TED Ideas

Looking for some evening entertainment? On your PC or your AppleTV catch up to TED- (Technology, Entertainment and Design) web videos of the conference held in Monterey California. It costs a fortune to get in, but the meeting is rich.  Podcasts to AppleTV are quite watchable. Many great technologists and thinkers provide personal demonstrations and insights into their latest area of work. A suprise this year is Al Gore’s 2008 presentation, stay for the Q&A. Almost as good as my favorite political blog Mark Brand.

Wildfire World

On Technology and Emergency - October smoke heavy from my house, behind me, I write from a balcony in Capistrano beach, a refugee overlooking the sea. Lucky to have a room with my wife, dog and cat and a few moments to reflect on the Internet and media in emergency. It all began Sunday when my wife warned me of fires she read of on the Internet. Four years ago were the fires in Rancho Bernardo. Can’t happen again.

The Quest for University

I CHOOSE TO LIVE A LIFE OF DESIGN.  My thoughts. That is why I have my iPhone. Especially having enjoyed the silvery MacBook Pro after struggling with an XP for years and imagining the hellishly complex life of Vista to come. Vista, that’s work. There, me and my IT department (all use Macs) fritter away investor resources on the convolutions of Microsoft and Intel OEMs that marginally interact for my benefit.

I choose my home life to be Apple. A life by design. Something I love to touch. Something rich in experience. Apple combines what Microsoft and Dell cannot. Full media, cameras, software smoothly integrated at the highest bar design point. Apple hardware. Mac OS X. People want “the Apple experience”. If I told you I was going to give you the “Microsoft experience” – well that would be rude. The new Apple really began with iPods for iTunes, well studied by media instructor Jeff Jarvis. The core purpose of iPhone and iPods he writes, is about enabling personal conversation. To teach conversation, a necessity for the Web 2.0 era, comes ironically from the ancient curriculum, once necessary for a cultured people – oratory. It has always been about finding your own voice. Invoked today as Rhetoric 2.0, the new universe must  span realtime digital media, the principles of media, interaction sciences, and all the arts. Poetics and poetry again.

Freeing the Wireless Internet Market

Face it. The regulated monopoly for Telecoms has to go. Within 10 years it has to end or the national economy will lose billions of dollars.

Some background. The Federal Communications Commission, created in 1934 – replacing the Federal Radio Commission of 1927,  specified spectrum as each new technical invention came along. This spectrum was for AM radio, that is for FM radio, this is for VHF tv, that is for UHF TV, this is for AMPS cell phones etc. Ever since the 1980’s as mass market digital devices have shown, all media is just wireless bits. Radio=bits, text=bits, tv=bits, voice=bits. Bits=Bits. All media is bits. In the 2000’s it is laughable that spectrum must be regulated and protected as one media function. In Being Digital (1995), Nicolas Negroponte spelled out the ecophysics of bits as the basis for the dawning era of the bitcasters.

Ever since the Times May 2007 article carried the story of Google bidding on FCC Spectrum, the Carriers, notably Verizon have been all up in a huff with sophistic arguments of how Google will stiffle innovation. But guess what folks – the evacuated spectrum at 700 MHZ is all television. So the broadcast folks should be in a huff.  What gives cellular voice companies the right to argue that only they can take broadcast televisions space?  Furthermore innovation is exactly what the carriers have halted, or as they see it – allow to flourish in the degrees of freedom within their walled garden. Ask any software maker who has tried to publish on a carrier deck.

Today in the USA, you can buy any PC, any software, any content and choose freely among competing companies. You cannot do this on telecom. You may like a certain phone, but you had better see if the carrier operates it. This is absurd. There is no competition in the market, the way there is in the PC market which allows the consumer to freely choose between Dell, SONY, Apple, etc. It is as if to watch NBC television you have to buy an NBC TV set. The antics of today’s “telecom business model” is absolutely insane and unfair. It is going to take the FCC and clearly this will lead to the Department of Justice as it did in 1982. The reasons for needed DOJ intervention are numerous. It is now clear that operators will defend their turf all the way to their breakup and the inevitable open platform deregulation to come.

Perhaps the subsidy provided to select phone makers should become a generic rebate for any device that a consumer chooses to operates on the network.

