IFTF's Future Now

links for 2005-09-29

• Chips help morgue track Katrina victims
  Morgue workers in Mississippi are using RFID tags to track victims of the hurricane.
  (tags: RFID)
• Canadian Journal of History: East end, west end: Science education, culture and class in mid-Victorian London
  Comparison of the Royal College of Mines, Royal School of Chemistry, and the City and Guilds of London Institute for the Advancement of Technical Education.
  (tags: UK science history)

Hacking the City? Why Municipal Wireless is Boring

I just got asked to serve on an advisory group setup to help the mayor of San Francisco figure out what to do about their TechConnect municipal wireless project.

I've been lamenting the state of Wi-Fi lately. I worked hard at NYCwireless trying to get people interested in DIY broadband... the cost structure of Wi-Fi just lends itself to highly decentralized deployment. And you can optimize your network for what you want - hotspots, point-to-point backhaul across the desert, totally separate regional networks not connected to the Internet, VoIP for low-income households and non-profits, etc. But the "municipal wireless" craze sweeping the U.S. seems to be about making Wi-Fi just another boring, plain vanilla, one-size-fits-all public utility. My hunch is that it will end up being available everywhere, but useful for nobody. (Sort of like a lot of American public transportation)

So, sad at the state of Wi-Fi, I ran across a post by Michael Lenczner of the Montreal community wireless group Île Sans Fil (blogged by Sean Savage, creator of Wi-Fi social network app Placesite) and got all fired up again. I met Mike last year at the Mobile Digital Commons Network in Montreal, probably the most fun I've had at a conference, ever.

Mike is fired up about the potential for grassroots wireless. and you should be too:

We are a group of concerned and motivated citizens taking control of ICT (Information and Communication Technology) infrastructure in our city. That's empowering as an example to others that this important part of our life isn't only the domain of companies and corporations or even governments. To me, that's a more significant impact than the actual fact that we have 55 hotspots and 9000 users

We are hacking the built city.
This statement is based on the idea that as wireless devices and services proliferate and ubiquitous computing becomes a reality, the physical environment (especially the built city) is rapidly becoming enhanced space or mixed-reality. The supposedly seperate existences of off-line and on-line are intersecting and overlapping - most rapidly in cities.

Where this get's exciting is that by citizens, artists and non-profit groups developing and adapting these technologies (portable devices, wireless connectivity, mobile- and location-based applications) and their model (who is supposed to use them and for what purpose) we are able to impact and change this enhanced space and through that have an actual impact on how the built city is experienced. To be sure, we have constraints on how much we can hack the city - it's not as if we can easily directly confront the power of the the police or building developpers. But we can work to allow spaces to better retain memories, to promote both stronger and a larger number of looser associations between individual, to increase valuing of art and artists, or to help people get laid (more) on the basis of shared interests as well as looks.

We might need to bring some of those guys to the Bay Area.

Case of Sony vs. developers

About a month ago, Sony released a firmware upgrade for their PSP portable gaming device, taking the basic system software of the machine from version 1.5 to version 2.0. The upgrade brought new features like a web browser and updates to video viewing and network performance, but the community of people writing their own programs for the PSP quickly figured out that the new version cut off their ability to run user-created, non-Sony-authorized software. Many in this community are writing more than games--the first way to access net content on the PSP was user-created--and they're working towards a goal of turning the powerful hardware of the PSP into a true open-ended portable IT platform. Warnings quickly went out in the blogosphere urging PSP owners to skip the upgrade, not only if they wanted to run such homebrew software but also as a form of protest against an apparent move by Sony to nip a burgeoning developer community in the bud (and, presumably, as a way to kill any trade of copied games).

Nothing is new about the philosophy of not upgrading to a new version of software as soon as it's released; for every Mac enthusiast that rushed to get the new operating system, Tiger, there were many more who chose to wait until these early adopters found and reported bugs. What happened this week in the Sony vs. developers saga is different. Today tech blog Gizmodo reports that French coders have created software to roll back the firmware on PSPs from version 2.0 to 1.5. This bit of Wayback Machine is intended for both PSP owners who made the "mistake" of upgrading and for new PSP buyers who find their devices pre-installed with the new firmware. If this hack catches on, or even if it doesn't, Sony will likely respond by requiring new PSP games to first check is the machine is running the new firmware. If it's not, the game won't run.

