Lunch over IP

Picnic Green Challenge 2008: The Winner

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

(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?

1. Diversity.
2. New and easy ways to allow people to contribute.
3. Ways to connect people together and to build on one-another.
4. 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.
5. Usually there is a core or kernel that's put there to begin with (the initial Linux software for ex)
6. 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).

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."

The Value Chain 2.0: Bringing In The Consumer

-- an essay by Xavier Comtesse and Jeffrey Huang.

When consumers turn into active stakeholders in the economy, they become integral part of the value creation process. A new dimension is thus opened: the “value chain 2.0“.

This dimension is, in some sense, a continuation of the value chain concept established by Michael Porter in 1985. However, here the focus is on a participative economy.

Download: This essay on "The Value Chain 2.0" can be downloaded in PDF in English (here) and French (here)

Value chain 2.0 takes into account the active consumer in the production of value, across every level of a company’s activities. Henceforth, we call the active consumer the “ConsumActor “ to indicate this reality.

The ConsumActor acts along two dimensions, as a:

• creator of context (action)
• creator of content (knowledge)

We recognize how deeply this shift towards “customer empowerment” is affecting the economy, especially in Internet-based industries.

The classic linear representation of the value chain needs therefore some fundamental rethinking. How can the old value chain integrate the non-linear, complex and networked realities of the participative economy?

The diagram of the value chain 2.0 below proposes an adaptation of the old value chain for the direct economy:

Explanation :

1. Participative Activities vs. Primary Activities

The basic activities of the company must henceforth integrate the activities of the ConsumActor.

1.1. Open Inbound Logistics vs. Inbound Logistics
The supply (reception, stock and distribution of raw materials) can be entrusted in certain cases to the ConsumActor (e.g. The customer arrives with his own T-shirts for personalization).

1.2. Co-operations vs. Operations
Le ConsumActor participates actively in the manufacturing process (e.g. Wikipedia)

1.3 Outbound Logistics by Customers vs. Outbound Logistics
The ConsumActor is in total or partial charge of the marketing activities (e.g. EBay).

1.4 Viral vs. Marketing and Sales
The techniques of viral marketing rely on the customers themselves (e.g. Amazon) 

1.5 Communities of Practice vs. Services
The communities of practice assume totally or partially the after-sale services.

2. Global activities vs. Support Activities

The support environment does not belong any longer to the company itself, but to the whole ecosystem in which the company is immersed in.

2.1. Mutistakeholders Infrastructure vs. Firm Infrastructure
The internal infrastructures of a company connect directly to the infrastructures of the other "stakeholders.” The result is a multi-stakeholder environment. (e.g. computer cloud).

2.2. Customer Network Management vs. HR management
The management of human resource management is extended and now also includes the client’s network. (e.g. Facebook).

2.3. Co-Creation vs. Technology Development
Research and development integrates the creativity of a company’s ConsumActors (eg P&G Connect).

2.4 Open Procurement vs. Procurement
ConsumActors penetrate also the supply chains.

The model of the value chain 2.0 presented above takes into account the change of paradigms imposed by the active participation of ConsumActors in the economy. 

When customers are no longer in a passive or self-service mode, but have become active -- i.e., operating in a do-it-yourself, co-design or co-creative mode -- the traditional value chain model is no longer effective.

We have thus today two complementary and distinct value chains:  the traditional value chain with a passive customer, and the version 2.0 with an active customer, the CustomActor. The two models in tandem allow us to analyze the activities of the contemporary companies.

Indeed the value chain 2.0 is valid only for companies that have opened up their value chains to integrate their customers. 

Yet it is a phenomenon which we notice every day.

(Xavier Comtesse is a mathematician, author of several books on innovation, and the Geneva-based Director of Avenir Suisse, a think-tank. Jeffrey Huang is a Professor and the Director of the Media and Design Laboratory at the Swiss Institute of Technology EPFL in Lausanne. They are both part of the Geneva-based braintrust ThinkStudio, where this essay originated.)

