IFTF's Future Now

Was the subpoena sent by txt message, too?

Earlier this year we noted a proposal by the NYPD to require that environmental monitoring devices used in New York City be registered by the police. Now the New York Times reports that lawyers representing the NYPD are asking for records from the TXTmob service, which was used by protesters at the 2004 Republication National Convention:

When delegates to the Republican National Convention assembled in New York in August 2004, the streets and sidewalks near Union Square and Madison Square Garden filled with demonstrators. Police officers in helmets formed barriers by stretching orange netting across intersections. Hordes of bicyclists participated in rolling protests through nighttime streets, and helicopters hovered overhead.

These tableaus and others were described as they happened in text messages that spread from mobile phone to mobile phone in New York City and beyond. The people sending and receiving the messages were using technology, developed by an anonymous group of artists and activists called the Institute for Applied Autonomy, that allowed users to form networks and transmit messages to hundreds or thousands of telephones.

Although the service, called TXTmob, was widely used by demonstrators, reporters and possibly even police officers, little was known about its inventors. Last month, however, the New York City Law Department issued a subpoena to Tad Hirsch, a doctoral candidate at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who wrote the code that created TXTmob.

Lawyers representing the city in lawsuits filed by hundreds of people arrested during the convention asked Mr. Hirsch to hand over voluminous records revealing the content of messages exchanged on his service and identifying people who sent and received messages.

[h/t to Jess]

Technorati Tags: mobility, security, smart mobs

Revolutionary IT in Cuba?

A short but interesting piece in the New York Times on IT and political activism in Cuba.

A growing underground network of young people armed with computer memory sticks, digital cameras and clandestine Internet hookups has been mounting some challenges to the Cuban government in recent months, spreading news that the official state media try to suppress....

“It passes from flash drive to flash drive,” said Ariel, 33, a computer programmer, who, like almost everyone else interviewed for this article, asked that his last name not be used for fear of political persecution. “This is going to get out of the government’s hands because the technology is moving so rapidly.”...

[T]he government’s attempts to control access are increasingly ineffective. Young people here say there is a thriving black market giving thousands of people an underground connection to the world outside the Communist country.

People who have smuggled in satellite dishes provide illegal connections to the Internet for a fee or download movies to sell on discs. Others exploit the connections to the Web of foreign businesses and state-run enterprises. Employees with the ability to connect to the Internet often sell their passwords and identification numbers for use in the middle of the night.

Hotels catering to tourists provide Internet services, and Cubans also exploit those conduits to the Web.

Even the country’s top computer science school, the University of Information Sciences, set in a campus once used by Cuba’s spy services, has become a hotbed of cyber-rebels. Students download everything from the latest American television shows to articles and videos criticizing the government, and pass them quickly around the island.

“There is a whole underground market of this stuff,” Ariel said.

This sounds similar to the story told in Annabelle Sreberny-Mohammadi's great article "Small Media for a Big Revolution," about the role that cassette tapes played in Iranian protest movements in the late 1970s.

She talks about three technologies in particular: the cassette tape, the leaflet, and foreign news services. Cassette tapes are small, easily hidden, highly portable, and relatively easy to copy with equipment ranging from the cheap to the industrial-strength and expensive; they also fit in well with a culture that had 65% illiteracy, and still favored oral over printed negotiation. Single-page xeroxed leaflets "were another form of small media utilized by the opposition." These were likewise easy to produce, copy, and publicize. Finally, Iran's intelligentsia had "had long supplemented… domestic information channels with various international media such as imported newspapers and news magazines, Persian-language broadcasting… and short-wave radio" (BBC Persia was a favorite).

The difference in that case was that new information technologies were seen as tools of the state and modernizers; much of what Sreberny-Mohammadi is interested in is how traditional institutions and centers of political discourse and information exchange-- in particular the mosque and the bazaar-- appropriated modern technologies for their own use. As she puts it,

The traditional elements with the help of perceptive advisors embarked upon an ingenious and creative adaptation of modern technologies of communication to serve their own purpose…. Current media technologies such as audio tapes and xerography allow multiple points of production and distribution so that they are almost untraceable and irrepressible, providing powerful tools of political propaganda that even the most authoritarian regime finds hard to control.

Despite the differences between the two cases, one can imagine that the problems the Iranian government of the 1970s had with tapes, leaflets, and BBC are likely to be even harder to deal with in an age of flash drives and cell phone cameras.

Technorati Tags: communication, politics, smart mobs

Check

Atul Gawande has a terrific article in last week's New Yorker on an information technology that, after several years' testing, looks like it could transform intensive care. It's mainly been used in the reduction of line infections, which Gawande explains are

so common that they are considered a routine complication. I.C.U.s put five million lines into patients each year, and national statistics show that, after ten days, four per cent of those lines become infected. Line infections occur in eighty thousand people a year in the United States, and are fatal between five and twenty-eight per cent of the time, depending on how sick one is at the start. Those who survive line infections spend on average a week longer in intensive care.

This new technology was developed a few years ago by Johns Hopkins professor Peter Pronovost. After the first trial using it in a hospital,

The results were so dramatic that they weren’t sure whether to believe them: the ten-day line-infection rate went from eleven per cent to zero. So they followed patients for fifteen more months. Only two line infections occurred during the entire period. They calculated that, in this one hospital... [it] had prevented forty-three infections and eight deaths, and saved two million dollars in costs.

For years we've heard that information technology could solve some of the most tractable problems with our health care system, and this seems to make that promise true. So what is this technology?

A checklist.

Not a gigantic database, or RFID tags in unconscious patients, or steerable needles (which boffins at UC Berkeley are now working on); but pieces of paper listing the steps you're supposed to take when doing something. You know what they are.

So why are they good-- good to the point of being able to save lots of lives and millions of dollars in an average hospital? Checklist offer

two main benefits, Pronovost observed. First, they helped with memory recall, especially with mundane matters that are easily overlooked in patients undergoing more drastic events. (When you’re worrying about what treatment to give a woman who won’t stop seizing, it’s hard to remember to make sure that the head of her bed is in the right position.) A second effect was to make explicit the minimum, expected steps in complex processes. Pronovost was surprised to discover how often even experienced personnel failed to grasp the importance of certain precautions. In a survey of I.C.U. staff taken before introducing the ventilator checklists, he found that half hadn’t realized that there was evidence strongly supporting giving ventilated patients antacid medication. Checklists established a higher standard of baseline performance.

Tools like checklists aren't just accidental media containing information; when you look at how they're used, they turn out to be aids to memory, objects that help standardize what can be chaotic practices. Under some circumstances, they're tools for diffusing practices and raising standards.

The power of checklists rests in their simplicity, particularly the simplicity of their use. Documents behave predictably. That predictability, I would argue, in turn is important for its incorporation into work practices. With a checklist, you can easily see that steps have been followed: it's a bit like how strips of paper in air traffic control centers serve as tools for tracking who has responsibility for a plane.

iPods Causing Crime Wave??

