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

All the World's Science Parks Gather in Barcelona, and I Learn About A New Model for Tech Transfer

I returned Friday from the annual congress of the International Association of Science Parks, an organization formed 20+ years ago at Sophia Antipolis in southern France - one of the early "technopoles" featured in Manuel Castells' and Peter Hall's classic study on science parks and science cities.

The world has come a long way since that first meeting... and since Castells and Hall looked at science parks and science cities in the 1980s. There were over 800 people from hundreds of science parks around the world at this conference - evidence that, while commercial success may not be widespread, science parks have become a popular tool in the arsenal of economic developers. Even in Bloomberg-ian capitalist Manhattan, we've got the city actively involved in orchestrating the development of the East River Science Park, intended to house a small but vibrant set of research hospital spin-offs. At the conference, I even met an ambitious young scholar trying to put together the plans for a science park in Windhoek, Namibia.

My talk focused, among other trends, on the long-term shift away from science parks and science cities, to science that is embedded in cities. At IFTF, Alex Pang and I have been trying to document and understand this trend over the last few years - first as part of the Delta Scan's 50-year look at the future of science and technology and more developed in our 2006 Ten Year Forecast.

Perhaps the most interesting presentation I heard was by the president of the Alfred Mann Foundation, A, Stephen Daums. Alfred Mann is the third largest philanthropist in the world, after Bill Gates and Warren Buffett, and has been funding the creation of major centers for accelerating the transfer of biomedical technology out of universities into the marketplace. Twelve centers are planned, and 3 are currently in operation (at USC, Perdue, and Israel's Technion). Each center will receive a $100 million dollar endowment and a $70 million grant for operating expenses, and will focus exclusively on selecting promising research for commercialization, assessing market potential, and shepherding the project through to commercialization. It's too early to tell if this will be a success, but I suspect that down the road we may owe thanks for some truly game-changing biomedical technologies to this novel model for technology transfer.

Political Obstacles to High-Tech Clustering in China

A good article in this week's BusinessWeek looks at the challenges that Chinese high-tech companies are having succeeding in global markets. Even Lenovo, the darling of China's tech sector, is having trouble and laying off workers.

Buried in the article, though was this fascinating bit of news - it seems that in return for aid from the central government, tech companies are being forced to decentralize manufacturing (and presumably R&D) across the country. It's an interesting policy, because while it may ultimately lead to the emergence of more high-tech clusters, it will almost certainly delay the accumulation of critical mass to make existing centers really take off.

The woes of China's tech hopefuls, though, aren't entirely the result of poor timing or management missteps. What was supposed to be a major advantage for Chinese tech companies--the backing they receive from Beijing--has in many cases turned into a liability. In exchange for preferential loans, tax breaks, and sweetheart property deals, Communist Party bosses often get to influence key business decisions.

Take SMIC. The chipmaker will soon operate plants in five cities across China. By contrast, SMIC's Taiwanese rivals, United Microelectronics Corp. (UMC) and Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. (TSM), have built most of their factories in two science parks just a few hours' drive from one another in Taiwan, making it easier to manage the plants. So why has SMIC spread out so much? "Every [local] government wants to go into high tech," says Pranab Kumar Samar, an analyst in Hong Kong with Daiwa Institute of Research. That might make for good politics, but it's not exactly smart business.

Read the full article

Is this a new model for high-tech clustering?

When the US government started to spend a lot of procurements (especially military) in California after World War II, it was a powerful force in decentralizing high-tech from Boston and the New York region. But as far as I know, there was never anything as drastic as forcing companies to open branch facilities.

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.

Baby Boomers Invade the Developing World

Cabo San Lucas and the rest of Baja California have long been the poster child for retiree-based economic development in a developing country. The influx of wealth and service jobs has made it one of the richest parts of Mexico (not counting the expats of course). In Europe, Morocco and Turkey are options. The Wall Street Journal ran a piece yesterday (subscribers only) that talks about the next wave of expat retirees heading to Southeast Asia. The most fascinating to me is the quote in bold below - if the Philippines reaches its goal of 1 million expat retirees, that will be nearly 1% of it's projected national population of 102 million by 2015!