From crossmedia to transmedia: thoughts on the future of entertainment

- by Nicoletta Iacobacci, guest blogger

Nicoletta Iacobacci is the Head of Interactive TV/Eurovision at the European Broadcasting Union (EBU).

Television, although originally a one-way (broadcast) medium, has been trying to engage its audience in a two-way experience for several decades.

A children's television programme called Winky Dink and You (CBS 1954) was the first attempt to drive the viewer from passive to active. Since then content providers, despite numerous failures along the way, have been trying to develop programs which create and exploit possibilities to be engaged by and to interact with TV content.
Nowadays the future of entertainment can’t be conceived without enhanced content and multiplatform distribution strategies, matching the media habits of the "Pokemon generation", seamless consumers of games, books, Internet, film and television. The web is the platform which "glues" and allows this multi/enhanced/two-way/mobile entertainment experience. TV has lost its predominant role, and it is now mandatory for broadcasters to embed various forms of interactive technology in their programs and to focus on crossmedia content and transmedia strategies. As Henry Jenkins, director of the Comparative Media Studies Program at MIT and a foremost authority on today’s media environment says: "Media convergence makes the flow of content across multiple media inevitable".

How do crossmedia (Xmedia) and transmedia differ? Both are about content in a multiplatform distribution strategy. Both utilize the web as the main engaging space. Both relate to TV as one, maybe the most important, but just one of the media used to tell the story.

Let's try a definition. In a crossmedia environment, content is repurposed, diversified and spread across multiple devices to enhance, engage and reach as many users/viewers as possible. It is common to call crossmedia "content 360". It is generally the same program re-edited for different screens, fragmented content disseminated on different platforms, possibly incorporating extra content and channels to extend the viewers' experience. Brand here plays a key role and needs to be always identifiable. A typical form of crossmedia is when the plot of the story ends with a call-to-action, and drives the audience across different media. A good example is the BBC's Spooks, where, at the end of the TV episode, a cheerful announcement gives directions to a website.

In transmedia storytelling, content becomes invasive and permeates fully the audience's lifestyle. Stephen Erin Dinehart, who coined the term transmedia and created the VUP (viewer/user/player) relates this model to Richard Wagner and his concept of "total artwork" ("Gesamtkunstwerk") where the spectator becomes actor/player. A transmedia project develops storytelling across multiple forms of media in order to have different "entry points" in the story; entry-points with a unique and independent lifespan but with a definite role in the big narrative scheme.

More concretely, from the originator's perspective, transmedia is content embedded with marketing strategies, where content is treated as “goods” to be franchised. Each franchise should have the goal of expanding the audience experience and drive for more consumption in the overall scheme.

Both crossmedia and transmedia are obviously multimedia approaches, using largely of any available channel, tool and media to tell a story. The difference between the two is to ascribe to a consequent evolution in public demand. Content spread across various media (crossmedia) is no longer satisfying enough, viewers wants more, they are becoming VUPs and in viewing/using/playing want to participate, and to a certain extent create, the story themselves.

The most self-explanatory example of multi/Xmedia/transmedia production is a recent participatory drama by Swedish public television SVT, Marika (site - trailer in English) which won the 2008 iEmmy Awards. Marika included a TV drama series, in-studio debates, online virtual environments, events across Sweden, blogs (picture), chats, fabricated documents and props, forums and mobile games -- and drew the public, and the other mainstream media, into the story. Following the iEmmy Awards win, Marika is creating some turmoil among public broadcasters, but it is also pushing content creators to start daring on innovative productions.

The Swatch co-inventor welds wood -- and bones

Elmar Mock believes that "most people talk of innovation but what they actually do, is renovation". He should know: in 1980 Mock, together with fellow engineer Jacques Müller, co-invented the Swatch, the plastic watch that started the rescue -- and led to the current triumph -- of the then-depressed Swiss watchmaking industry, which was suffering in particular from the competition of Japanese digital watch manufacturers such as Seiko.

