. Third problem: relationships online don't really model after real life; online you're either my friend or you're not, there isn't much nuance. The relationship on the web today is represented flatly. The only solution is different levels of trust. The fourth problem is that the places of content consumption and content authoring are different. Most power bloggers don't understand the fact that content authoring can be difficult for many people. I believe there is an emerging social networking fatigue.

The second session (which I'm moderating, so only limited blogging -- that will be the case for several sessions during this conference) features economist David Birch and sci-fi writer Bruce Sterling talking about the digitization of money and the emerging cashless economy.

Birch is a director of Consult Hyperion and a specialist of electronic business and banking (he was once described as "one of the most user-friendly of the UK's uber-techies"). Running notes: Cash doesn't work very well for many people. For example: cash costs too much (from the cost of withdrawing money from an ATM to fees for remittances etc) and these costs disproportionally fall on the poorest. In societies with cash-based economies (for ex Sweden) risks for robberies is higher. So don't take it for granted that cash is the best way of doing things. US: about 2/3 of all the US dollars in circulation, are not in the US. Being the person that issues the cash, it's a very good position to be: people basically give you an interest-free loan. The amount of dollars in circulation is actually falling. Cell phone in some countries has already become an alternative to cash payments, and even to plastic payments. Ex Japan, where operator DoCoMo has invested in Sumitomo bank to develop its payment systems. Other Asian cell-phone payment systems: G-Cash and Smart in the Philippines; E-tong in China; SKT Visa and KTF MasterCard in Korea; ETS and EZ-Link in Singapore. This demonstrates very clearly that consumers have no problems whatsoever with the idea of using their cell phone instead of cash or plastic cards. In Kenya: M-PESA, which has millions of users and signs up thousands of users a day (it's a system that allows to send Kenyan shilling from cell phone to cell phone). In other countries such as Congo, mobile-phone minutes have become an "alternative currency". If you're just talking about putting extra menus into a mobile phone, then you can try experiments, letting people choose among a series of possibilities for payments. In Latin America, branchless banks and shared agent networks in Brazil.

(Here a series of M-PESA screenshots showing how it works)

Let's assume that we replace cash with cell phones. Who whould be the winners? There would be economic growth (0.5%?). We may get reduced crime (no robberies). There would be reduced tax evasion. Banks: no more cash handling, filling ATMs, etc. And poor people would get rid of the weight of transaction charges.

American sci-fi writer and initiator of the cyberpunk genre Bruce Sterling is next. He has already addressed (on different topics) past LIFT conferences in Geneva twice, and is therefore a sort of unofficial LIFT resident big thinker. Running notes: Rather than talking about the hi-tech world of computing, I want to talk about the poor world, without computing. There are two kinds of poverty: the first kind is people that have no money, and the second kind is the people who can't make any money. The latter are going to remain poor, but there are alot of people that are very capable of making money but are shut out of that possibility by their current financial system. The new poverty is urban: peasants all around the world are living their land and moving into cities, places like Lagos, Sao Paulo, Mumbai. These poors have cell phones, there is no cell phone divide. People are really surprised, and even alarmed, at how eager the poor are to have cell phones. In India the cell phone user base in 2008 is expanding by 6 million people a month (and those are just accounts: typically a whole family would use a cell phone). There are people who can't read and buy cell phones. So these are not the "old" poor: these are big-city people, and like most people in big cities they're rather sophisticated. They just don't have money, they don't have banking services. But they do have some of these cell-phone-based payment services that David just described. This is disruptive innovation: it's not an add-on to the banks that rich people already have; this are millions of people being brought into a parallel financial system. These are not banks: I think we're seeing the invention of some kind of anti-bank, or even an anti-money, here. I suspect (BG: here Bruce addresses the Koreans in the audience) that your contribution will be in North Korea. Will the regime in North Korea collapse? Yes. When that happens, who can do something about it? South Korea of course. You will have to lift NK out of their poverty, and I don't think that you can do it with conventional economics and with these nice currency notes (He shows a 10'000-won note). They are poor and they have never had cell phones, but as soon as the regime collapses that's what they are gonna get: cell phones. And they will go to cities. Consider the historic example of Eastern and Western Germany: the West thought they could replace one economic and currency system with the other, but that didn't make them into capitalists. You will have to replace it completely. You will have to come up with some Korean electronic solutions for poverty. NK is not going to collapse tomorrow, but you should start preparing, to start thinking: when my fellow Korean from the North becomes free, what kind of technology should we put into his or her hands so that in ten years they become happy citizens?

links for 2008-09-03

2008-09-04T01:02:16+02:00

Google Chrome Browser

Google is about to launch its own browser, named Chrome. Blogoscoped has details on it and a scan of the 38-pages comic book Google is distributing to give tech details about the browser (which will initially be available only for Windows users, Mac and Linux will come later).