Notorious VC Fred Wilson has strong
opinions about the future of social media.
“I believe that we are headed to a world in which everyone will
share their lives with the rest of the world via the Internet. That
is social media. It’s a huge movement and we are at the start of
it,” he recently proclaimed on his blog.
Over the years I’ve heard many futurists express similar
sentiments about the direction of our species, arguing that the
benefits of ubiquitous life-streaming, transparency, and the
sharing of all information are so powerful that they will trump
people’s reluctance to open up their lives to the rest of the
world. While I certainly agree that we are probably at the start of
a whole
open information movement and that pervasive sharing is a
useful trend on which to base forward-looking extrapolations, I
nevertheless find it highly unlikely that ALL people will choose to participate, especially
over the next 20 years.
Considering that we co-exist in a complex environment in which
different people with very different personalities, cultures and
behaviors each compete for resources and control, betting on such a
simple future seems to leave a great many other futures out of the
mix. (cont.)
At the recent Low-Volume Manufacturers Association
conference, Boris Fritz, a senior engineer technical specialist at
Northrop
Grumman, said he expects nanotechnology in our lifetime to
enable small devices called respirocytes
that permit us to hold our breath for up to 4 hours.
“What you do is replace about 10% of your blood with these
respirocytes and then you would have literally 4 hours where you
can hold your breath,” lays out Fritz, “So if you had a problem
with your heart stopping you could just leisurely call the hospital
and tell them ‘Well, i’ve had a heart attack, my heart is
stopped’.”
Or another option, as Fritz points out, is that “you could go
scuba diving without any gear.”
Check out the full Fritz interview by Dean Rotbart, Director of
the Low-Volume Manufacturers Association, here. (Would have
embedded the vid, but the youtube code is buggy.) (cont.)
A social exhibit called the telectroscope
allows crowds in London and New York to interact with one another
through a video “tunnel”, aka a giant webcam.
Conceived by installation artist Paul
St. George, the device is named after the first word used to
describe the possibility of a 2-way television back in 1878
and is stylized to look like an invention by H.G. Wells.
Despite its relative simplicity, the exhibit is drawing
considerable attention in both real life and through the
blogosphere, indicating that it has struck a chord with the popular
imagination.
As LED and OLED interfaces get cheaper and web
connections get faster, we can expect such tele-portals to expand
in size and resolution and to proliferate. Just imagine how
fascinating the next generation of huge interactive windows to
different cities, concerts, real-time news events, etc, will turn
out to be, and what sorts of new behavior they will make possible.
(cont.)
With crude oil hovering at an all-time high of $130/gallon
people all over the globe are feeling the pain and starting to
react in different ways.
Some are finally choosing to drive less frequently.
CNNreports
that “compared with March a year earlier, Americans drove an
estimated 4.3 percent less—that’s 11 billion fewer miles, the
DOT’s Federal Highway Administration said
Monday, calling it ‘the sharpest yearly drop for any month in
FHWA history.’”
Others are increasingly making the
switch to higher-mileage and hybrid vehicles.
In Europe, where environmental taxes roughly double the cost of
gas, groups of French and British workers are demanding public
assistance by
staging protests .
A few particularly pinched and pro-active folks in rural regions
are shifting around their work week and travel schedule. According
to the
Wall Street Journal “a handful of small towns and community
colleges are switching to four-day workweeks in an effort to help
employees cope with the rising gasoline prices, and could soon be
joined by some larger local governments.”
Google
Earth is the ultimate palette for myriad developers whose
products require geo-spatial context, but its utility and reach has
been capped by the fact that it’s a stand-alone API that exists outside the standard browsing
experience. As of today that’s no longer the case. With the release
of the
new Earth Browser Plug-in Google’s little Hulk), the
future hub and entry point for many of the company’s offerings, has
escaped its cage and is now free to roam the halls of the worldwide
web and look for new friends… millions of them.
In the immediate to short-term, this allows those who
have installed the plugin to embed frames of Google Earth directly
into their web pages and to manipulate and mash objects and
places.
“Driven by an extensive JavaScript API, you can control the camera; create lines,
markers, and polygons; import 3D models from the web and overlay
them anywhere on the planet,” writes Paul Rademacher, Technical
Lead of the Earth Browser Plug-in project, “In fact, you can even
overlay your content over different planets, stars, and galaxies by
toggling Sky mode, letting you build 3D Google Sky mashups. You can
also enable 3D buildings with a single line of JavaScript, attach
JavaScript callbacks to mouse events, fetch KML data from the web, and more.” (cont.)
Futurist and professor Paul Saffo thinks
that just as Japan will transition to a robotic society, so too
will the United States and the rest of the world. He predicts the
transition over here will be “more messy” and that a booming
robotic manufacturing industry could potentially devastate the
economy.
“New technology may destroy old jobs, but it also creates more
jobs than it destroys,” explains Saffo in a recent Fora interview (see below), but
“that may not be the case with the world of ubiquitous
manufacturing robots.”
He points out that rapidly advancing robotics are replacing
large manufacturing chunks one industry at a time. “What you see
are industries calving off like icebergs, just a whole industry
drops away, suddenly the human operators disappear,” he says.
(cont.)
According to
Mac Rumours who first discovered the patent application:
The most interesting technique described by Apple … is the
integration of the solar panels behind the actual LCD screen of a portable device. The solar panel
would absorb ambient light that passes through the LCD screen of the device. ... If successfully
implemented, Apple’s iPhone, iPod and laptops, could require no
outward changes in design to add solar power.
As the price of both iPhone components and photovoltaic
(PV) cells comes down steadily, this will add to the appeal of the
increasingly coveted device, especially in resource-strapped areas
as rising oil prices gradually push up the cost of manufacturing,
transportation and electricity.