According to a study by the Urban Institute, iPods and cell phones may be triggering a rise in violent crime.  From the study press release:

The gadgets are not just entertaining and convenient; their high value, visibility, and versatility make them "criminogenic"—or "crime-creating," in the vocabulary of criminologists. And their power to distract users can give thieves an advantage.

In the first three months of 2005, major felonies rose 18 percent on New York City's subways; but if iPod and cell phone thefts are excluded, felonies actually declined by 3 percent.

Whether or not it is true, "criminogenic" is a very cool word. 

Update:  MSNBC released a broader story on this today.

Kitchen Budapest

On my last day in Budapest, Anthony and I dropped in on Kitchen Budapest, a new digital art / prototyping / cool new stuff place, sponsored by Magyar Telecom.

via flickr

As I understand it, the company isn't looking to Kibu as a source of new products-- they don't have to create X number of prototype cell phones or products per quarter-- but instead as a source of inspiration, a place to see interesting things. Definitely nice work if you can get it!

The space isn't huge, but it's very pleasant, and has a nice buzz. It's on Raday utca, which is one of the hipper neighborhoods in the city-- sort of a paprika-dusted version of Williamsburg or SoMa-- and the building itself is a grand old stone pile. Inside, it's all open space and clean lines, but not antiseptic. They have a couple things that I hadn't seen before, but would like to get for the Institute, or just for my own home office. The black paneling on the columns, for example, is pressed wood with a magnetic laminate: presto, floor-to-ceiling magnetic boards. Very handy.

via flickr

We had just enough time to see some demos of things they're working on. Two of them completely blew me away. The first is a mind-mapping or relational mapping program that's written in Flash. They call it Zui, because it's also a zooming browser: you can dive into an area, see new details, go deeper on some particular detail, etc., etc. (A demo is here.)

via flickr

The Institute makes a lot of maps, and so I'm always interested to see programs like these. What impressed me about this is that it's browser-accessible, and it's also offers a way to combine abstraction or high-level organization-- the top layer of the map-- with lots of interesting detail that reveals itself only when you call for it.

So that was very neat. But what blew me away was seeing it in combination with a touch-sensitive screen they've created.

via flickr

The system consists of a glass screen with infrared sensors, backed with paper. Behind it is a projector that throws images on the screen, and a camera that watches what users are doing.

via flickr

Put all the pieces together, and you have a system that lets you project a map, then move around it by using gestures.

via flickr

They've also created a table version with a camera mounted above. What this let you do is put physical objects on top of the map-- say, a Post-it with some words, a photograph, etc.-- which the camera then records, and integrates into the map: in other words, put a physical object on the surface, and it's transformed into a digital object on the screen. Very, very cool.

Technorati Tags: art, Budapest, convergence, design, digital culture, digital-physical, Hungary, Kitchen Budapest

Quote of the day

Following up on my earlier Super Crunchers post, Peter Levin asks (actually, he did this back in June), "Does Information-mining displace decision-making?"

At what point, though (and this is the general question), does information mining actually replace decision-making? In sociology, C. Wright Mills made the argument a half-century ago, this is leads to the vacuousness of abstracted empiricism. In business decision-making, it leads to an abdication of decision-making in favor of empirical data mining. The problem here (following James March) is that the world is not just uncertain, it is ambiguous. If the world were simply uncertain, reduction of uncertainty via the aggregation of more and better information might prove just the ticket. But what happens when a decision has to be made between qualitatively different options? When more information does not provide a clear direction to go? Or when decision-making could actually increase, decrease, or change in fundamental ways the options themselves? At this point, information-mining actually becomes harmful to the extent that it replaces rather than augments real decision-making. Worse, making decisions is a skill, that needs to be flexed, and used. Understanding when and how information-mining would be useful seems to me a more important ability than even knowing how to manage the information-mining itself.

I need to go back to The Black Swan and see what Nassim Nicholas Taleb says about the role of automated trading in exacerbating financial crises. His big argument is that black swans are fewer but worse in today's more precisely-managed economies and societies: to build on Peter's observation, does he argue that efforts to generate certainty distract us from the continuing existence of ambiguity-- and perhaps even make those ambiguities bigger and more dangerous, even while we focus on the computer model?

Technorati Tags: business, economics, psychology, risk

Evolutionary algorithms, and design vs. understanding

This week's New Scientist has an article on evolutionary algorithms (sometimes also called genetic algorithms) and debates over their use. Put simply, EAs "mimic the processes of natural selection and random mutation by 'breeding,' selecting and re-breeding possible designs to produce the fittest ones." They might start with two current designs for an antenna, and generate a number of offspring that borrow characteristics from both. The offspring are tested; most fail to work and are discarded, while the survivors are matched up, and the cycle is repeated-- a few thousand times. The result is a new antenna design that is better than any of its ancestors.

Some of the biggest successes with EA (or evolutionary design, or artificial design, take your pick) have been with technologies where the scientific foundations aren't very firm, or don't work as well as you'd expect. Antenna design, for example, has had some notable successes with EA, in part because, as NASA scientist Jason Lohn notes, "Maxwell wrote down the four equations which govern all of wireless communication.... They describe the physics, but the weird thing is, you never use them. In practice, this field is so squirrely, the only way to learn is through trial and error. It's the school of hard knocks."

These methods have been around for a while, but they seem likely to become more widely accessible soon:

[Traditionally, EAs have required] ultra-fast computers, both to breed the thousands, or even billions, of generations and to simulate the results to select those offspring that are fit for re-breeding. This has limited their use to a few niche applications.

That is now changing with the availability of ever more powerful computers, the advent of distributed computing "grids", which pool the resources of thousands of PCs, and the emergence of multicore chips, which suit EAs because it's easy to divide up the tasks between cores. As a result, designs can now be evolved in days rather than months or years and EAs are going mainstream.

As one evolutionary designer recalled in 2004, "When I started doing this, I was running my simulations on a single Pentium 66 [MHz] PC.... That meant I had to be real careful with how large my problems were and how long it took things to run. Now, you can brute-force things a lot more easily."

So why if these methods work, and are becoming more accessible, why are they controversial? Here's where things get really interesting.

Proponents of EAs say they could replace traditional methods in many fields from designing exotic new types of optical fibre and USB memory sticks to more aesthetic computer-generated art. Critics argue that the technique may lead to designs that can't be properly evaluated since no human understands which trade-offs were made and therefore where failure is likely....

Essentially, some worry that these designs might perform better, but if we can't understand them, we won't know know what hidden costs or disadvantages they carry-- until it's too late. NASA scientist Lohn puts it a different way: he sees EA as forcing people into one of two schools of thought.

"One school of thought says you need a black box that does X, Y and Z. If I use evolution to get something that does X, Y and Z, I don't care what's in it as long as it works."

And the other school? "That one says, 'I need to understand what's in there,'" Lohn says. "Those are the people we can't really help, because a lot of times, we don't know what's in there."