The Morning After, iPhone

I am a PC. Yesterday, I happened to walk into an Apple Store, they happened to have an iPhone, I happened to buy it.  The morning after, I am still amazed, it happened so fast, I am a Mac.

When you see an incredibly beautiful thing, and you get an amazingly smooth experience, you soon realize that this new solid experience has the same simple coherrant DNA in every fiber of its design. It marries perfectly software, hardware and user interface. The richness is in the screen – 144 pixels an inch (PC’s and cell phones typically are 75 ppi). The powerful animation and video refresh subsystems make video and pictures stunning, but that touch interface – responsive, pleasurable and magical.

I brought my iPhone home, fired up my family Dell, updated software and got an account on iTunes7.3 (the slowest part of this process) then activated the phone with the at&t plan and I was making calls in ten minutes. It is amazingly simple, and fast, especially if you have suffered activation in-store. Helpful to watch their no-nonsense video at apple/iphone/activation. The iPhone is sold as a personal device, sadly. You cannot put it on an at&t business plan, though my IT department tried mightily.  It has to be a personal buy. Where to buy? I went to my home town at&t store, but the lady told me they trickle in. She went out of her way to say, politely but firmly, it would be an at&t security violation to open the Apple box in the store. I had to get out of the store to do it. Talk about bad service policy that result in making operator salespeople look like jerks.  No commissions for at&t. My advice – the Apple store is the only place to buy.

BREW 7

 
Qualcomm’s 7th BREW conference is being celebrated tonight in the cool breeze on the aircraft carrier Midway and the  girl’s dream band, Goo-Goo Dolls pounding as I nerd this note out and Kevin taking the picture. Earlier Paul Jacobs showed the prototype lowcost communication computer today at the keynote. Kind of looked like one of those 1970’s shoebox cell phones with a big antenna. BREW 4.1 coming with multithreading, and a task switcher just like Windows. I would like Apple to take over BREW, the greatest comms API on the planet, and put it on the right design path for Apple developers to make great applications.

On Day 2 it is becoming clear that BREW has become quite fluffy. Gone are the long futuristic presentations from Japan and Finland - in broken English, but with much more savy content, and insight into the shape of things to come, than the smiley shiney presentations of incremental progress that rule this show. 

You can learn more about LBS/GPS ideas, and the shape of the industry at Where 2.0/Google than the provincial technical and panel presentations at BREW. It has become quite dull. This is kind of a paradox as Qualcomm is all about delivering the promise of direct community on the wireless Internet.

 Also compare Apple’s iPhone demo presentations with Qualcomm.’s BREW looks ratty and small, largely because they still use Elmo’s and Apple has thought a bit more about how to show a phone with a direct cable out and a small inset for the user. Thinking ab bit more, Apple has just one phone, while BREW has to support hundreds. This is a great flaw, as Qualcomm is in the Microsoft position of supporting hordes of phones. Noone tries to exceed or excel in mobile user experience. While Apple is alligning itself to Internet, realtime user content, and a direct peer community, Qualcomm stays alligned with console-think and not offending the carrier interest of publishing and broadcast.

Imagine Applers watching these big suit executives ranting, raving, and chortling about their hard to see, hard to operate mobile phone applications. The Apple 1984 commercial redone -  smaller  lemmings rapt at the big screen shwoing small screens of carrier choices satified by ancient technology. I await the olympic woman in red shorts crashing the show, but for now – an iPhone guided tour will do (7 days away).

Apple WWDC2007 – The Platfone

Lat: 37.784  Lon: -122.403 Acquired: Jun 11, 2007 09:50

 

Moscone West, all three floors are covered in black drapes. In the dark auditorium, a white apple bite is spotted as 5,000 gather for the keynote. It begins with a fake Steve Jobs movie done by the I’m a PC, I’m a Mac team, stating Apple computer had closed for business because Vista was doing so well and the Zune was shutting down the iPod. But Mac put him in his place. See the blow by blow at Engadget.

Steve Job’s show begins celebrating Intel’s Paul Botellini. His job award is for transitioning Apple to Intel (PC?) and working on next generation products. Then some games awards highlights.

