Monthly Archives: April 2009

Pizzled: 1 Brain = 1 Dollar

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There is a great presentation by Nova Spivack on the future of the web, the emergence of collective intelligence and the global brain.

Nova Spivack has been in space, has a great blog/news site, and has recently created Twine.com. I strongly recommend you to subscribe to Twine. It’s one of my great sources of information.

Nova is also a Tibetan Buddhist, which is not irrelevant in this context.

The presentation he delivered at the Singularity Summit Dec 2008 gives a longer term perspective beyond Web 2.0. Btw: all the key presentations of that Summit are now online.

Just to set the scene: by 2030 you will be able to buy the power of the human brain for 1 dollar. By 2040, machine intelligence will be one billion TIMES greater than all human intelligence together.

The presentation starts with a list of great thinkers: first of all this is a very humbling experience, and secondly a great shopping list for my next pile of books. It makes me so hungry to know more, which illustrates my oral character structure.

Quiz: in that list of great thinkers, Nova mentions 2 Flemish researchers/thinkers: if you spot their names, let me know via the comment of this post.  Prize ? Eternal Fame in my blog.

Then he leads you through concepts such as Web 4.0, the Web Wide World (not the World Wide Web), the evolution of crowds, groups, and meta-selves. This would be a great subject for my friend André Pelgrims, who specializes in group dynamics of people in flesh & blood (people like you and me 😉 and to see whether André’s model on group evolution with 4 phases would apply to the online world as well. The 4 phases André defines are:

  1. Forming & dependency. The individual is part of the group but with loss of his identity
  2. Storming & counter-dependency: scapegoating and the innocent gets all the shit.
  3. Independency. Expansion of the individual, helping/caring for others takes central stage
  4. Inter-Dependency: blend in the group without loss of identity. Genuinely sharing is key, nothings needs care or help.

You can find Nova’s presentation here. Enjoy.

This of course raises a lot of questions on our personal and corporate value kit for the future, and what it will mean to be a human, when indeed machine intelligence will be dramatically more powerful then our collective intelligence.

As some sort of counterbalance, i would also like to point you to a older (2007) TED presentation by Daniel Coleman (Emotional Intelligence) on Compassion by Daniel Coleman 2007. Thanks to my friend Sven for sharing this one.

All this technological evolutions still make us search & reach for REAL contact between people. Coleman describes the feeling of NOT getting attention when somebody uses his Blackberry/iPhone/whatever during a meeting or conversation: you feel “pizzled”, a combination of puzzled and pissed-off.

That’s because the other person does not give you real attention.

Coleman’s recommendation is to turn off your PDA’s, close your laptop, end your daydreams, and pay full attention to the other. And about the art of balancing between the self and the other selves, and the meta-selves of Nova Spivack. And so we are back to the Tibetan Buddhist.

Clouds and Boom in the Zoo: the unbearable lightness of IT.

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There was spring in the air yesterday afternoon. So what do you do ? You make a nice drive in your convertible car and you head for the Antwerp Zoo. (I don’t have a convertible, but I thought this would be a nice start for today’s blog)

Antwerp Zoo: not that i am such an animal-freak, but that’s where the 1st CloudCamp for Belgium was held. For this first, the organizers got about 80 people together. Not bad, and gives an idea of the buzz going on about this topic. And as you will see, these sort of CloudCamps happen everywhere in the world. Take your chance if there’s one in your country.

cloudcamp_antwerp_banner

For those not familiar with Cloud Computing, a good primer “Above the Clouds: A Berkeley View of Cloud Computing” was recently released by Berkeley University. You can download it here.

You will quickly find out that this is the space of Amazon Web Services (AWS), Google AppEngine, Microsoft Azure, and many many others. Many, many others… right. Just have a look at the list of sponsors of yesterday’s CloudCamp: some well established big boys such as Sun and Microsoft (strange that neither AWS not Google had any presence or sponsorship), and then “the rest”: all (at least for me) new names such as A-Server, Zeus, iTricity, Flexiscale, Terremark, WDC (Wallonie Data Center), Virtualization.com, Ausy, Unuits Open Source, etc…

It’s maybe good to throw in some buzzwords in here:

  1. IaaS: Infrastructure-as-a-Service
  2. PaaS: Platform-as-a-Service
  3. SaaS: Software-as-a-Service

Most of the speakers come out of what i call the datacenter/hosting space. The IaaS space. When i walked in (too late, as usual), there was a presentation going on about: cooling, racks, power being 30%+ of the cost of a datacenter,…

I was only 30 min late, but this was already the 5th presentation after the keynote.

That’s a bit the problem with these “un-conference” formats. Each speaker gets 5 min to do a non-commercial pitch, and for the rest one hopes that during the “power-break” and the “beer with cheese” after-event some good discussions or business will happen: they usually don’t (except of seeing some old pals again after years) and there is no way how you can get some depth on these subjects. And then at the end you have these terrible unprepared Q&A sessions with the “panel” that really go nowhere.