This back-and-forth between Sony and the developer community exemplifies some interwoven trends: an end-user backlash against intellectual property protection schemes seen as far too restrictive, the rise of those that want to author and share as much content as they consume, and the power of the Internet to connect sub-groups, disseminate information, and amplify the ability of any one rabble rouser to affect change. Taking the PSP example to an extreme, I wouldn't be entirely surprised to see wearable-implantable-holographic computers in 2020 running on Windows 3.1 or the same operating system as my favorite computer of all time, the Commodore 64.

links for 2005-09-28

• Europe as a partner in world science-- RTD info ( July 2005)
  "Interview with Louis Bellemin, Head of the International Scientific Co-operation Policy Unit at DG Research."
  (tags: cooperation collaboration science Europe c2st)
• Attracting Top Researchers to Finland
  "Finnish scientific agencies have launched a new funding scheme to attract (and integrate) top foreign researchers to its shores."
  (tags: Finland brain_circulation science c2st)

Tag Costs Drop, IBM Pushes Technology

An eWeek article that discusses how IBM is seeking to legitimize RFID, working with OatSystems, TrueDemand and Marc Global. Also an announcement of decreasing tag costs: "..... hardware provider Alien Technology Corp. unveiled new tags designed to significantly reduce the cost of using RFID technology. Alien's EPC Class 1 RFID labels are priced at just under 13 cents—a 44 percent decrease in the price of 96-bit labels from Alien in the past 12 months, officials said, and a hairbreadth closer to the 5-cents-per-tag price industry experts have pinpointed as necessary for a return on investment. That price is good for tags ordered in quantities of 1 million or more ...." Tag cost is not the only barrier to seeing their broad rollout in retail, but a step in the right direction. From last week's ePC Global conference.

It feels like an earthquake today

They're tearing down the building next door. Our building shakes every time the backhoe takes out another section.

You can see more pictures here.

Technorati Tags: IFTF

links for 2005-09-27

• Chinese architecture
  A portfolio of Chinese architecture in the works. Includes designs by Koolhaas, Hadid, KPF, etc..
  (tags: architecture China)
• Search engines for the forgetful: New firms zero in on tracking items that get mislaid
  "Technology has made finding information easier than ever.... Yet as we carry more and more high-dollar gadgets, losing those gadgets has become a problem."
  (tags: search digital/physical RFID)

Rudy Rucker @ IFTF

Rudy Rucker is visiting the Institute today, talking about his new book, The Lifebox, the Seashell, and the Soul-- one of the most intriguing book titles of the year. Should be interesting.

Technorati Tags: computer, IFTF, science

Prospects for the Network Computer?

I probably wouldn't take this seriously if I hadn't seen how in Korea, people really do use PCs like network terminals. Especially young people who are just using games/apps that are on every PC (Starcraft, Office, etc) and storing all their data on the web.... plus there is an open, networked, free PC about every 50 feet in that country.

ZDNet - "Sun president: PCs are so yesterday.... So asserted Jonathan Schwartz, president of server and software maker Sun Microsystems. Instead, what has become important are Web services on the Internet and the mobile phones most will use to access them, he argued at a Friday speech here at a meeting of the American India Foundation."

Search engines in the real world

A brief article on using RFID to track items, with quotes from Paul Saffo and myself.

One point I made in the interview that didn't make it into the article: I think that for a lot of applications, reprogrammable RFID tags will become a must. I'm just paranoid enough of the scenario of thieves using RFID readers to identify who's got the iPod, or the real Rolex versus the fake, to be wary of having factory-issued tags on everything. If, on the other hand, I could rewrite them with my own personal serial numbers that mean nothing to anyone else, they'd become a lot more useful, and I'd be more comfortable using them.

Whether that entirely negates any post-purchase value retailers and manufacturers would gain from RFID tags remains to be seen. But if I have to choose between creating value for myself and creating value for a store, there's really no contest.

Technorati Tags: RFID, search