IFTF's Future Now

The Innovation Economy ala BusinessWeek (or, how to ruin my weekend)

BusinessWeek just posted this week's issue, The Innovation Economy. The issue is full of brief interviews, industrial analyses, corporate research initiatives, a handful of stories about innovators (which they began posting a few weeks back as part of the magazines 75th anniversary), and even a few rather good edge technology articles.

The magazine seems to have put every good writer they have on an insightful or descriptive or simply fun article in this broad look at, as they term it, the innovation economy. And you can read it all online, free.

The content of the article focus most heavily on large corporate research, thoughts from innovators, a small set of technology areas that promise near-term breakthroughs (and possible long-term revolutions), and a few very high-level articles that mix each of these topics together.

BusinessWeek even included two articles (only one in print) on sci-fi as an instigator of imagination (and the author doesn't even try to push the singularlity meme on us, which is refreshing).

Philips Design & Ambient Intelligence

Although I had seen some references to it on various blogs or at Amazon, I stumbled upon The New Everyday View on Ambient Intelligence in the library yesterday. This book was completed by Stefano Marzano & Emile Aarts from the Philips Design group, the Netherlands.

Its a fun tome, with more text than normal for a Philips Design sampler. Discussion of future branding, cool ideas, physical products of the future et al. If you have anything to do with foresight, futurism, design, or marketing, this book will hold something of interest.

(I found their napkining attempt to be pretty standard...and sad).

David Rumsey profile

One of the features speakers at our "New Geography" conference (here's a PDF with more information) is the subject of a profile in Monday's San Francisco Chronicle:

David Rumsey was nearing 40 and enjoying a successful career in real estate development when his true calling -- the private obsession that he had successfully kept in check since boyhood -- finally claimed him....

[I]n 1997 he began digitizing his vast collection, and in 1999 launched www.davidrumsey.com. In true wonk style, Rumsey switched gears from obsessively collecting to obsessively throwing himself into the technological aspects of cartography. His main goal was to design a Web site that featured such high resolution and mobility that clicking on a map would be like holding it in your hands....

Once launched, the Web site was off like a rocket, with dazzling, high- res graphics. "We can scan at 300 psi," he smiles. "All 10,000 maps we scanned so far are 2.5 terabytes. We use Macs for everything. And we actually won a Webby in technology -- we beat out Google that year."

It helps that the Web site is high in the gee-whiz factor. With delight, Rumsey downloads a topographical map of Yosemite dated 1883 onto a computer screen, which is projected onto a TV screen in his living room.

"This is the first accurate map of Yosemite, from the government's Wheeler survey," he explains, before turning the map into a huge 3-D close-up and then zooming through Yosemite Valley in a stunning virtual flyover -- a Luke Skywalker with gray hair and spectacles, cruising canyons that have not yet been hiked or filled with smog.

"This is gaming technology, but no one is shooting anyone up," he laughs.

IBM Promotes Shopper Communication

Alex Pang in his recent post describes the upcoming meeting at IFTF regarding the Geoweb. See more about that meeting with supporting documents here. Here is an example of work underway that is also about location, though at a smaller scale. IBM, Symbol, Wincor-Nixdorf, Fujitsu and others have tests underway in this domain, exploiting intelligence about location.

The following is an example of work underway at IBM collaborating with Cuesol ... Note in particular some of their estimates of benefits of such systems.

Faster, smarter…retail on demand

Provide a faster and more convenient customer experience while enabling your store to more effectively deploy labor. The IBM personal shopping assistant can leverage your loyalty programs by dynamically delivering targeted incentives at the point-of-purchase. Respond to your customers’ needs and reduce operating costs with retail on demand ...

Streamlining store operations to help remove costs
IBM’s and Cuesol’s consultants have developed a sophisticated return-on-investment model, based on industry metrics and discussions with major retailers ...

Although each retailers results will vary, this model projects:
The personal shopping assistant can drive approximately 15% - 20% of a store’s total sales, by increasing frequency and basket sizes.
Reduce store labor costs by converting 90% of shopping assistant users to self-checkout customers.
Contribute 5% - 10% to the store’s bottom-line performance.
Return significant cash flow to the business in 2 years or less.

SIMS distinguished lecture series

Even though I've spoken in and thus am a suspect source, I wanted to point to this fall's UC Berkeley School of Information Management and Systems Distinguished Lecture Series.

It's a very diverse, interesting group of speakers, ranging from former Amazon.com CTO Andreas Weigend (speaking tomorrow) to Stanford's Fred Turner, to Genevieve Bell. and a good audience-- even though Berkeley has SO many different things going on, it's easy for people to get overloaded and just hang out at Cafe Milano.