Mac OSX has 22million users. 2/3 use Tiger. Leopard to ship in October with 300 features. Here are 10. And by ten, Steve is the only CEO I know of today who can passionately and clearly explain his product. Each and every feature. And then go run the feature himself. No demonstrators.

1. New Desktop improvements, with stacks, downloads.
2. New finder – searches other computers, shared computers, coverflow – a carousel with semi loader. The .mac server hosts the changing IP addresss of all your computers.
3. Quick Look – File previews.
4. 64 Bit goes mainstream – app – Cocoa. Necessary for large picture, video handling.
5. Core Animation – Automatic animation, scene of layers – large fields of images can be brought center stage.
6. BootCamp – runs Windows and Vista. Parrallels & vmware will also run in parallel
7. Spaces – Can group applications to help work flow. (Like Rooms) Can switch between each space.
8. Dashboard – 3,000 widgets. Added movie time widgets. WebClip lets you make a widget out of most Internet sites. Point at the areas and say make it as a widget – kind of a web rss feed. Dashcode- used for making widgets.
9. iChat – Apple photobooth compete with Myface. iChat Theater. Moving backdrops.Photoface inserts.
10. Time Machine – Storing our digital lives. Like to solve problems in such a simple way that everyone actually uses it. Has a UI to look and restore files. Good for selling more home file servers. Free copy of Leopard  10.5 for everyone. Safari browser 5%. Now on XP and Vista. Twice as fast.

Where Day 3 – Google Developer Day

Google Developer Day 2007
May 31 2007
San Jose Convention Center

Keynoter Jeff Huber VP Engineering presented Google’s First Worldwide conference. Live ten city worldwide broadcast to 1500 local and 5000 Googlers world wide. In 2002 Google first published APIs based on Google maps stimulated by the revolutionary Paul Rodimacher – Housing Maps.

Ads, Standards, Mashups, Open Source.
Mashups are the model to compose and create applications today. Amazon S3 for storage. AdSense for commercialization. Ajax is for rich browser experiences. places suggested are: moviemaps.google.com , coolphotoeditor.google.com, syncingservice.google.com , jogplanner.google.com , apartmentfinder.google.com
http://Picasa.com – picnik syncs up pictures.
GData APIs used ini Google apps - Apps Provisioining, Base, Calendar, Code Search, Noteok, Spreadhseets, Blogger
Spanning Sync – for Mac
Honda used cars site

* announce
Google Mashup Editor – Paul McDonald
Server/Hosting/Ajax skills/Authentication/Atom & RSS with right caching/ Test,Deploy,Distribute
Experimental product -Cal State Parks + Maps + Commercial products. Uses new tags, gmlist, gmtmap – Feed from Google Base for products.

igoogle home page gadgets – 100,000 created.
PacMan v2.4 – 6 million page views for author last week
expedia fair updater
Can put gadgets in Blogger blog.
Embed in web pages / (served by Google)

*announce
Google Mapplets – Thai Tran
Google Gadgets and Maps APIS combined.
Orbitz – IFRAME with Mini web page. Puts their results on Google Map.
What is powerful is you can create multiple apps on the same page.
WeatherBug runs Flash.
maps.google.com/preview

GoogleWEb Toolkit launched last year – one Javascript language that work across browsers. Limits of AJAX – only for being online.

*announce
Gears – Othman Laraki – Offline access for web apps.  Gears is a work in progress going out to the community.  [Picture of laptops in airline seats] Needed tool to go off network. It is a special Browser extension – Mac/Linux/Win  Firefox/IE/Safari. Uses a Javascript API.
Needs GoogleReader – consumes up to 2000 feeds – http://reader.google.com  Green gear icon at top to synchronize.

Kevin Lynch – Adobe.
Apollo installs apps on desktop – windows/mac/linux, Flex Open Source.
Live drag and drop of data. Syncing APIs with Gears. Local storage and sync of data.

Where Day 2

The day opens late, so I am reading about Microsoft’s Surface Tabletop PC in the Tribune. OK here we go.

Tim Foresman presents the  Intelligent Design of the Earth Operating System to take off on his own Al Gore-like flights of enviro-projection based on his work heading NASA’s digital earth. DEX – Digital Earth Exchange. Many good quotes from Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth, Buckminister Fuller 1963 for the Earth huggers.

