Release 4.0

change of EDdress

2004-01-22T12:50:00.000-08:00

heartfelt thanks to the team at Blogger.com, who helped me set up my first blog (blush), but I have now moved the blog to my own site: http://weblog.edventure.com

(please be patient, you will be redirected automatically).

Happy New Year!

Esther

some comments about LinkedIn

2003-12-11T04:30:00.000-08:00

I'm trying out the social network platforms, and of all of them LinkedIn suits me best. SO this comment is rendered in the spirit of "I like you so much I want you to be better!"

I am getting a lot of invitations from people I don't know. It would be great to have a button that says "See inviter's profile" that links directly from the confirm-or decline-invitation page.

Also, on the invitations page, the service should include some advice: "Do not invite people who do not know you. If you are not sure, at least give them a hint of who you are ... how you met, etc. If you are not sure or that effort is too much work for a particular person, perhaps you do not know that person well enough."

My sense is that people are starting to invite everyone in their address book. That may goose statistics, but the key is the signal, not the noise. ANd, of course, too much noise will drown out the signal...

Khodorkovski - gotta say this (no tech content)

2003-11-02T03:33:00.000-08:00

Now that I'm back in the US and thinking slightly longer-term, I can't ignore the topic of Khodorkovski. (note to tech readers; this is about Russian politics, not the Internet....but remember when we thought politics in the US didn't matter to us either??) It gives me the feeling of familiar despair: "Uncle is drinking again!" We thought maybe he was cured, but he's not.

THe Russian government is showing its worst side, going after one man (Khodorkovski) and his company for the (alleged) kind of crimes that virtually every non-software Russian business has been involved in. (Software companies created things out of their heads, and did not generally "buy" assets from the state for amazing prices.) That means, long run, that most Russian businesses are vulnerable. WHen you create a situation where almost everyone is guilty (viz. our drug laws), you create disrespect for the law and a climate where everyone is vulnerable to misuse of government power masquerading as the force of law.

One American I encountered during the past week said to the Russians (paraphrase): "You have Yukos; we have Enron." but that is precisely wrong. Enron broke specific laws (that most but certainly not all other companies did not break), and was not singled out for political reasons.

The RUssian business community is upset but vulnerable; the US business community and government should be taking a stand in favor of the things we believe in: transparency, rule of law, etc., instead of turning a blind eye.

and now from the Budapest airport

2003-11-01T05:17:00.000-08:00

I love providing tech support in airport lounges; it makes me feel so smart! I'm here in the Budapest airport lounge using properly workig WiFi after two days of frustrations with various half-working systems, including the most annoying hotel system I have ever used at the Budapest SOfitel. (When it was a Hyatt they had WIFi that worked perfectly; now they have some godforsaken system that - says a friend - detects you are not French and makes it tough for you. You have to reboot to start it, and then again each time you close your browser, (inadvertently) pull out the cable, put it on standby...

Meanwhile, my own mail server is down and I can't get into my friend Eric's hotmail account (can't blame the Sofitel for that!?!), so I've been sending meeting follow-up e-mails by using my new LinkedIn account and inviting in the people I partlcularly liked. I'm using LinkedIn both because I'm hoping it will be useful, *and* because I want to write about it for Release 1.0. It's interesting to observe my own behavior...but my flight is now boarding. SO please, anyone with experience with any of these platforms - LinkedIn, Spoke , Contact Network, let me know. I hope to be up again soon at edyson@edventure.com. Bon voygage!

2003-10-29T02:09:00.000-08:00

I'm sitting here in a conference room on the second floor of the Marriott Grand in Moscow, enjoying the hotspot... And I'm realizing how hard it is to maintain a blog without frequent connectivity. I have WiFi in the apartment I'm staying in too, but by the time I get home I'm exhausted. Better to do it sitting on the sidelines at a meeting, near to the power outlet...

The meeting I'm at is for Luxoft, an outsourcing company pitching itself to the press, both US and Russian. "You're telling us business is great here and sucks [paraphrase] in the West, so why are you selling in the West?" asks one journalist. good question!

but the answer, of course, is that hard times make customers smarter buyers...and therefore they will buy from Luxoft.... [disclosure: I'm on the board of Luxoft's parent company, IBS Group.]