I suspect many of our readers are within striking distance of Berkeley, and they should check out the events if they're in the area.

Building the geoweb

Next week the Institute is hosting a conference on "New Geography: Strategies for Deep Place," at the San Francisco Presidio. (Here's a PDF of the conference program.) Consequently I'm doing a lot of last-minute reading about location-based services, and projects to associate digital information with physical things and places. So today's Mercury News article on Geovector, a company working on location-aware technology for cell phones, caught my eye. The descriptions of what they imagine doing with the technology sound like some of the things we'll be talking about:

Equip your buddies with a phone, and you can play a real-life version of the computer game "Doom," chasing each other down alleys, targeting your nemesis in your phone screen and shooting fake bullets. GeoVector will tell if your line of fire results in a hit. Or there's the treasure hunt. You leave a message on a marked spot, say under a tree, and when the other player arrives at the spot, GeoVector sends a message with more directions. You can take photos of your kids in front of the Bay Bridge and have the bridge's name superimposed on the photo. Ellenby said GeoVector also can help you keep track of the exact location of family members while you're traveling. If everyone carries phones, GeoVector can provide directions to find anyone who gets lost.

It's worth noting that none of this is exactly novel, but that's not a swipe against GeoVector. Rather, it suggests that we're starting to get a sense of how we'd use these kinds of technologies-- at least in their early lives.

Alice the Chatbot Wins the Loebner Again

The BBC provides an overview of the recent Loebner chatbot competition, which ALICE won for the third time. The ALICE chatbot was developed by Richard Wallace. A few years ago ALICE was internally proposed for an interactive way to gather consumer comments. A technical tidbit: This form of AI uses Zipf's law as part of the basis for its interaction. Wallace and his team have developed something called the Artificial Intelligence Markup Language (AIML) which is worth a look.

We experimented with web based chatbots using the Extempo system. Neither of our efforts went very far, but the results are worth examining. For purposes of scale, having a system that interacts like a person, using a knowledge base of information, can be very useful. The knowledge simply needs to be uploaded rather than learned. It turns out that people interact with AI systems in remarkably trusting ways, I refer again to Stanford's Byron Reeves work on media interaction, where we were inspired by his seminal book with Clifford Nass: The Media Equation.

Tricky issues of privacy also emerge, should we demand to know if we are talking to an AI versus a human? What is the implication of giving data to an AI that represents itself as a human? I consider the Loebner Prize more of a slight-of-hand trick that takes advantage of our trusting nature, rather than a creating true AI, but it is a step that suggests how we may eventually solve the problem.

Next-generation bookmobile

Wired News has an article about the Anywhere Books bookmobile, which distributes print-on-demand books in Africa:

Kids in rural areas of Africa have few resources on hand to bolster their education, but in several areas of the continent, one of the foundations of education -- books -- is coming to them.

Anywhere Books has piloted a digital bookmobile -- a van outfitted with a laptop, laser printer, bookbinding machine and cutter -- in remote areas of Uganda to print free books for children since November 2003. Now the project has plans to expand to Ghana and Macedonia.

This is one of several digital bookmobiles: the Internet Archive has another.

The notion of a bookmobile-as-digital-hub-and-printing-press may seem odd. But the bookmobile is a well-recognized social institution (as well as a distribution mechanism) in many parts of the world.

Further, the technology has now gotten cheap enough to make print-on-demand pretty interesting. It can cost less than $1 to print and bind a 100-page book, which is less than it can cost a library to loan it (once you factor in the costs of checking it out, processing it upon its return, putting it back on the shelf, etc.). In other words, it can be cheaper to just give a book away than to loan it out.

New York Times on RFID

A short article (by New York Times standards, anyway) on companies that are starting to position themselves to help manufacturers and retailers deal with RFID and other sensor-generated information:

I.B.M plans to announce today that it will invest $250 million over the next five years and employ 1,000 people in a new business unit to support products and services related to sensor networks. The new unit will also focus on helping businesses exploit sensor networks by, for example, setting up computer systems that use sensor data to quickly identify supply shortages and automatically adjust delivery schedules.

I.B.M.'s goal, analysts said, is to persuade businesses to view radio tagging - one of the hottest growth areas for mobile sensor technology - as just one element of a new wave of information technology outside of data centers that must be integrated to be exploited.

NYT Magazine on Blogging

In today's NYT Magazine an article (registration required) by the Mainstream Media (MSM) on Blogging, mostly concerning politics. The piece is entertaining in the sense that it examines the people doing blogging as some strange alien group, carefully tracing their backgrounds and individual quirks, instead of looking at the value of the process. I also sense an element of defensiveness, and bemused reaction to blogging in general. It is one of the first examples where the MSM has devoted considerable space to the phenomenon in a non technology space.