ESRI Bernard Szukalski talks about providing content and capabilities. Spatial tools and GIS models are now published as WMS or KML services. With ARC GIS Server, the ESRI planet dials through GIS map content. Then slices a line to compute terrain altitude profiles. Then over to Google Earth, Maps and MS Virtual Earth – all the same data, but the ESRI servers do all the application computation and return the results as plume graphics. The AdobeFlex2 API shows very dynamic data set and time set grouping over maps, also now being used MapQuest.

David Colleen of Planet 9 demos one of 70 city models, here San Fran in hi-rez streets, buildings and interiors. www.web3d.org X3D-earth open source. They own the original name Virtual Earth. Announcing the Raygun multiworld model, kind of a 1st gen Metaverse, Neal Stephenson’s novel Snow Crash 1992.

Yahoo Maps, Jeremy Kreitler talks of geospatial data, paraphrased as data that knows what to do when it meets a map. Y!Local 3 million ratings and reviews over 2 years and using API and GeoRSS. Flickr has 20 million geotagged photos used by 28 million users. Provide Geocoder API. Y!Pipes simple mashup tool.

Steve Coast, OpenStreetMap is a free Wiki map of the world – open and editable. 7,000 users creating a map of the world. European mostly. Open tagging for street names. Corporate campus are typically unmapped.

Swivel - Viznu & Tao.
Liberate data on the Internet. Users go to Google and upload PDF data that Swivel scans and normalizes and creates graphs. Showed Swivel G with exports data in KML to Google earth.

Send to Car – Dash Navigation – Draw maps with your tires.
Mark Williamson, Eric Klein, Senior Director, Product Marketing,
Dash provides, they claim, the first connected navigation device in the US. Wifi + GPRS + GPS in motion. Uses geolocated data into the car. 230 million cars in US 7% have GPS. Portable Navigation Devices (PND) 4 million today. Realtime traffic is the killer app as Mapquest points out. The Dash box has a realtime traffic model for all major cities. When you drive, your stats are being uploaded. But a community of drivers around you will let you know if things are bad. Community-based traffic probes enhance the value of the community. We think this will enrich base map data. Dash drivers provide new data. We know in minutes that a new road has opened up. Anonmyous data about all roads you are driving on. Now for send to Car – In car search to change consumer behavior using Yahoo Local platform.Nearby / Other City / Nearby Destination. Searches for WiFi, iPOD, Gas Prices. Possible consumer ads, combining community pictures, rate them.

Where Day 1

This is the third year of Where 2.0, O’Reilly’s two day fest of 800 people pushing the edge of the location world. Here neogeography, OpenStreetMap, GeoSensor networks etc. are brought to stage by Brady Forrest the writer of Radar. Certainly this rivals the When Sacrificial Convention of 2000BC when sundials were once the revolutionary device.

Schuyler Erle, (SKYler) of MetaCarta talks while hammering big type word slides (he just shared the automapper picture above). His project is mapping Mumbai, concluding the need to build new maps from the ground up, rather than scan convert maps and loosing all the reference and nuance of the map. “Maps are a bounding box for a story.” Schulyer riffs the great lines. The beauty project is BUILDING A MAP of the WORLD. Pure ontological chaos as people try to teach the Internet robot how it should see the world.

Rich Skrenta of Co-founder of Topix shows how news companies are building out automatic geo tag systems.

The Evolution of the Geoweb, interesting title.  John Hanke, Director, Google Earth  (ex Keyhole) announces Google Street View (link unknown, example here) that have immersive street views. Pick up the man-cursor and see his photographic viers. But I am sitting next to Everyscape’s Mok Oh shaking his head – because his company uses a progressive moving map experience that transcends all this. (Somewhat like Microsoft Photosynth, but smarter.) It is becoming clear that pictures are locations.

John talks about the mainstreaming of GEO and doing two things: building the basemap and adding geotainment – all the moving stuff on top of it - mapping user annotations, images, and  sound. Later in the conference Google Earth, Microsoft Live Maps talk about how they are mapping the planet, then structures, then skins. This reminds me of Donald Ryan’s study of the evolution of architecture in Stuart Brand’s How Buildings Learn.