It's a pleasure to see the development in this country...even as the political tides continue to go in and out... I remember when it was a challenge to make a phone call here, and now I'm using WiFI...!!

Two days ago I went to see Yandex, Russia's answer to Google... THey are doing interesting things, and see the social-network aspect of links clearly... (And like Google, they are discreet about their technology!) Meanwhile, Russian radio is reporting Google's imminent IPO - small world!

the attention divide - Bloggercon

2003-10-05T07:39:00.000-07:00

I managed to attend only two panels at Bloggercon yesterday (plus social hours), but they were great… And I know it’s politically incorrect to blog so late after the fact, but the wireless was spotty.

In retrospect, despite all the inconclusive discussion about Utopia or dystopia, the issue I liked best was the campaign bloggers’ dilemma over control. There’s nothing more accountable than a campaign: If things go wrong, no matter whose fault, you lose... So campaign managers are traditionally loath to give up control of anything. The candidate must stay on message, and everything around him must be cheery – except for descriptions of the ills attributable to the incumbent or the other candidates.

Yet the essence of blogging is power to the people. Will the various campaigns allow feedback? Host bloggers? Etc. etc. What if we give up control and something bad happens? Of course, the answer is let the bloggers control one another. If someone says something stupid, someone else will reply. (Don’t dignify the idiots by having the candidate respond…)

And there are increasingly interesting tools to use. Why not something like Slashdot? Or Microsoft’s Netscan? A bow to Jeff Ubois, who is writing about Netscan for the next issue of Release 1.0. Think of when you walk into a party – the Bloggercon reception last night, for example. Some people are in the middle of crowds hanging eagerly on to a single person’s every word – Dave Winer, for example. In other groups, two people are debating, and others are listening – Doc Searls and Dave Weinberger, perhaps. Or one is asking and the other is talking: Chris Lydon and name-your-luminary. In other clumps, everyone is shouting. There are two-person exchanges where one is talking and the other is looking over his shoulder. On the periphery, Rageboy is muttering to other peripherors. A couple of people are near the food, silent. You can tell a lot without knowing anyone at all, and without hearing a word. The structure within any blog-circle is similarly telling: who is posting? And who is listening and commenting? Whose comments are inciting replies, and whose are ignored? There are tools that can show us that show us the community regulating itself, and that can help the community to do it better by making the structure visible. For example, Technorati, Feedster, Lafayette Project…

….or will they make us follow the crowd and ignore the peripherors, just as network tv does?

Then the second challenge. The first magic of blogging, of course, is that everyone can self-publish. Everyone has a voice. The tools makes that possible. But the next magic, much harder to achieve, is that everyone wants to be listened to.

What?!? the candidates don’t read every word the earnest bloggers post? Don’t they care? Won’t he (or occasionally she, though not at Bloggercon) reply to at least one question a day? After all, he spends quality time with “regular” reporters.

Amy Wohl made the interesting point of how long she has been giving speeches, but it wasn’t till she started blogging that she began to get all kinds of interesting feedback. But then she’s Amy Wohl; people listen to her, and want her attention back. Many other people may start to feel that they are publishing into a vacuum, especially each of the 2200-odd people that post to Dean blogs in a typical day (if I have my numbers right).

In the blogosphere, there’s no shortage of airtime, but there’s still a shortage of attention.

That is, there’s an attention divide: the candidates who get too much and give too little….. and the rest, who even en masse don’t have enough to give to satisfy all the world’s publishers, marketers and would-be stars, and who crave just a little for themselves.

[speaking of which, I know I should enable feedback and get more integrated into the blogosphere myself. Coming soon. Meanwhile, I’m at edyson@edventure.com.]

Congratulations ICANN!

2003-10-03T16:47:00.000-07:00

Glad to see ICANN is talking tough, and VeriSign is capitulating. About time!!

The point about maps

2003-09-27T10:30:00.000-07:00

One of the things I’m planning to write about soon is maps and mapping tools. I have always loved maps (and travel, of course!). I love to see how things are laid out, their relationships, how they fit together. And in addition to traveling, I love the intricacies of planning a trip: the sequence of places matching the sequence of meetings, which carriers fly where, route optimization… someday, I know, I will be able to leave this up to software and the Semantic Web, but for now…. Does anyone know if Icelandair gives Star Alliance mileage? (The Website is cryptic.)