Mock and Müller sketched out the lightweight, iconic, fashionable and colored plastic watch in May 1980. Codename of the first prototypes: "Delirium Vulgare". The first collection of 12 Swatch models went on sale in Zurich in 1983. The key engineering innovation of the Swatch was to use an integrated production technique that reduced the number of parts by half, to about 50; but the key design and marketing innovation was to put on the market a plastic watch that, at the beginning, met with legions of skeptics. But which went on to sell hundreds of millions of pieces -- the 333-million mark was past in 2006.

Mock (picture left) left Swatch in 1986 and to launch his own innovation firm, Creaholic, in Biel/Bienne, a city along the language divide between the German and the French parts of Switzerland, which someone dubbed "the Swiss Liverpool" for the industrial turmoil of the 1980s and the creative and economic renewal of the last 15 years. Mock will also be a keynote speaker at the upcoming Forum des 100 conference in Lausanne, which I've been producing.

I visited with Mock the other day at Creaholic's headquarter, nested in a former soap factory in the center of town: high ceilings, a suspended meeting room reachable through a short glass bridge, and plenty of room for the 30-something employees and partners. Creaholic has worked and works on a whole range of products, from hearing aids to ski gear, from packaging to flavors, from software to micromechanical devices. Their creative model is, says Mock, inspired by nature: ideas travel from a "gas phase", that of high-energy creativity, fantasy and dreams (and chaos), to a "liquid phase", where they start to coalesce and take a tangible form (here is where design comes into play, where thinking about usage and aesthetics are at work), to a "solid phase" where the value of the idea can be truly measured, and where the practical aspects of the development are dealt with (materials, production, industrialization).

The problem of innovation, says Mock, is in the love-hate relationship between the "gas" and the "solid" phases: it is in turning an intuition or a dream into an actual product that can "bring a timely business advantage" -- because competitive advantages, so thinks Creaholic, are always limited in time, and only constant innovation can keep you ahead.

Mock told me about some of the projects Creaholic has been working on, and one in particular, which is now a spinoff, caught my attention: WoodWelding. The starting point was some research into using thermoplastic elements (resins) to weld, reinforce or anchor wood. Said in very simple terms (I'm probably oversimplifying) WoodWelding's technology uses nails or seals or pegs made of synthetic resins as fixations. Put a resin nail into wood, for example and pass ultrasonic energy through it: the resin will start to liquefy and penetrate into the porous material. It then cools rapidly, resulting -- in a few seconds -- in a stable and durable bond. Look at the bottom item in the picture: the resin nail has basically "melted" into the wood, becoming "part" of it. This is applicable to most porous materials, such as chipboard, concrete, or paper.

The technology however had a slow start, and for what I know only one company has licensed the technology for things like cabinet and window assembly. However, the part that I found most interesting is that several companies have licensed it for medical applications. Because  -- and this was nowhere in the inventor's initial thinking -- bones are also a very porous material, and the WoodWelding technology has turned out to be ideal for cranio-maxillofacial usage (welding a broken skull, for instance) or for orthopaedics.

This is a very telling example of how innovations often find their best/ideal applications outside their original field of reference -- and spotting this lateral opportunities (finding ideas and solutions outside your field, etc) is a key way to gain a competitive edge.

Shares and sharing alike

The other day in London I spent some time with Richard Bernstein, the brilliant CEO of Eurovestech, a fund investing in tech startups in Europe.

But we didn't only discuss tech ideas and entreprises: we talked charity. Richard is the man behind an intriguing new form for making donations to non-profits. I first learned about it last December, when 100'000 shares of Eurovestech were donated to the small non-profit I co-founded, Friends of Humanity, in Geneva.

The principle is simple: instead of donating cash, Eurovestech -- which is publicly listed on the London stock exchange -- issues new company shares in batches of 100'000 and gives them to charitable organizations. They are then of course free to sell them immediately or hold on to them waiting for a higher valuation. From Eurovestech's point of view, it costs only a fraction of what it would have cost to give the same amount in cash. From the recipient's point of view, it's a significant amount of money with a potentially interesting additional upside, depending on the share's value evolution.