So ultimately, the question isn't whether these designs work, but whether it's important for us to understand why they work.

Technorati Tags: design, evolution

Manufacturing 2.0

One of the distinctive features of Web 2.0, I've felt, is an understanding that humans are very good at certain things, computers are really good at different things, and groups of people are good at yet other things; and that creating systems that combine individual, machine, and collective intelligence will be powerful-- more powerful than, for example, software that tries to mimic human capabilities.

Today, while reading Bill Leslie's brilliant article, "Blue Collar Science,"* on Western Electric's efforts to commercialize the transistor and integrated circuit-- a category of work that, he argues, is just as important in the history of R&D as the more famous and detached style of research that we normally think of as "R&D"-- I came across this 1964 quote by Eugene Anderson, a Bell Labs researcher:

[H]ighly complex assembly machines... are always expensive and are extremely specialized. A change in design or technology can turn a beautiful machine into a boat anchor overnight. We tend to forget that while labor costs are high, so is the cost of capital. We are finding that simple tools coupled with the sensing, judging and tactile abilities of people are often more desirable than complex machinery. It is very difficult to make a machine that has the eyeball sensory abilities or is as smart as even a scatterbrained 18-year old... at least for the same cost and flexibility.

A similar kind of relationship between human and machine, which recognizes that symbiotic systems can sometimes do better work, more cheaply, than ones that try to cut humans out of the loop.

* Stuart W. Leslie, "Blue collar science: Bringing the transistor to life in the Lehigh Valley," Historical Studies in the Physical and Biological Science 32:1 (2001), 71-113.

Technorati Tags: Web 2.0, manufacturing, social software, collective intelligence

Telepresence: it's the details?

In the first years after its founding in 1968, one of the biggest projects the Institute for the Future undertook was a study of online collaboration systems, and their impact on organizational behavior. The dream of the electronic system that's as good as a real meeting refuses to die; but unlike some futuristic technologies (I'm talking to you, personal jet pack), this one seems to be getting closer to reality, as this weekend's New York Times article on the latest high-end telepresence systems suggests.

High-end videoconferencing — the magical ability to be two places at once — has had a bumpy past, plagued by jerky gestures, out-of-sync lips and sound and cumbersome equipment. Few executives liked what they saw, including unflattering pictures of themselves, and most thought the business tool was not worth the price.

But now, thanks to new technology, videoconferencing is delivering on its promise as an alternative to traditional business travel. The high-definition TV images are sharp. Broadband fiber-optic cable has replaced tired telephone lines. And the equipment is often installed in studios that are handsome and appropriately corporate....

Two things are notable about this upsurge in telepresence.

First, the video, audio, and connections are all unquestionably getting better. But what's really interesting to me about these systems, and what makes them more successful, are the low-tech details that HP, Cisco and other companies use to fill in the gaps between video and reality.

Cisco’s virtual meeting room includes an IP (Internet Protocol) phone, three broadcast-quality cameras, three ultrasensitive mikes, three 60-inch plasma screens, a crescent-shaped table that seats six and soft back-lighting.

“The table is maple to complement faces,” said a Cisco spokeswoman, Jacqueline Pigliucci. The studios are painted in identical colors, to give the impression that the people on the screen are in the same room.

The couple people I've talked to who've used these systems say that the room design is what really makes the illusion work. Another is that the service on these high-end systems is very good: as one consultant quoted in the New York Times article says, "Walk in a Halo room, and everything is ready to run." (No one ever has to reboot a real conference room.) Of course, seamlessness comes at a cost: about $18,000 a month, to be precise.

In other words, it's not just that the technology is getting better in the conventional, specs-are-getting-more-impressive kind of way: the experience of using these systems is changing for the better because their designers are paying more attention to deployment and maintenance. Nothing breaks the illusion of seamlessness like having to reboot the computer the video conference was supposed to run on.

The second notable thing is who's really using these systems.

It might be just an artifact of a very small sample size, but the heaviest users I've heard of are groups who already have standing meetings, not people who are using these systems to substitute for first-time meetings with prospective clients. The technology isn't bringing together people who have never met before, but is strengthening an connection between colleagues. As Business Week reported earlier this year,

A typical user is private equity star Blackstone Group. Several times a week, CEO Stephen A. Schwarzman gathers senior managing partners around a polished conference table in the firm's New York headquarters on Park Avenue for a five-way video call.... Blackstone has 40 video rooms stationed around the world. One executive is so enthralled with the system that he keeps the conference connection running in his office all day long. "We're big proponents of videoconferencing because of the way it enhances the quality of meetings," says Harry D. Moseley, Blackstone's chief information officer.

Financial and consulting firms have been particularly avid purchasers. Deloitte & Touche USA is installing a dozen $250,000 video suites made by Polycom so that various business units can collaborate on outsourcing ideas or interview job candidates from India. AIC Ventures, a real estate investment company, has three video rooms: one in its home base of Austin, Tex., another in Dallas, and one in Chicago. They are used for everything from reviewing new Web page designs to celebrating the close of a big deal with a (now crystal-clear) ring of a tabletop gong.

This is a bit like the experience we've had at the Institute with Google Docs: that collaboration tool has its uses for asynchronous collaboration among geographically-dispersed authors, but the best uses come when authors are in the same room, and able to talk about the document in real time.

Despite this, at least one telepresence consulting company argues that this isn't the future: "effective inter-company business," they maintain, "will be propelling this industry forward in the coming years (remember where you heard it first!).... The future of telepresence will be about connecting with vendors, customers, and joint venture partners... to lower the shared costs of business relationships."

Technorati Tags: collaboration, displays, office, video, work

Bill Gates' Record as Seer

The Seattle Post-Intelligencer has a great piece on Bill Gates' record as prognosticator.

I laughed out loud reading his forecast that OS/2 would be the most important operating system of all time.

The End of Mobile Social Web 1.0

I first met Dennis Crowley in 2001, a few months before he and partner Alex Rainert, both grad students at NYU's Interactive Telecommunications Program, launched the mobile version of Dodgeball as part of their thesis project. I remember thinking, this is interesting. Not long after that, Clay Shirky (inspired largely by Dodgeball and other ITP projects), wrote a great piece on what he called "situated software". In short, Dodgeball was an early indicator of a new ecosystem of lightweight apps create by small communities of users for each other.

And it's been fascinating to watch Dodgeball work its way through the multiple challenges of innovation in the mobile application space - from overcoming walled gardens, to massaging their UI model, to the dozens of social hacks to make the service appealing and fun without being annoying. (Crowley used to give presentations that had a whole slide called "The Ex-Girlfriend Problem"). In the process, they figured out how to make Dodgeball scale beyond its small early adopter community in downtown Manhattan.