I’m an investor in MetaCarta, a sort of geographic googling tool. And then there's Google itself. Over the past year I’ve been dabbling with maps and GIS where I find them. But the basic “map insight” – the story about whoever it was that compared disease incidence on a map with the location of certain water pumps in London and indicated the source of cholera – seemed pretty old to me. It was all about visualization.

Last Thursday, though, I had dinner with a senior vp at ESRI, the leader in the mapping tools business, and it all came clear. Or, to see the sizzle,

It’s not about visualization (which is just the means to the end), it’s about identity. Yes… my R1 colleagues and I have been writing for a year about digital identity, registries of objects and data represenetation across the Semantic Web.... and (as Dave Barry would say) I swear I’m not making this up: With maps it’s the same issue. Inside the mapping community, the big challenge is standards for data representation. Just as you need federated identity to leverage all kinds of services for individuals, so do you need location identity to leverage mapping tools. Sure, I can match my map to your map… but unless I have a person (or a very smart tool) doing the work, I don’t know that your “WH” is my 1700 Pennsylvania Avenue. …and so forth. Maps and GIS are a huge tool for a broad range of applications in everything from (as usual) “homeland security” and petroleum extraction, to retail site location, cell-phone everything, logistics, etc. etc. Most of what people do takes place in physical space…even though so far we have focused mostly on what happens in commercial and legal space (financial transactions and record-keeping). For the next phase of computerization, accurate understanding of the physical world will be key.

So what’s the answer? I’m looking for companies that are good at understanding/managing “location identity.” There’s probably a different name for it; you know who you are….

catching up (as usual)

2003-08-08T17:37:00.000-07:00

Just coming up for air after (almost) finishing collaboration with Dan Gillmor (of San Jose Mercury renown) and Christina Koukkos of Release 1.0 renown (our editor) on the July-August issue of Release 1.0. It began as an issue on blogging (!yes!) and turned into an issue about RSS and the meta of blogging - syndication, data feeds (check out Amazon.com ) and the like. It's not just content anymore: In one direction it's conversations, and in another it's active data (cf. the Semantic Web).

As part of this, last week I visited David Sifry at Technorati.com
. In some ways, Technorati is the Google of the blogging world: It uses links to navigate its world and produce interesting results. It has been an interesting time exploring all these new startups, including also Six Apart , Feedster , 20six
more at my site (coming soon).

Completely separately, we visited the Computer History Museum , cleverly located in a former marketing building of Silicon Graphics (from the good old days when everyone had lots of money). It's wonderful to see how the people and things we took for granted are now "history"...and by god, the sutff is interesting. From the very beginnings JOhn von Neumann et al., Babbage's difference engine, to the old Computer Tabulating and Recording Company (now called IBM), the early PCs and Apples ... and now the Internet. Aside from thoroughly enjoying the visit, I am absolutely delighted that the Museum accepts donations not only of money but of things. THose who know my office - famous for its mess - will understand that I have quite a collection of T-shirts, old software, IPO prospectuses and other ephemera. I hate throwing things out, but I love giving them away...

syndication and branding - preliminary thoughts

2003-07-19T11:27:00.000-07:00

Intel made a huge success of its Intel Inside! branding program. Although few consumers knew what a microprocessor was, they wanted one in their personal computer. Now Intel is trying to do that again, with the Centrino for WiFi.

As we drove up Highway 101 to SFO, we saw the billboard for Auctiondrop ( funded by Draper Fisher and Mobius): You drop it off; we sell it on eBay. In other words, we don’t just sell it for you and give you the money (minus a commission). We sell it for you on eBay, and then we give you that, eBay-enhanced money. Is the money really worth more if it comes from eBay? Well, presumably you trust that you will get a fair deal if your things are sold on eBay…

The power of branding on the Internet is amazing. More and more, we have the process of syndication, which is a sort of distribution of a service just as a reseller can resell goods. But of course there are a variety of different business models, reflecting market position and logistics, just as in the physical channel. Who owns the brand name? who takes the risk of owning the products? Does the reseller work on commission or does it actually take title to the goods or pay for the service upfront?

The word syndication itself has many meanings. IN publishing, a content-owner, such as the New York Times syndicate, will license its content to other publishers, such as YOUR PUB NAME HERE, . IN finance, one lender will syndicate a loan or an insurance contract, laying off the risk (and the profits) to a set of partners. And then there’s the whole ad-network business, where tk wording.