But there was a lot of positive as well:

There was this spring "Internet Boom” feeling again: a lot of idealism, lots of young people, going for it and not afraid to go to war against the incumbents.

The speaker from Microsoft at least had a story to tell. Although his presentation was in essence a very high level powerpoint of the Berkeley report (download above) plus one obligate slide on Azure, he was not too arrogant to admit to sat “there is still a lot of work to be done”.

And of course every time you have Microsoft in the room, you get these sterile and religious “let’s bash Microsoft” interventions about the desktop is dead, everybody else is more secure than Microsoft, etc, etc. It’s a real pity, because Microsoft deserves better and they have a story to tell. And the speaker handled the questions very well in an non-arrogant and respectful way.

There were some good interventions by the Sun guy. You could feel he was used to talk to CIO’s and alike. In the end he said that any big company will need it all: their own infrastructure, a private cloud next to their datacenter to be able to deal with latency issues, and one or more public clouds.

There was a good – although light – debate why big banks or airline companies (i think business criticality and high I/O were the underlying themes) have not yet embraced Cloud. The answers from the panel were staggering and almost a license to kill for any CIO you would like to convince about Cloud:

  1. We are in a learning phase
  2. There are a lot of security issues to be tackled
  3. You don’t have the right skills
  4. Cloud is for Web 2.0 architectures, for rendering and streaming. We can’t help you with your legacy.
  5. High I/O database projects don’t fly well in the Cloud.

As the afternoon progressed, i got more and more irritated with what i would call “The Unbearable Lightness” of these sort of events. These folks really have to do a major effort to speak the language of the business: they speak about security, migration, liability, scalability, resilience like you would talk to your 3 year old daughter about your latest visit to the Zoo. I know some companies where you would be shown the door after 5 minutes if you came with such a pitch.

By contrast, we closed the day with a not-so-light Belgian Beer and Cheese buffet. After that, i strolled around in the by now empty Zoo. “That’s where he belongs”, i hear some of you thinking.

The last sunrays were sprinkling a soft and cozy “light” into the warm early spring evening: in the end, i was happy i went to this CloudCamp: this is a space with a lot of action for the next 1-2 years. Then the rain will fall out of the clouds, and we will see who will be able to offer alternatives to the Cloud power houses of today.

Tom Cruise Wall

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Who has the real Tom Cruise touch-screen wall of Minority Report ?

Recently i had the chance to see ànd touch ànd play-around with Microsoft’s Surface Table. That was fun. Made me think of the video wall in Minority Report ;-).

Microsoft already showed some wall like this from their R&D group back in 2006

But what’s next ? Is the Tom Cruise Wall reality or still in the R&D labs ? Or is our vision of User Interface (UI) getting even better or fundamentally different ? Found in the meantime following cool stuff:

  1. Jeff Han’s http://www.perceptivepixel.com/ company. Jeff created havoc  at TED 2007
  2. Pattie Maes’ TED 2009 appearance without screen and based on gestures:
  3. More gestures: the QB1 computer from OZWE: http://www.ozwe.com/
  4. In stead of flat screens and Tablet PC’s, check out the Pulse Smartpen at http://www.livescribe.com/
  5. Or throw into this things like PopFly, Yahoo Pipes, Adobe AIR, Silverlight, etc

In other words: how will we interface with the computer in 5 years ? In 10 years ? Will we all have at home a 15 m³ wall-screen in our living room, connected to a Terabit Internet Connection ?

This must be fun: let’s share what other Tom Cruise Walls are available in the market today, or that you have seen on the web or in R&D labs.

Singularity: Web² and augmented First Life

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I am a big fan of Ray Kurzweil.

Too make a long story short, he is predicting that man & machine will blend together around 2030, and that is not so far away !

It’s about augmented human beings. And superhumans. And what the impact on society of all that is.

A must read from Ray is his latest (already out there for 2 years or so) book: “The singularity is near”

And have in this context also a look at the Singularity University. Not only the subject and idea of building a dedicated university for his is cool in itself (I enlisted for the 3 day program in Fall 2009, and i am anxiously waiting whether i will be accepted 😉 but have a look at who was there at their founding conference !

This is top-notch “crème de la crème” set of folks: Chris Anderson, Robert Freitas, Larry Page and a lot of other Google & NASA brains.

This is just going to happen. And it’s going to get in mainstream faster then we believe. Ray is even preparing a movie to get these thought permeated into mainstream thinking.

Talking about mainstream. I am again referring to my previous post on Tim O’Reilly’s keynote at WebExpo 2.0 earlier this month.

Free interpretation: forget about Second Life, it’s all about First Life augmented with stuff in the cloud.

In my opinion we are witnessing the singularity in some form already now in what Tim O’Reilly calls Web² (yep, you got it: not Web 2.0 but Web²): World + Web 2.0 = Web².