When Google picked up Dodgeball 2 years ago, there were cheers throughout the scattered remnants of Silicon Alley. Gotham City still had something to teach the West Coast math geeks about taking the web to the streets. Developers in California spend their weekends hunched underneath their desks eating pizza and playing Doom. As Crowley's Dodgeball profile summed it up, New York's new breed of mobile developers were more likely to "spend my weekends either (a) fixing this website, (b) on a chairlift or (c) hungover." No Second Life here, we're looking for tools to have a more interesting, intense, serendipitous First Life.

So it's come as a real shame that Crowley and Rainert have left Google. It's truly the end of Mobile Social Web 1.0. While Dodgeball never figured out how to monetize its network without really pissing people off (there was an unsuccessful attempt to create an Absolut Vodka user that people could friend to get invited to events with free drinks), it was a light in the dark for entrepreneurs trying to figure out how to break open the mobile Internet, despite the obstacles imposed by mobile carriers. And it was just plain fun.

The worst part is that the future of the mobile social web looks bleak. Twitter has stolen a lot of the thunder as Dodgeball stagnated over the last year due to benign neglect inside the G-plex. But as a great comment on today's ValleyWag story speculating on a shutdown of Dodgeball puts it:

Twitter is just a suburban man's Dodgeball. They have no lives, therefore, they twitter.

If Twitter is the mobile social web 2.0, I want a downgrade.

More importantly though, I fear what this development has to say about Google's much-touted R&D model of letting employees spend a day working on their own projects. To date, the only thing that Google has figured out how to monetize out of beta is search.

If two talented and motivated innovators like Crowley and Rainert - who were given ALL of their time to work on an idea that was ALREADY PROVEN to be successful - were frustrated enough to leave the money and free gourmet food behind, it tells me that the Google research emperor might not have any clothes.

Wi-Fi Sharing Goes Soft

There's been much written about FON's recent deal with Time Warner Cable. However, the new trend in Wi-Fi sharing communities is to remove the pesky, expensive, time-consuming hardware part and just build services and sharing around any consumer-grade Wifi station.

Whisher, founded by a FON refugee and We-Fi a San Jose-based startup funded by Israeli VC Yossi Vardi (of ICQ fame) are the first two out of the gate. We'll see if they gain momentum, but the idea of turning wi-fi sharing, which has always been an infrastructure-centric activity, into a software-centric activity, seems to be to be on the scale of the shift from Ham radio to the Internet. Software geeks are just better at scaling collaboration than hardware geeks.

 

Caves in China Have Cell Phone Coverage, But I Still Can't Get a Signal on the NYC Subway

David Cummins over at the great Pacific Epoch blogs on the Chinese Internet and mobile industry has a funny post about finding a workable cell signal at the bottom of some pre-historic caves in rural China.

On a weekend that was meant for the PE Team to get away from it all, China Mobile was inescapable. In contrast to many of the wireless players who, despite their best efforts to avoid it, seem to bump into China Mobile at every turn, our weekend encounter with China Mobile was actually a welcomed one in the most unlikely of places. After arriving at Huang Shan (or at least nearby), we found ourselves in caves running like veins under the mountain that were dug out 1000 years ago, or so the tour guide said. As is the case on most trips to the middle of nowhere, we were a little worried about whether or not we would get mobile service so far from our beloved Shanghai. Upon entering the cave, instead of being warned of swarming bats and falling stalactites, we were meant with a sign that read "China Mobile happily brings you service within these caves," or something to that effect. Right next to that sign was a similar one posted by China Unicom.

Full article

Too bad I still can't get a signal on the New York City subway. Score one for leapfrogging.

The Law of Unintended Consequences: Are Mobile Phones Disorienting Bees?

The recent global die-off off bee colonies has been another side of the rapidly shifting global food system. If the spread of wireless infrastructure turns out to be a culprit in damaging delicate apiaries, things could get a lot more complicated. Oh, the law of unintended consequences.

Are mobile phones wiping out our bees? - Independent Online

It seems like the plot of a particularly far-fetched horror film. But some scientists suggest that our love of the mobile phone could cause massive food shortages, as the world's harvests fail.

They are putting forward the theory that radiation given off by mobile phones and other hi-tech gadgets is a possible answer to one of the more bizarre mysteries ever to happen in the natural world - the abrupt disappearance of the bees that pollinate crops. Late last week, some bee-keepers claimed that the phenomenon - which started in the US, then spread to continental Europe - was beginning to hit Britain as well.

Language Schools in the New, Voice-Enabled Second Life

Second Life has finally caught up with every other immersive VR world (games) and will soon have voice capabilities. Entrepreneurs are stepping up and exploiting this new medium to offer interesting services like virtual language schools.

Technology Review: A Boon to Second Life Language Schools

Immersive language learning in a realistic environment with native-speaking teachers will soon be available online, in the popular virtual world Second Life. Starting in September, a language school called Languagelab.com will offer English and Spanish classes. The cost of the classes will be comparable to those in the real world, which can cost several hundred U.S. dollars for a semester-long course. "You won't be taking classes in LanguageLab because it's a lot cheaper," says LanguageLab founder David Kaskel, an entrepreneur and PhD candidate at the Center for Computing in the Humanities at King's College, London. "We think it's a lot better than in a physical space because there's more you can offer than in a classroom."

I have to wonder, though, if this is one of those examples of good intentions gone very very bad. Isn't the whole idea of language immersion about gaining the deep, rich cultural and human context that language is embedded in? Doing it in a virtual space seems even worse than doing it in a classroom, where you are stuck for 90 minutes with a teacher and classmates. No logging off if you don't know what to say. You're on the spot.

Seems like a case of bad virtualization to me.

Seoul Surpasses 100% Broadband Penetration

Seoul is now, officially, completely wired. Literally, 100% of homes are now connected to broadband according to the Korean government.

Looking at the table below, clearly, this is due to multiple lines in some households, or a minor blurring of commercial/residential subscriber data. I've just received this data from Najin Jun, a graduate student at the University of Delaware, summarizing the Korean government's latest city-level broadband penetration statistics. Korea is just about the only country I know that publishes this kind of detailed geographic breakdown of residential broadband penetration, and it's just amazing. As I've said before, South Korea (and Seoul in particular) has about a 10-year lead in broadband deployment over the US and much of the rest of the developed world. As always, its still a place worth visiting for insight into broadband culture.

p.s. Isn't Korean the coolest looking language on earth? It's also incredibly logical and easy to learn - its the only alphabet that was ever designed, not organically evolved over history.

 

The Blackberry UI defense

I noticed in this morning's Talking Points Memo a twist in the "he said, she said" swirling around the U.S. Attorney firings / resignations/ replacements. One of the elements of the controversy involves the use of a little-known provision allowing the Attorney General to appoint interim attorneys without Congressional approval, and whether the firings were intended as a test of that new power.

Alberto Gonzales' chief of staff Kyle Sampson was advising the use of the AG's newfound power to appoint replacements indefinitely -- without the trouble of Senate confirmation.... The emails show that Sampson wasn't shy about the scheme. He discussed it freely with members of the White House counsel office, including Harriet Miers. In October of 2006, he forwarded one of these discussions to Michael Elston, [Deputy Attorney General Paul] McNulty's chief of staff.