The Perfect Place - WSJ.com

The Philippines, meanwhile, has revved up its recruiting efforts as a matter of national priority. The number of overseas retirees rose by 1,273 last year, more than double the previous year's total. The number of active retirement visa holders totaled 5,183 at the end of 2006, excluding dependents.

"We aim to have one million retirees here by 2015," says Ernesto M. Ordonez, president of Philippine Retirement Inc., a nonprofit organization that helps foster cooperation between private companies and the government's Philippine Retirement Authority, which processes visas for retirees.

New Bedouins

This is a bit of an update of a 2006 article in GigaOm on cafes as the new garages (a piece that generated a number of responses), but still worth noting. Today's San Francisco Chronicle has a long article about "the new Bedouins," tech workers who have moved more or less permanently out of offices, and now circulate among cafes.

A new breed of worker, fueled by caffeine and using the tools of modern technology, is flourishing in the coffeehouses of San Francisco. Roaming from cafe to cafe and borrowing a name from the nomadic Arabs who wandered freely in the desert, they've come to be known as "bedouins." [ed: the term appears in a 2006 Charter Street post, which is also a nice meditation on the benefits of "going Bedouin"]

San Francisco's modern-day bedouins are typically armed with laptops and cell phones, paying for their office space and Internet access by buying coffee and muffins.

San Francisco's bedouins see themselves changing the nature of the workplace, if not the world at large. They see large companies like General Motors laying off workers, contributing to insecurity. And at the same time, they see the Internet providing the tools to start companies on the cheap. In the Bedouin lifestyle, they are free to make their own rules.

"The San Francisco coffeehouse is the new Palo Alto garage," declares Kevin Burton, 30, who runs his Internet startup Tailrank without renting offices. "It's where all the innovation is happening."...

"This is just confirmation that Starbucks and its cousins are all really in the commercial real estate business," [Daniel Pink] said. "They're giving very cheap real estate for a very pricey cup of coffee."

As I argued the last time this meme bloomed, "the shift from garages to cafes" isn't really just about getting rid of offices, but instead reflects "a shift in preference away from [working in] spaces that are privately owned and isolated, to ones that are more public, that provide services, and offer the potential for fruitful random encounters and social interactions." My sense is that that's still true.

Technorati Tags: business, cafe, mobility, office, wireless, work

New Urbanism and the college

The New York Times has an article about a trend among universities and colleges to invest in New Urbanism-style town development, as a way to create an environment more attractive to students, faculty, and others. Of course, large urban universities have been in the real estate development business for years (Stanford has been remarkably successful playing this market); what seems to be new is that a wider variety of institutions-- from Hendrix College in Arkansas, to Furman Univeristy in South Carolina, to Hampshire College in Massachusetts-- are getting into the game, and they're doing so mainly to make themselves more attractive to students, faculty, and others who want urban cultural amenities.

Nearly all of these developments are being built by institutions with vast tracts of unused land; officials hope to take advantage of that asset to help build endowments. Generally, these are also institutions that are not looking to expand significantly the size of their student bodies....

[O]fficials have realized that a more urbanized version of the ideal campus could attract a population well past its college years — working people and retiring baby boomers — if there is housing to suit them. And so a new concept of the college campus is taking root: a small city in the country that is not reserved for only the young.

In effect, this is a collegiate version of what Anthony Townsend and I have been studying: attempts by partnerships of universities, real estate developers, and local governments to create innovation zones that will attract world-class scientists, entrepreneurs, corporations, and start-ups.

This is a similar phenomenon, but at a different financial scale, and with a different audience in mind: not the VC-funded biotech hotshot willing to locate her company in any of half a dozen countries, but professionals, retirees, and working-class people looking to strike a balance between small-town affordability and intimacy, and academic/urban engagement.

Indeed, it sounds less like these developments don't aim to be interesting small towns, on the model of Williamstown or Amherst; they want to be urban neighborhoods, without the big city.

Franklin & Marshall College in Lancaster, Pa., which has created several programs to revive adjacent neighborhoods and to encourage faculty to live nearby, is building an apartment complex for undergraduates across from the main entrance to campus. There will be retail stores on the first floor.

