IFTF's Future Now

Tivo Pops-Up During Fast Forward

More details about the testing of the Tivo ads that pop-up during fast-forward. This was apparently part of the recently announced Comcast-Tivo deal. I previously posted on this, with some links to Tivo economic models. This brings to mind the book: The Big Picture: the New Logic of Money and Power in Hollywood by Edward Jay Epstein, which talks at considerable length about the evolution of content delivery economic models. The Tivo approach is novel, but how will its users respond? Slashdot post on Tivo's test. Via Richard L. James.

links for 2005-03-30

• The New York Times > Technology > Brazil: Free Software's Biggest and Best Friend
  ÃO PAULO, Brazil, March 28 - Since taking office two years ago, President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva has turned Brazil into a tropical outpost of the free software movement.
  (tags: social_software)

On the Enterprise Blogosphere

In Infoworld: The Enterprise Blogosphere, an article on the use of blogs and wikis by business. There is not too much new here, but its a nice overview, with pointers to applications, discussions of concerns and processes. Quoted Martin Wattenberg, IBM researcher, formerly worked on Map of the Market visualization.

...To qualify as intelligence, information muct be both used and renewed. Good synapses fire fast and standard groupware can be too structured and rigid to support real-time, off-the-cuff data collection for workgroups or projects. Easy and informal, e-mail and IM remain the knowledge-sharing tools of choice for many employees. But after a message has been sent and read, it often drops into the network netherworld never to be seen or used again.

To facilitate the exchange of information and to establish customized, user-friendly data archives, companies such as Cisco, Disney, Hewlett-Packard, General Motors, IBM, Intel, Microsoft, Nokia, Novell, and Yahoo are turning to a new breed of collaboration tools: blogs and wikis. Each helps fill the gaps left by traditional groupware in a different way.

“Blogs and wikis play opposite roles,” says Martin Wattenberg, a researcher on the collaborative user experience team at IBM Watson Research Center. “Blogs are based on an individual voice; a blog is sort of a personal broadcasting system. Wikis, because they give people the chance to edit each other’s words, are designed to blend many voices. Reading a blog is like listening to a diva sing, reading a wiki is like listening to a symphony.” ....

links for 2005-03-28

• India's Honey Bee Network Case Study
  Realizing the need to bridge the gap between the creation of innovations in the formal and informal sectors of Indian society, a consortium of support organizations led by the Society for Research and Initiatives for Sustainable Technologies and Instituti
  (tags: social_software)

Wal-Mart and Alternative Uses of RFID

The most common proposed use of RFID is to track goods in supply chains, but since the early penny-tag days at MIT, other ideas have been proposed for the tags, making them part of a larger sensor network. Here are some proposals from Wal-Mart. All require a level of tagging ubiquity.

Views of Innovation Models

David Pollard in his Salon blog summarizes Michael Porter's, Peter Drucker's and Clayton Christensen's approaches to innovation research. A good place to get insight about their work without reading all the books. Via Innovation Weblog.

links for 2005-03-27

• Folksonomy, or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Mess
  Discussion with Clay Shirky, Stewart Butterfield, Joshua Schachter, Jimmy Wales.
  (tags: collective_intelligence folksonomy)

links for 2005-03-26

• Tsunami created gender imbalance
  Four times more women than men were killed in some areas hit by the Indian Ocean tsunami, creating long-term social problems for devastated communities as they try to rebuild, a leading charity has warned.
  (categories: society)
• CorporateBlogging.Info: European Corporate Blogs
  "Corporate Blogging is still a very US-focused phenomenon. But it would be interesting to see examples from Europe."
  (categories: blogging business)
• Euromail - What Germans can teach us about e-mail
  "For Europeans, e-mail has replaced the business letter. For Americans, it has replaced the telephone."
  (categories: Europe culture business)
• It's Not Graffiti, It's Grafedia
  "What if the internet extended beyond computers and high-speed connections, with web pages expanding down city streets and onto the sides of buildings?"
  (categories: art digital/physical place/space city)
• Large-Scale Social Cooperation in the East African Plains Ape
  "Of all the puzzles in xenobiology, perhaps the most remarkable is the existence of large-scale (but very imperfect) social cooperation among the East African Plains Ape of Sol III."
  (categories: biology cooperation)

First reports on Yahoo 360

Charlene Li blogs about Yahoo's new blogging/social networking service, Yahoo 360. One line really caught my eye:

Central to the whole service is the concept that you want to communicate and connect with the people that you already know, rather than try to meet new people.

Why does this strike me as so, so terribly wrong? Isn't much of the point of things like del.icio.us and flickr-- and for that matter, blogging-- that they let us maintain our "strong ties" (to use Mark Granovetter's phrasing) of friends and family and associates-- our known, mapped universe of people who are interested in us and the things we know/do-- while also expanding our network of "weak ties" to people who share certain curious combinations of interests, people we have never met but whose work we've read, or just sometimes work at the same cafe that we do, etc.?

Or, might the world of blogs and social software evolve toward a bifurcation of inward-looking and outward-looking families of services, software, etc.?

links for 2005-03-25

• E-Governance - making some headway to help common man
  epartment of Administrative Reforms and Public Grievances, all the central ministries and departments have a website of their own. Of the ministries & departments with key G2C (government-to-Citizen) processes, about 69% are using Website to directly conn
  (categories: social_software)
• The New York Times > International > Asia Pacific > India Alters Law on Drug Patents
  ndia, a major source of inexpensive AIDS drugs, passed a new patent law yesterday that groups providing drugs to the world's poorest patients fear will choke off their supply of new treatments.
  (categories: health)
• science made easy
  airing cutting-edge scientific research with Laurel and Hardy? Or Sherlock Holmes? Surely not. But like a good scientist, Sudhir Thattey brings together the unlikeliest ingredients to create a concoction of full-throttle mystery, surprise and scientific d
  (categories: science)
• Companies in Radio Tag Business Broaden Legal Dispute
  "A skirmish over patents between suppliers of gear that uses radio signals instead of bar codes to identify commercial goods expanded yesterday into a much broader legal battle."
  (categories: RFID)
• The Pro-Am Revolution
  "From astronomy to activism, from surfing to saving lives, Pro-Ams - people pursuing amateur activities to professional standards - are an increasingly important part of our society and economy."
  (categories: culture Internet science cooperation)
• Always connect
  Open source "has worked in the hi-tech sector - could it be the key to creating the perfect soft drink, the ultimate wine guide or even a cure for malaria?"
  (categories: open_source cooperation)
• Always connect - part 2
  "[O]ne thing is known: open-source software was only the beginning."
  (categories: open_source cooperation)
• Spark Issue 1
  "Spark is a new magazine about the good things that are going on all over the world, and the people working to create a brighter future for us all."
  (categories: future)
• Forward thinking
  " Pervasive computing will be introduced under the banner of efficiency, and will probably turn into a battle between our sometimes - conflicting desires for privacy and for security. Expect security to win every time."
  (categories: RFID ubicomp future privacy security)
• Change is in the Air
  "New technologies promise to make air travel smoother for passengers and cut costs for beleaguered airlines."
  (categories: RFID travel)
• IATA - Simplifying the Business
  "IATA has been tasked to lead the industry's agenda to Simplify the Business by moving forward with five key projects: e-ticketing, common use self-service kiosks for check-in, bar-coded boarding passes, radio frequency identification (RFID) for baggage h
  (categories: travel RFID future business)
• IATA - Radio Frequency ID
  "ATA is leading an initiative to introduce radio frequency (RFID) technology in baggage handling industry-wide by conducting a pilot project with key airlines and airports worldwide."
  (categories: RFID travel)