McNulty has maintained that he knew nothing about this, and that the AG's office always planned to send the nominations up to Capitol Hill.

But if his chief of staff was sent an e-mail about it, how could McNulty not have heard? The culprit is technology:

“Either Elston did not scroll down on his BlackBerry to read the last section [of the e-mail] or it made no impression on him, because he knew that it did not reflect the department’s plan for replacing the U.S. attorneys who would be asked to resign,” says spokesman Brian Roehrkasse.

This instantly reminded me of a problem John Hagel wrote about, "Berrybite" blowback:

Both JSB and I have had experiences where documents we sent were read by people on a Blackberry or Treo. They weren’t long documents – basically the equivalent of two or three pages of text. The recipients were initially highly critical of the material. But, when we pressed them to read the documents again, they came back after reading them more carefully on a PC or in print form and apologized for their initial reactions. They said the material was excellent and they didn’t really understand why they had such a negative initial reaction.

Well, we think we know why initial reactions were so negative. The Blackberry or Treo is not conducive to a careful read – it encourages skimming. It also encourages people to find a quick way to capture what is in the document and then move on to the next message. As a result, people tend to try to fit these documents into familiar categories based on some key words rather than thinking deeply about the topic and absorbing new perspectives. It also doesn’t help that documents on these devices are typically accessed in environments with lots of distractions – meeting rooms, airports, automobiles, etc. – making it difficult to concentrate on the message at hand.

Bottom line, if you send a document to someone and they don’t like it, ask them how they accessed and read it. If it was on a Blackberry or Treo, ask them to read it again in a different format. You (and they) might be surprised at how their reactions change.

Or as one commenter put it, "If the text don't fit, you must acquit."

One has to wonder how many government or corporate decisions are made via Blackberry or Treo without having read all through the relevant documents.... John or JSB, if you're someday called as defense witnesses, I deeply apologize!

Technorati Tags: interface, mobility, politics

MagicBoard - lightweight interaction space

I'm surprised that this software was developed in 2003 and I haven't heard more about it. MagicBoard is like a lightweight version of Jeff Han's Multi-Touch Interaction work that was demoed at TED recently.  The setup could be as simple as a whiteboard, a video camera, and a projector (image below links to video).  When I mentioned this to Alex, he immediately started imagining an  environment with multiple translucent screens with the cameras in front and projectors behind the screens.

The user works on the board as in the usual way, drawing or writing with ordinary marker pens. Whenever she chooses, the user can "grab" an electronic copy of the things that have been drawn or written with the marker pen. This copy is projected back onto the board, precisely overlaying the original markings with the appropriate colour. The physical ink may then be erased and the electronic version manipulated on the board's surface: it can be duplicated, moved, enlarged or reduced, printed, or hidden for a moment before being recalled.

(from Barney Pell's blog)

Hacking at the roots

Hackers Attack Key Net Traffic Computers

Hackers briefly overwhelmed at least three of the 13 computers that help manage global computer traffic Tuesday in one of the most significant attacks against the Internet since 2002.

Experts said the unusually powerful attacks lasted as long as 12 hours but passed largely unnoticed by most computer users, a testament to the resiliency of the Internet. Behind the scenes, computer scientists worldwide raced to cope with enormous volumes of data that threatened to saturate some of the Internet's most vital pipelines....

Other experts said the hackers appeared to disguise their origin, but vast amounts of rogue data in the attacks were traced to South Korea.

Technorati Tags: crime, internet, Korea, security

Internet, China's wonderland of fun

My colleagues at the beautifully-designed Virtual China will no doubt have more interesting things to say about this report, but the New York Times had a piece on Chinese company Tencent what its dominance among Chinese Internet users-- it's like Google, Yahoo!, eBay, and MySpace all rolled into one-- reveals about national differences in Internet use:

While America’s Internet users send e-mail messages and surf for information on their personal computers, young people in China are playing online games, downloading video and music into their cellphones and MP3 players and entering imaginary worlds where they can swap virtual goods and assume online personas. Tencent earns the bulk of its revenue from the entertainment services it sells through the Internet and mobile phones.

Another distinguishing feature is the youthful face of China’s online community. In the United States, roughly 70 percent of Internet users are over the age of 30; in China, it is the other way around — 70 percent of users here are under 30, according to the investment bank Morgan Stanley.

Because few people in China have credit cards or trust the Internet for financial transactions, e-commerce is emerging slowly. But instant messaging and game-playing are major obsessions, now central to Chinese culture. So is social networking, a natural fit in a country full of young people without siblings. Tencent combines aspects of the social networking site MySpace, the video sharing site YouTube and the online virtual world of Second Life.

These kinds of national differences have long been recognized as important for multinational companies trying to enter new markets; but in a world of user-generated media, such differences have the potential to drive the evolution over time of distinctive national technical and media styles.

Technorati Tags: business, China, culture, entertainment, IM, internet, social software

Feeature Article in Technology Review on Cell Phones Impact in the Developing World

My inbox this morning held a gem of a feature-length AP story from Technology Review on the micro-economic impacts that mobile phones are having on developing country economies. It's really the same story around the world. Man starts business, business struggles along for decades, man gets cell phone, man prospers.

Nguyen Huu Truc's trusty cell phone has revolutionized his small embroidery business -- and his life. When he bought his first mobile phone in 1995, Vietnam had just one fixed-line phone for every 100 people, and cell phones were a pricey novelty. Communication was difficult, forcing Truc to make time-consuming trips to suppliers and buyers. But these days, Vietnam has 33 telephones per 100 people -- and two-thirds of the phones are mobile.

Now Truc can make calls on his cell phone from virtually anywhere in the country for about 10 U.S. cents a minute, saving him time and money and providing quicker access to information. ''I cannot imagine what it would be like if I didn't have my mobile phone for a day,'' he says. ''It's no longer just something that only the rich can afford. Now, it's a basic means of communication.''
[snip]

Today, mobile phones are the primary form of telecommunication in most emerging economies, fulfilling much the same role as fixed-line phone networks did in facilitating growth in the United States and Europe after World War II.

''It's all micro-activity -- tailors, small repair shops, textile producers, grocery stores,'' Ruppert says. ''Even though they're small, they're allowed to get an idea of the market via the cell phone.'' Text messaging, or SMS, is another application that's particularly popular in Asian nations like Thailand, Vietnam and the Philippines. It's considered a cheap, unobtrusive way to stay in touch with friends, connect to the Internet and conduct business. ''It's a good way to save costs, but more importantly I can use SMS services as evidence for my business transactions,'' says Truc, the embroidery business owner.

There's a great discussion of mobile payment systems that have flourished in places like the Philippines, even as larger more developed economies like Japan and the US struggle to implement such systems (who uses PayPal Mobile?). Also the article does justice to several economic studies - at LSE and McKinsey - that have demonstrated the macroeconomic impact of mobiles on developing nations.