A human being augmented with sensors in the cloud and in the body, tapping the collective intelligence in this global brain that the web is becoming, sharing & collaborating in ways we never thought possible 5 years ago.

Or is all this too much SF to you ? Have i been reading to many Asimov ?

For the fun of it, i just remind you the 3 Asimov Laws of Robotics:

  • A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.
  • A robot must obey orders given to it by human beings, except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.
  • A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law.

    I would be interested to hear from you on whether you believe this will happen or not. And all the above is very much inspired by things and folks working from Silicon Valley. Any cool similar things going on in the rest of the world ?

    • Web Trend Map 4 – Final Beta

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    You probably will be hit by this from numerous sources, but Information Architects just released 4th "Web Trends Map".

    The original URL is here

    But for really a cool visualisation of this I recommend the Zoomorama site.

    System to System

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    My good friend Peter Hinssen is pretty busy these days. At the end of last year he wrote a book about the dead of alignment between IT and Business. It was and still is a big plea for “fusion”.

    Now he’s doing in video’s. The first one is called “The laws of IT”. You can find it here.

    In both stories there is something of “us” and “them”.

    It all illustrates the fact that we are trapped in talking system to system. For example: IT to Business. Or Marketing to Products. Or Ordering to Finance, etc.

    As long as we do this, we are “competing” between systems.

    We have to talk human to human. My way of co-operating with my colleagues changes dramatically when i have the mindset of “what story is behind that PERSON”.

    I start having genuine interest in that person, and it profoundly changes our co-operation potential.

    Do we still need identity numbers ?

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    Tim O’Reilly did a great opening keynote at Web2.0Expo about 5 technologies to watch and subsequently also commented on a related Forbes article about the emergence of a social nervous system.

    Tim is saying some really profound things here. I will spend 2-3 posts to comment.

    He is saying some cool stuff about identities of things. He says that meaning does not have to formalized. And that for example the identity of CD’s in the CDDB project is based on recognizing the checksum of the length of the songs on the CD. Or the energy-signature of major appliances is so unique that you can derive from that unique signal what brand and model of fridge you are using. Its all about pattern recognition.

    Fine. All that is about things. But what about humans ? Do we “radiate” some sort of unique pattern that can be used to uniquely identify each of us ?

    In my previous life, i was pretty deeply involved in the Belgian Electronic Identity Card project (eID). In Belgium more than 8 million citizens have a smartcard that contains 2 certificates issues by the Belgian Government. One to authenticate and one for digital signatures with legal value. Is that advanced ? Depends how you look at it. Americans and Britains for ex shiver by the idea only of an identity card, don’t even mention an electronic identity card. Now on the other hand, a smart-card is not what one would call these days “rocket science”. And of course we get biometrics mixed in all of this. But all this is about capturing something unique of our body (fingerprint, retina, voice, etc) and being able to read it and map it to a database.

    And aren’t we all looking for one secure identity that we can use in many different contexts (work, private, different online services, etc,…) and across many different devices (PC, Mac, iPhone, touchwall, arm wrist devices, car, etc) ?

    And that we can use in different scenarios: authentication, signature, encryption,….

    But would there be something like a human unique energy-signature ? Or unique footprint ? Maybe your Twitter behaviour has a unique “twit-print” ? I don’t know. Are you aware of such initiatives ?

    If you want to think about human identity from a broader then technology perspective, then I recommend www.identityblog.com by Kim Cameron. Kim is Microsoft’s Chief Architect Identity. Kim is a non-typical Microsoftie 😉 He has a high teddy-bear factor, and talks more to the open source, IBM, Sun, etc community than pure Microsoft audiences because he is convinced that digital identity will need to be solved at industry level, not as proprietary company initiatives. Kim has on his blog some interesting whitepapers on the Identity Meta-System and CardSpace implementations in both Microsoft and non-Microsoft environments. If you want to get a feel of the full scope of identity – including themes like privacy, user control, etc – then this blog is an excellent point to start.

    Singing my own song

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    I finally decided to start my own blog.

    A lot in this blog will be about technology, mainly IT-related but not exclusively. And its impact on society. And reflecting what all this means for our personal and corporate values.

    The title of my first post is inspired by an personal development course i recently followed. The course is titled “Leading by Being”, and over an 18-month period I was part of a group of 10, who discovered themselves.

    In the end, it is all about discovering your true purpose in life. For myself, i discovered it is about “Inspiring other people to dream”.

    I can do this in many different authentic ways: in my family, at work, with friends, in communities, on-line.

    Wouldn’t it not be a shame if each of us has a song to sing in this world, and never gets to it because you are trapped in your current systems and thinking ?

    That’s why I want – it’s more than wanting, it’s so compelling that I must do this -  to sing my own song.

    Or as in a poem i wrote some years ago:

    I want to be playful like the birds,

    showing little tricks,

    challenge and pursue

    but not limited

    by any form of danger

    In essence, it’s about a free mind.