Adding solar cells beneath LCD screens
is such an elegant no-brainer that it’s difficult to imagine a
period in the near future when all mobile phones/computers
aren’t forced to integrate solar. The main plausible
alternative I can see is the prevalence of small plug-in PV power
stations (either based at home, mounted on the car or worn) that
can directly or indirectly charge mobile devices. But even then,
just knowing that your device can charge autonomously still seems
quite desirable.
In a paper released yesterday, AJ.P. Gownder and James L.
McQuivey at Forrester predict that by 2013
Apple will become the hub of the digital home. They support
this contention by imagining
eight future Apple
products including “wall-mountable digital picture frames with
small high-definition screens and speakers that wirelessly play
media”, “an Apple ‘clock radio’ that pipes in music and other media
across a home network”, and “an ‘AppleSound’ universal remote
control, also with a touch-sensitive screen, that lets users browse
their music collections and change the songs playing through their
stereo as they stroll around the house.”
I tend to concur with the rest of the
blogosphere in that this is quite the tame list and that we’ll
probably see significantly more advanced products from the likes of
Apple circa 2013. With dropping component costs (hi-rez screens,
processors, graphics cards, etc.), rising data transfer speeds
(Internet2, a possible
re-allocation of analog TV spectrum) new competition from
proliferating design & interface companies, and the fact that
most of these concepts already in prototype, I believe such
products are more likely to hit mass-markets inside of 3 years
rather than 5 long years away.
In particular I find the “wall-mountable digital picture frames”
prediction a bit weak. If former Xerox PARC
Director John Seely Brown is accurate
in his estimation that Apple CEOSteve Jobs “is
positioning himself to take over completely the living room,” then
by 2013 I see the company developing radically cooler products such
as a slick telepresence
interface that future blogger Dick Pelletier expects
by 2015 or before .
Being that such devices, albeit clunky and expensive versions,
are already being sold by the likes of
Cisco and
VisBox, and that
holographic and projection technologies could eliminate
the expensive screen altogether, it’s unlikely that Steve Jobs and
his crack team of agile researchers and designers haven’t yet
realized the trumping value of rich multi-purpose,
telepresence-enabling interfaces. (cont.)
Google lost
nearly 5% of its market value yesterday when Microsoft
announced that it will begin offering rebates to consumers who use
its Live Search
to discover and purchase products. The action marks the beginning
of a new phase in the online battle for our attention which will
gradually return more and more value to the user.
It is significant and a bit surprising that Microsoft, a company
known for squeezing every last bit of value out of its dominant
position in operating systems, and not Google (which is using a
very similar tactic vs. Wikipedia by creating a competitor,
Knol, that returns ad
revenue to contributors)is leading the charge to return capital to
its users. Though I’m sure Google has similar options readily
available (having so much familiarity with revenue splitting via
its AdSense program and development
of Knol) this goes to show the company is confident in its ongoing
development of search and content to react to Microsoft’s moves and
let the market do the talking.
The Main Takeaway: As the value of human attention
allocation continues to rise and more competition essentially
commoditizes current web applications, we can expect that companies
will be forced to either 1) return value directly through revenue
share, 2) return value through a superior product and/or network,or
3) a combination of 1 and 2. We should expect these trends to
transform our web experience over the coming years as search
companies (Google, Microsoft, Yahoo, Fledglings), Semantic Web
Companies (Twine, Adaptive Blue), social media
(Digg, Reddit, Stumble Upon),
social networks (Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn), prediction markets
(Predictify,
InTrade,
ZiiTrend),
social web browsers (Medium, Flock), etc. all try to garner human
participation.
Microsoft being forced into the value-added game is a strong
indication that the rise in value of attention allocation is quite
real.
Update: Some thorough and spot-on analysis of the
situation by Michael Arrington
here.
Mike Masnick at Tech Dirt has a great
piece up about the concept of idea redundancy in which he
responds to a conflicted Malcom Gladwell
article that praises Nathan
Mhyrvold idea-tank company Intellectual
Ventures, which makes money by conceiving and patenting
hundreds of ideas, while at the same time noting that ideas are
likely to pop up simultaneously in different brains.
Whereas Gladwell writes that, “Good ideas are out there for
anyone with the wit and the will to find them, which is how a group
of people can sit down to dinner, put their minds to it, and end up
with eight single-spaced pages of ideas,” Masnick critiques that
“if these ideas are the natural progression, almost guaranteed to
be discovered by someone sooner or later, why do we give a monopoly
on these ideas to a single discoverer?”
Being a bit of an idea junkie myself, I have often contemplated
the notions of idea formation, attribution, ownership and
profitability, both from an individual and social context.
Fundamentally, I agree with Masnick’s argument that “in giving
monopoly rights to Myhrvold and his friends [in addition to
gigantic corporate actors, universities and other patent trolls],
we make it much more difficult for others (even those who
discovered the same things totally independently) to help actually
make them useful.” That being said, I also realize that the patent
system that we currently have was and is needed to protect the
rights of inventors and encourages many people to invest time into
the innovation of concepts.
From a broader systems context, it seems to me we should be
striving to find the “sweet spot” for social progress. This entails
using the most cost-effective means to most accurately attribute
ideas to their rightful creators (whether those be multiple
individuals, social groups, long historical chains thinkers, or
even biological systems themselves), while ensuring that they
benefit us in the short-term and long-term through 1) their
execution and diffusion, and 2) by profiting the creators
appropriately to raise their standard of living and encourage
additional innovation directly at the source. (cont.)
recently proclaimed on his blog.
At the recent 
In the immediate to short-term, this allows those who
have installed the plugin to embed frames of Google Earth directly
into their web pages and to manipulate and mash objects and
places.
According to 