There is, of course, a "hidden" cost: dilution. Simplifying, it means that every time the number of shares of Eurovestech grows, all shares are worth a bit less. A tiny bit less, actually: 100'000 extra shares are almost negligible compared to the 344 million shares that comprise Eurovestech's capital. "I believe that a dilution of 0.2 % per annum is absolutely invisible: it's basically a rounding error", Richard told me.

Over the last 7 years, Richard's company has donated a total of 8.2 million ordinary shares to some 73 different charitable and non-profit organizations, amounting to a stock market value of roughly 1.9 million euros.
And Eurovestech is just a small company. But Richard wants now to encourage other companies to do the same. He's done the maths: "If all the companies on the FTSE-100 gave 0.1% of their shares every year, that would amount to almost 1.8 billion euros", he says. "Now apply that to all the other listed companies".

He is a believer in corporate responsibility not as a marketing tool but as "an intrinsic duty to be a good citizen and do the right thing". Richard has already convinced other companies to follow suit -- one of which has already allocated 5 million euros worth of shares for charity. He is now in the process of setting up an organization, called Share And Share Alike, which will raise awareness of and promote this approach, centralize share donations, and distribute them. He hopes to be able to convince companies all over Europe to start donating shares.  "I'm ready to go to see any CEO, in any company, anywhere in Europe to explain how it works and show how easily it can be done from the company's point of view", he said.

Legally, he says, for listed companies this is easily done. The Board can issue shares. The decision must be communicated to the markets and be filed according to regulations, but that's pretty much it. Although legally this is not necessary, some companies may chose to get shareholder approval at the annual meeting -- to make it into a shareholder-approved policy.

Richard: "I want to get to the point where it's embarrassing for a company not to be "sharing alike"...".

Crossing the "silos of expertise" in humanitarian technology

Says Janet Ginsburg: "A full year before the CDC reported cases of paralysis in West Nile patients, cases had been reported in veterinary journals in large mammals. Nevermind that humans are, in fact, large mammals, doctors don't have time to read veterinarian journals and vice-versa".

There are similar examples in just about every field, and that's why Ginsburg -- a former BusinessWeek science reporter with extensive experience in covering things like biosurveillance -- has been working with InSTEDD (see this previous post) to imagine a way to cross these silos of expertise and promote cross-disciplinary awareness and collaboration. "Though specialization has led to a greater aggregate knowledge, gaps between disciplines mean missed opportunities and potential dangers", she told me the other day. The answer: the Humanitarian Technology Review (HTR -- not the final name), an attempt to provide experts across a range of fields -- and across the world -- a place to learn about each other's work, and to connect.

If this sounds generic, the fields that the HTR will cover aren't: early disease detection, predictive modeling and simulation, mobile communications, transportation, water and sanitation, green tech, climate change impacts, machine translation, vaccines, crisis management, food security, resilience and recovery, energy, chronic disease, microbiology, just to mention a few.

What connects these fields? The HTR defines technology broadly: "anything and everything that can make a difference". One of the key points is that "disease and disaster are most often viewed as separate issues, and handled by different agencies and specialists". Yet, there is no humanitarian crisis without a health component, or a serious disease outbreak without a humanitarian dimension. Likewise, "most human diseases are zoonotic, meaning they also affect animals; animal and human health are two sides of the same coin. And regional disasters can quickly go global, while global events can have devastating local consequences".