But it's the examples of how it impacts the daily lives of small businesspeople that grabs me:

In India, fishermen call ahead to ports to see where they will get the best deal on their catch...

Kenyan farmers check crop prices on a service offered by local provider Safaricom...

In South Africa, cell phones serve as a virtual office for carpenters, painters and other laborers who post their numbers on handwritten signs advertising their skills...

In Bangladesh, a quarter of a million ''phone ladies'' buy mobile phones on credit from Grameen Bank, winner of the 2006 Nobel Peace Prize along with its founder Muhammad Yunus, providing wireless communication for the community and themselves with a livelihood...

The Philippines has become a global leader in mobile commerce. Since 2000, Smart Communications Inc., the country's largest carrier, has allowed subscribers in its Smart Money program to hold limited amounts of cash in electronic wallets linked to their mobile accounts...

And perhaps the most shocking statistic in the whole piece.

Rugged, sprawling Afghanistan, for example, now has 2 million cell phone subscribers and only 20,000 fixed-line phones.

China, world's most populous country of Internet users?

The Guardian reports that:

China could overtake the US as the country with the most internet users within two years, according to its government, which released figures showing that the nation's online population had increased to 137 million people in the last 12 months.

Statistics from the China Internet Network Information Centre show that more than a 10th of the country's 1.3 billion people now use the internet, with the figure increasing by 23.4% last year. "We believe it will take two years at most for China to overtake the United States," the official China Daily newspaper quoted a centre official, Wang Enhai, as saying.

Technorati Tags: China, internet

What is Web 3.0?

Some friends of mine sell T-shirts that read, "Everytime you say 'Web 3.0,' a startup dies." In a more serious vein, Wade Roush writes in Technology Review about two strains of research that are reaching for Web 3.0 status, but are still "closer to 'Web 2.1.'"

The first category of projects is related to the Semantic Web, a vision for a smarter Web laid out in the late 1990s by World Wide Web creator Tim Berners-Lee. The vision calls for enriching every piece of data on the Web with metadata conveying its meaning. In theory, this added context would help Web-based software applications use the data more appropriately....

A second category of post-Web 2.0 projects focuses not on helping machines understand the meaning and the uses of existing Web content, but on recruiting real people to add their intelligence to information before it's used. The best known example is Amazon Mechanical Turk, a kind of high-tech temp agency introduced by the online retailer in 2005. The service allows people with tasks and questions that computers can't handle--for example, spotting inappropriate images in a collection of photos--to hire other Web users to help.

Wade is always worth reading. Alas, he seems to have led his very promising Continuous Computing blog go fallow.

Technorati Tags: AI, Web 2.0

Quote of the day

New technologies carry great potential for improving and refining the conceptualization and application of futures research methods. For example, the Internet has made participatory approaches among geographically dispersed people practical. Just forty years ago, computers were not much of a factor in futures research. The Delphi method was accomplished with pencil and paper in 1963, and sent through mail. However, if the current trends continue, forty years from now nearly all futures methods will be conducted in software, through networks, with diverse and changing sets of people, continually cross-referenced data, and monitoring decisions. Hence, the image of a few bright people, using a few interesting methods to forecast the future, may be replaced by the image of many people interacting with many combinations of methods to shape the future by blurring the distinctions between research and decision making. (Gordon, Glenn and Jakil, "Frontiers of Futures Research: What's Next?" Technological Forecasting and Social Change 72 (2005), 1064-1069, quote on 1065.)

Wireless Harlem: Grassroots Broadband

I went to my first NYCwireless General Meeting in over a year tonight. NYCwireless is a non-profit in New York I helped start about five years ago. They had a great speaker, Michael Lewis, who started the Wireless Harlem project a year ago. I hadn't heard much about the details since the initiative was announced a while ago, and its encouraging to see it moving rapidly. It's a great example of what I believe is the right way to build municipal broadband - from the ground up using off-the-shelf components and various partners. As Michael put it "Really, the beauty of municipal wireless is in the community, isn't it? The power comes from the community, from the ground up."

This is one future for the Internet infrastructure: free of big telecom companies that have stood in the way of user- and community-led innovation.

Update: Dana Spiegel NYCwireless has posted a podcast and PDF of the talk.

RFID: From baggage to passengers?

There have been several trials involving using RFID tags on baggage. Now, engineers at University College, London, are working on a prototype system to issue tags to people when they enter airports:

Electronically tagging passengers at airports could help the fight against terrorism, scientists have said.

The prototype technology is to be tested at an airport in Hungary, and could, if successful, become a reality "in two years"....

Dr Paul Brennan, an electrical engineer, is leading the tagging project, known as Optag.

He said: "The basic idea is that airports could be fitted with a network of combined panoramic cameras and RFID (radio frequency ID) tag readers, which would monitor the movements of people around the various terminal buildings."

The plan, he said, would be for each passenger to be issued with a tag at check-in.

He said: "In our system, the location can be detected to an accuracy of 1m, and video and tag data could be merged to give a powerful surveillance capability."...

The project still needs to overcome some hurdles, such as finding a way of ensuring the tags cannot be switched between passengers or removed without notification.

Technorati Tags: airport, RFID, security, UK

Computer memory, social memory, and the road to Big Brother

The New York Times has a pretty scary article detailing how it's getting harder to expunge criminal records:

In 41 states, people accused or convicted of crimes have the legal right to rewrite history. They can have their criminal records expunged, and in theory that means that all traces of their encounters with the justice system will disappear....

But real expungement is becoming significantly harder to accomplish in the electronic age. Records once held only in paper form by law enforcement agencies, courts and corrections departments are now routinely digitized and sold in bulk to the private sector. Some commercial databases now contain more than 100 million criminal records. They are updated only fitfully, and expunged records now often turn up in criminal background checks ordered by employers and landlords....

Lida Rodriguez-Taseff, a lawyer in Miami, tells her clients that expungement is a waste of time. “To tell someone their record is gone is essentially to lie to them,” Ms. Rodriguez-Taseff said. “In an electronic age, people should understand that once they have been convicted or arrested that will never go away.”

Judge Stanford Blake, whose court often enters expungement orders, said his inability to make them effective had left him feeling frustrated and helpless.

“It’s a horrible situation,” said Judge Blake, the administrative judge of the criminal division of the Eleventh Circuit Court in Miami. “It’s the ultimate Big Brother, always watching you.”

As Ellen Ullman argued in her brilliant essay "Memory and Megabytes," there's a big difference between human and computer memory, and we tend to overlook the critical differences between them. Computers are indiscriminate rememberers. This is a very good thing if they're keeping track of bank records or subatomic events, but it's more problematic when it's applied to the world of more complex human affairs. This is because individuals are much more selective about what they remember, and societies actively negotiate what they choose to remember and call attention to.