“I think liberal arts colleges and universities are all about the serendipitous moments,” said John Fry, president of Franklin & Marshall. “You’re in the coffee shop on a Saturday morning sipping a cup of coffee and you run into a professor, and two hours later you’ve had one of those transformative moments.”

With some modification, this quote, and the idea of constructing an urban space that encourages serendipity and casual transformation that it expresses, could appear in a conversation about Bio-X, the Stata Center, the new IT-media region in Copenhagen, or any number of other new R&D spaces. In this case, the "transformative moment" probably leads to a deeper appreciation of the mind-body problem or the influence of Kurosawa on contemporary cinema, not a patent for a new kind of drug delivery system; but the underlying logic is the same.

Technorati Tags: cities, community, innovation, university

NYC Launches Mass "Sousveillance"

Gothamist has a great post about Mayor Bloomberg's announcement yesterday about a massive expansion of the city's successfiul 311 program to other mobile networked media. (BTW, as I write this the first snow of the season is falling in Manhattan! Go global warming! Go El Nino!)
As part of his State of the City address, Mayor Bloomberg announced some new technology for New Yorkers.

Bloomberg:

"This year, we'll begin a revolutionary innovation in crime-fighting: Equipping "911" call centers to receive digital images and videos New Yorkers send from cell phones and computers something no other city in the world is doing.

If you see a crime in progress or a dangerous building condition you'll be able to transmit images to 911, or online to NYC.GOV. And we'll start extending the same technology to 311 to allow New Yorkers to step forward and document non-emergency quality of life concerns holding City agencies accountable for correcting them quickly and efficiently.

And Gothamist's rebuttal:

City Hall should totally start its own Flickr group - as should the NYPD! Sadly, the Mayor did not divulge the email address or number you will be able to send images or video to - maybe he do that in an extra special message via YouTube.

The mayor's "criminal justice coordinator" John Feinblatt told the Times, "This is absolutely brand new for law enforcement, and it’s absolutely new for a call center like 311, but by no means is it new technology. So what we’re going to do is take applications that already exist in the industry and adapt them to 911 and 311." Feinblatt and Police Commissioner Ray Kelly both pointed to the incident where Thao Nguyen took a cellphone picture of Dan Hoyt pleasuring himself on a subway, posted it on the Internet, all leading to Hoyt's arrest (this wasn't his first offense, either!). Others have used cellphones to try to nab wrongdoers as well. Civil rights attorney Norman Siegel tells the Post he thinks would be "no civil liberties objections" if the photographs are of "criminal behavior."

And New Yorkers would be able to log quality of life issues the same way to 311. How very reminiscent of Andrew Rasiej's "We Fix NYC" pothole tracking! But we don't recommend you email 311 every time when you see that poop on the street because that'll get old.

The Institute has been tracking this kind of bottom-up-surveillance, or "sousveillance" for a couple of years as part of our work on context-aware computing and more broadly as a social trend in our Ten-Year Forecast. In fact, we've got a new perspective piece in the 2007 Ten Year Forecast that will address this very trend. Don't you wish you were a member?

Google Heatmaps Mashup

I've written about FortiusOne's GeoIQ platform before, but now their Google Maps heat map mashup is now online. Very much worth a look at www.GeoIQ.com.

One of the demo apps is a New York vs. San Francisco side by side comparison of demographic data that you can customize. Very cool

The Interactive City

Eric Paulos of Intel's Berkeley Research Lab has been giving a big boost to the group of scholars, hackers and artists thinking about information and communications technology's impact on cities. Today and yesterday, as part of the big ISEA 2006 Zero.one festival going on in San Jose he hosted a summit on the Interactive City. This builds on Eric's StreetTalk event 2 years ago, which incidentally is where I first met Marina Gorbis who brought me on at IFTF some time later.

Matt Jones from Nokia is giving an interesting talk that mirrors a lot of IFTF's recent forecasts about how mobile technologies are affecting the way people use space - he calls it "solidified socialization" - the idea technology is soldifying our social relationships rather than fragmenting them. And he also mentions a shift from "controlled, awful spaces" to "truly playful spaces" as people use social and media tools to activate, annotate and live up drab 20th century urban spaces.

There's a wiki evolving during the event as well.

I'll update this post as the day goes on.