These intersections are increasingly frequent and producing severe impacts. The HTR is an attempt to mix and match ideas and innovations that can lead to better answers. "Some of the most promising developments in the field over the last few years are the result of inspired combinations", is stated in the Review's project documents. For instance:

• lightweight fabric + satellite technology = a cheaper portable satellite dish
• software + cell phones = real-time surveillance for bird flu
• GPS + interactive mapping = real time tracking of fires and floods
• solar panels + refrigerator = reliable field transport for vaccines
• filter + straw = a mobile water purification device
• open source water tech + microfinance = funding for small water projects
• genetic sampling  +  fast data analysis = identifying a pathogen in hours

The core of the HTR will be an electronic newsletter and website, which will be complemented with videos, blogs, podcasts, downloadable software and tools, translation and mapping programs, etc (plus print and events) -- whatever platform can serve its mission.

Here is a PDF describing the project. Initiated by InSTEDD, the Review will be editorially independent. For more details and an account of the HTR's genesis, see this post on Ginsburg's blog.

Tyler Brûlé on starting up

Tyler Brûlé's Monocle magazine is one of the most interesting and intriguing press products out there -- I already raved about it here. At CEBit recently Tyler talked about the principles he and his team adhered to in launching the mag:

• No research
• No focus groups (“trust that you know the market better than others”)
• No creative conflict
• No eating at your desk
• No PowerPoint presentations to clients
• No walls (“create a work environment where everyone can talk with everyone else”)
• No freebies or press trips
  
• No user generated content

As John Maeda writes, "there is a positive trend in our society towards endearment to quality approaches — versus just new ones. Success in this new age of media will be manifest as a combination of the new (approach to business) with the excellent (built on foundations of quality)."

OpenSpimes: Turn your cell phone into a monitoring tool of your own local climate

Question: how much do you know about the quality of your own, personal, local climate? Do you know the concentration of CO2 in the air you're breathing, in the air that people are breathing in your neighborhood or city?

I'm pretty sure your answer is "no". These data aren't collected at that micro scale, and even when they are collected (by public authorities, research entities or private firms) they aren't generally made easily available.

That's the premise behind my friend Leandro (Leeander) Agrò's OpenSpime idea, which he and his small team at WideTag Inc in Turin, Italy, are turning into both a product and, hopefully soon, a movement.

A "spime" (the word -- a contraction of "space" and "time" -- was coined by sci-fi writer Bruce Sterling) is an object that, thanks to GPS and sensors, is aware of where and when it is, and can record and communicate these data. OpenSpimes are designed to allow everyone to record and visualize environmental (or other) data, to store them, publish them, blog them, compare them, mix and mash them up.

The first spime they've designed is a smart application of distributed computing in the service of sustainability. It can measure the CO2 level in parts-per-million in the surrounding air, and through a bluetooth link to a cell phone (or an alternative link to a laptop or other wireless channels) can relay that information back to the OpenSpime servers. There they can be mashed up and aggregated on Google Maps in almost-real-time. Here is a picture of the first prototype "reporting" on a Google Map:

A dissemination of OpenSpimes could produce a very granular image of CO2 presence or of other local indicators (industrial data for example, as in the following Italian example, where as you zoom in the single detected values appear related to their point of gathering -- and it can get much more detailed the more OpenSpimes there are):

To come back to CO2: "I guess it's indisputable today that climate change is real", Leeander told me, "and CO2 is at the core of it, but so far people have little awareness of its concentration in their immediate surroundings. Yet, real change can come only when people act -- and information is the basis for action".

CO2 monitoring is just the first app, of course, as the OpenSpime way of looking at things could potentially be applied to many other fields, and transform alot of "independent" hardware (such as cars) into "social" and environmentally-aware hardware.

The whole infrastructure is built on an open framework, which means that once they roll this out (it's at prototype stage for now) everybody will be able to use it freely. "It's almost all open source and creative commons", says Leeander, with only one exception: the SpimeID, which is a certification mechanism based on encrypted ID numbers that they've designed to ensure the transmitted data can be trusted. Selling and managing the SpimeIDs (which presumably will cost only a few euros or dollars) is what will bring to OpenSpime the revenues to run the system.

Again, it's all prototypes for now, but pretty cool and very promising. For more, here is a video explaining the basics, and here a short speech by WideTag's evangelist David Orban at the recent eTech conference.