First, the case of individuals. Forgetting insults and painful events, we all recognize, is a pretty healthy thing for individuals: a well-adjusted person just doesn't feel the same shock over a breakup after ten years (if they can even remember the name of Whoever They Were), nor do they regard a fight from their childhood with anything but clinical detachment. Collectively, societies can also be said to make decisions about what they choose to remember, and how to act toward the past. Sometimes this happens informally, but has practical reasons: think of national decisions of avoid deep reflection on wars or civil strife, in the interests of promoting national unity and moving forward.

Sometimes, though, that forgetting is the product of formal social negotiation. For a long time, our actions as youths have been understood to be separable from adulthood, and we've agreed that bad things that kids do shouldn't always count against them as adults. Likewise, there are expiration dates on most bad actions. Someone who does jail time for a crime is supposed to have paid their debt to society. We feel a little uncomfortable when politicians have thirty year-old college arrests splashed in the news (it's not a big thing, it was a long time ago); we may have mixed feelings about a 83 year-old woman who's deported for serving as a guard at a Nazi prison camp in her youth (yes, it's bad, but is it too harsh to throw an elderly woman out of the country where her husband is buried?). Of course, there are some deeds that are too serious to ever outlive: serial killers don't get second chances.

Increasingly, however, thanks to the imposition of computers on what been a psychologically nuanced and socially negotiated activity, those second chances are becoming harder to come by. Just as important, the chance to move beyond past bad events-- both ones done by you, and ones done to you-- is starting to slip. Computers remember, but they don't mature; people can forget in ways that computers don't, and that's one reason they do.

Technorati Tags: computer, crime, memory, privacy

The experience of using Google docs and the future of collaboration

Today one of my colleagues at the Institute and I finished up a draft of a piece on the future of biomimicry. We've been working on it for a while, and had divided up the piece into several sections. But when it came time to write the opening and conclusion, and do the editorial work necessary to make the pieces flow together, we decided to try something new: we put it up on Google docs (formerly Writely), and worked on it together.

The experience was a very interesting one, for a couple reasons.

First, the technology. Google docs has a basic word processor, and while it doesn't do footnotes, it has most of the essentials for styling and structuring documents (though most people mistake the former for the latter). It also has a pretty good revisions tracker, which is a cross between the "track changes" functionality in Word, and the view changes feature you see on many wikis.

I suspect that when people design (or start to play around with) such systems, they imagine the collaborators being separated by oceans and time zones: that the real benefits will come to coauthors in Berlin and Berkeley, or Paris and Perth. And for lots of groups, that's probably a plus. But what struck me, as my colleague and I were working on our article, was how valuable it was for the two of, even though we were right across from each other. We'd brainstorm a transition, or talk about how to restructure a paragraph; one of us would make the changes, and save the version; we'd hit refresh, look at it on our respective machines; and rework it until we had it right.

In a couple hours we had written as much as we'd each written in the previous month. Why? In part, writing together serves to tighten attention. I'm easily distracted, and can hit Google to look up some very specific fact, only to find myself ten minutes later looking at a Web site about animal pictures on the London Underground.

It also serves to eliminate some of the rationalizations that slow traditional multiauthored pieces. There are always turns of phrase or pieces of argument that really need to be worked out with your co-authors; when you're writing alone, it's easy to put those sections off until later, and tell yourself, "Well, I can't write the next paragraph until we work out that transition. I wonder if there are any new cat videos on YouTube?" When your coauthor is right beside you, and it's easy to make changes right in the document, the bar to completion gets lower.

It's also much easier to make changes directly onscreen, in a way that everyone can see, than to put edits on a printed page, which have to then be carried later (if you can remember exactly what they meant).

Of course, the technology could be a little better: having automatic line or paragraph numbering, for example, would make it infinitely easier for collaborators to stay on the same page (as it were). Instinct suggests that this isn't hard to implement, but if you assume that coauthors are going to be working asynchronously and at a distance, you don't need it.

But that doesn't detract from the big point: the system may facilitate collaboration at a distance, but it supercharges collaboration in person. More broadly, I suspect that this is where the really big gains in collaborative and social software will be made in the future: not in teams whose members are on opposite sides of a continent, but teams whose members are on opposite sides of a coffee table.

Update, 2 January 2007: Paul Boutin has an article on Slate that links to this post. I for one welcome our new Slate reader overlords!

Technorati Tags: collaboration, collective intelligence, social software, work

Remembering 9/11: The Day the Infrastructure Collapsed?

My wife and I walked into Manhattan this morning over the Brooklyn Bridge, partly as our own kind of tribute, but partly because we were really wary of taking the subway. I recalled my own experience of 9/11 - I found out about 9/11 largely through failed interactions with collapsing infrastructures. I woke up late, around 9:30 am, and because most of the civilian telecoms infrastructure had collapsed under massive load by then, there were no ringing phones to wake me up. I showered, left home, and started walking west down Houston Street towards the F train subway. The streets were totally congested, and road construction guys were directing traffic away from Lower Manhattan. The subways were closed. I remember thinking to myself, "man, the infrastructure is this city is really letting me down today."

In many ways, 9/11 was about taking the infrastructure of global capitalism and imploding it back on itself. It illustrated how delicate our networks are and how powerfully destructive they are, if some outside force can deflect their flows just a few degrees off trajectory.

But perhaps more so, 9/11 demonstrated just how resilient post-industrial capitalism has become, because we depend less and less every day on heavy legacy infrastructure and more on lightweight, agile alternatives. Financial markets took a beating after the New York Stock Exchange closed for nearly a week - but life on the NASDAQ and other decentralized online markets went on as usual. The U.S. economy shuddered from 9/11 but recovered as the nation absorbed what turned out to be a very small recession highly localized in the New York metro area. Firms displaced by the physical destruction at Ground Zero rapidly reconvened in new quarters elsewhere, working by laptop and Blackberry from homes and hotels in the interim. The damage to the Pentagon had negligible real impact on the operational capabilities of the Defense Department, whose real intelligence is deliberately scattered across the globe.

So sometimes in my mind, while I still think of 9/11 as the day the infrastructure collapsed, and have written about those failures (especially the telecom failures), perhaps we should instead think of 9/11 as a looking glass into how our "machines for living in" as Le Corbusier called them, really function. Even a city as centralized as New York is, is finely stitched together with an increasingly dense web of lightweight links and connections that are the true flesh of our networked society.

Paper, walls, and the sociology of collective knowledge

Prof. Armsworth's comment that the University of East Anglia environmental exercise was "a very physical experience" caught my eye. Sometimes clients or workshop participants will ask, an exercise to map the future that's done on a wall with giant Post-Its seems a little retro. Why don't we do this with computers?

In a way, it is. After all, what's more antiquated than paper? But there's more to such an exercise than just making a big list and voting on it. We find this old media valuable for a few reasons.

First of all, you can't underestimate the value of working on an entire wall, rather than just a screen. When you're dealing with upwards of a hundred ideas-- and a brainstorming session with a couple dozen people can easily generate a few hundred-- you can't fit them all on a laptop screen. You need a big wall when you're dealing with lots of ideas.

Not only does the big wall help individuals make sense of the "one great blooming, buzzing confusion" (to use William James' felicitous phrase) of brainstorming; it's also essential for groups. The irony of computer technology right now-- at least the kind that isn't fresh out of the lab and requires two grad students and a union foreman to get working properly-- is that while it makes communication with people in other time zones much easier, it just as easily stifles communication with people in the same room. A roomful of people all looking at screens don't interact with each other; they're a bunch of individuals working by themselves, not a group working together. (And yes, IM side conversations may erupt, but when you're working with a group, they're generally more of a problem than a solution.) The big wall, in contrast, provides a focal point, a common reference point, for groups.

It's also much, much easier for groups to work together on a big wall, than a bunch of little screens. You can watch other people cluster cards into groups, add yours, and move things around. Discussions about where cards should go emerge spontaneously. You can see what other people are doing, and they can see what you're doing. The wall becomes both a medium for work and a conversational space.

The simple fact that people are working as a group is a serious benefit for some clients. Often, we work with groups of executives, government officials, NGO managers, or others who don't spend much time together, but collectively have a significant amount of brain power and operational knowledge: to use the tired phrase, they're the future of the organization. Our events are set up to work with them to figure out what futures they face, and what they have to do to bring the preferable ones into being. At the end of a couple days, in other words, they're 1) a group rather than a collection of individuals, and 2) have a common vision of the future.

So moving around, seeing how other participants have voted or clustered cards, and interacting with other people aren't distractions. They're central to the process.

It is indeed a more obviously physical experience than most knowledge work, but it should be noted that all knowledge work, to some degree, has a physical component to it. Our normal habit is to assume that thinking is purely cerebral, and collaboration is essentially nothing more than an exchange of formal information. Neither is true.

Technorati Tags: collaboration, communication, IFTF, work

Meetro's Location-Aware IM Goes Mac

Paul Bragiel, who moved his startup Meetro out here to Palo Alto about 6 months ago to pursue fame and funding, has announced the availability of a Mac version of their location-aware IM client. It's loads of fun, so please try it out. Windows too.

Multi-Channel Telepresence

I'm working at home today because it's easier to write outside the office, but there was a really interesting guest speaker at the Institute today. So Alex and I are playing with some tele-presence tools.

What I've got running:

• Conference call bridge (for zero-latency audio)
• iChat video session (for low-res video)
• a couple of iChat IM windows
• a PBOX browser window (for Powerpoint slides) - an experimental technology we are testing for Fuji Xerox Palo Alto Labs.

I feel like I'm pretty much there. I'm getting something from each of the channels. Most suprising though, it seems that if I have the slides, the video feed is almost totally useless. It's just - literally - a talking head. It's the least useful of the channels right now, which I definitely did not expect. Explains why video phones never took off, I suppose.

It Takes 30 Years for A Technology to Become an Overnight Success

IFTF pundit Paul Saffo has eloquently claimed many times that "it takes 30 years for a technology to become an overnight success". Add another data point for Wi-Fi on planes and hotels, as noted by wi-fi watchdog Glenn Fleishman:

In researching AirFone's history, which dates back over 20 years, I found this Associated Press story in an old telecom journal: The story, filed in Oct. 1982, describes a not-far-off future in which businesspeople would have access to terminals for data exchange using "electronic mail" on board planes and at hotels. (Search for AirFone to find the article in this long set of text journals.)

This most amazing paragraph belies the next 24 years: "An unrelated company, Airfone Inc., hopes to begin testing the nation's first commercial air-to-ground telephone system next month. Assuming the experiment works, Airfone officials say it's a small step from an airplane telephone system transmitting voices to a phone system transmitting computer data." (AirFone was 50 percent owned by Western Union at that point, then sold itself to GTE, which was transformed into Verizon. It's remained somewhat of a separate division from what I can tell.)

This is even sadder: "While there might not be many people carrying portable computers now, that is clearly something envisioned by Airfone. The company says that one day airline travelers will be able to use their own terminal or a portable device provided by the airline to work during flights."

One day 20 years later for Boeing on over-water routes, and what will wind up being about 26 years later not for AirFone, but for AirCell on domestic flights.

Interestingly, AirFone's founder, John D. Goeken, also previously founded MCI, is partly responsible for the AT&T breakup, started FTD (the floral delivery service), and founded another in-flight phone company after selling AirFone--In-Flight Phone Corporation--which used all-digital phone communications with a network operational in 1991. That was the same year that AirCell's business was sparked for air-to-ground telephony, according to their corporate history.

Shades of Wi-Fi in this paragraph: "Dallas-based Travelhost Inc. plans to begin placing small computer terminals in hotel and motel rooms in January. The company is convinced it can entice hotel operators to place 500,000 terminals in the field by mid-1985." (An obscure young reporter named J. Markoff wrote about Quazon in the June 1983 issue of InfoWorld, still noting the 500,000 terminals.)

Suffice it to say, Travelhost's Quazon terminals didn't take off. I was unable to find out what happened via Internet searches. I found a 1983 Wall Street Journal article mentioning a deal with Nynex. There's a May 1983 article in The New York Times written by David Sanger talking about the first 5,000 hotel rooms with Quazon terminals and plans for 100,000 by the end of 1983 in Quality Inns, Hiltons, Marriotts, Sheraton, and so forth. Service would run $3 plus 34 cent a minute (peak time) or 17 cents a minute at night. The device had a touch-sensitive keyboard and no word processor, but included a flight directory, up-to-date news, and some form of email.

Chinese Google (Guge) lets in some of the "bad" stuff

Part trashing Google/Guge, part pursed-lips shock, part guide to the backstreets of virtual China, this May 10 "Daily Economic News 每日经济新闻" article spells out how to find drugs, guns, and other illegal things online--and makes the assertion that Guge/Google is not doing a proper filtering job. 

The reporter's central question: "How can we prevent the Internet from becoming more of a breeding ground and bridge for harmful information?" 

The reporter compared keyword searches of 谷歌(Guge/Google) and "other major search engines."  When he/she typed in keywords "gambling 赌博," "drugs,毒品," "guns 枪支," "fake ID 假证件," and "pornography 色情," on Guge/Google, there were tens of millions of hits.  When entered on the other, unnamed search engines, however, this message came up:  "The keyword you have entered may not conform with the content of relevant laws and regulations." “你键入的关键词可能不符合相关法律法规的内容”.

 

Hertzian Space and the City

Donnie Gonzales, a student of Exploratorium curator/artist Ali Sant's at the California College of the Arts in San Francisco, has developed an interesting new notation system for warchalking - the graffitti-esque practice of making marks on sidewalks and buildings to inform passersby of available networks.

Yesterday, I got to spend the afternoon running all over Potrero Hill and the Mission District of San Francisco with Ali's "Site Specific" design studio class and architect/professor Jordan Geiger critiquing final projects.

There are some real interesting