And finally, as I sit here on Aeroflot, I’m bemused by a world without branding. There’s no menu, just a flight attendant offering me chicken or fish. (Maybe I’ve been flying FC too much to expect anything more…) There are no brand names on the food, either: no little promotional flyers, no packaged potato chips or cookies, no attempt to leverage any other brand name. On other airlines, the menus are prepared by the chef of some famous restaurant. As airlines get into the business of selling food, they are wise enough to understand that their own brand names might not cut it…

So back to Auctiondrop.com. We’re seeing an interesting evolution where services are branded on the one hand, and deconstructed and syndicated on the other. One service is “powered by” another. more later.

yours from Moscow

Palo Alto-bound

2003-07-14T05:45:00.000-07:00

I just spent the first weekend day in my office without an issue of Release 1.0 hanging over me; I finished the one on RFID some weeks ago, and the next one isn’t until September…and R1ter Eric Dean will be doing most of the work, anyway.

So, it was a great day. I pared my inbox from above 4000 to under 3000 (no, I didn’t exactly read them all!), I cleared a path from the door to my desk, I filled up three trash carns….it was great!

But I didn’t quite get around to doing my blog until now – sitting at O’Hare, and waiting to upload in Palo Alto. I’m heading for a couple of board meetings – Graphisoft and Meetup.com – and then the AlwaysOn conference, where I’m moderating a panel on “community” – in essence, applying the open-source, community model to software businesses. Panelists are Dan Ciporin, CEO, DealTime; Erick Hachenburg, General Manager, Electronic Arts Online Publishing; Lorna Borenstein, Vice President, Category Management, eBay; Tim Sullivan, President, Match.com. It should be fun. And it will be a nice opportunity to catch up with a lot of friends without scheduling in advance.

Meanwhile, Meetup is deeper fun; rather than pontificate, I’m working on how we navigate our strategy as the political side of our business gets great exposure, mostly because of Howard Dean (no relationship to Eric Dean!). It’s wonderful, but we don’t want to become all politics, all the time. Should we form a separate unit? What’s the difference between a political rally and a Meetup? And so on…

Last week, lots of meetings, including with Frank Chisholm, an old friend, at Aptsoft, and a long meeting with Mark Foster and Richard Shockey of Neustar, in preparation for September’s issue on registries. (They do telephones, domain names and soon ENUM.) Dinner with David Johnson, who’s working on some interesting social software, and Elliot Maxwell, who among other things is a policy advisor to the Auto-ID Center. Speaking of RFID, Wal-Mart has pulled back slightly on RFID for individual items, focusing more on tagging containers, where its enthusiasm continues….

The week before last, I was in England, and saw a sign in a Cambridge University building that bears noting (paraphrase):

“It is inadvisable to use the automatic lift during hours when the maintenance staff are off-duty.”

Am I my product's keeper?

2003-06-16T05:04:00.000-07:00

I've been feeling guilty for a while about not keeping this blog up to date, and now I have another problem; my e-mail server is down. (Interesting, how the urge to write, normally sated by my voracious e-mail outbox, is now finding another outlet...)

I have been beavering away on the next issue of Release 1.0, on RFID and its implications, and in the pool this morning I finally got to ...not the answers, but at least some of the questions to ask. Since I can't send them to my regular eminences grises, I am posting them here instead. All comments welcome (to edyson@eventure.com), but please note that this is blind speculation, un-fact-checked, unedited, all disclaimers incorporated by reference:

Total information awareness: Am I my product’s keeper?

There are a lot of parallels between personal identity and – call it “object identity.” There are also lots of ways the parallels break down. For starters, each person born is in charge of his own identity. There’s someone there paying attention. By contrast, most products are born without an identity (though they certainly have characteristics, makers and other associated information). To the extent that the information is explicit, it resides outside the product; it doesn’t know itself. So the first difference is that RFID is in a sense a way of conferring DNA, or an identity that is inherent rather than attributed (in theory, and as long as the tag stays on).

Thus the identity of people is far more persistent; RFID gives some of those attributes to products. The big metaphysical – and IT – question is what will actually happen? Will products actually carry their identities with them through life? or only through point of sale? When I purchase a rice cooker, for example, will a pointer simply change in the maker’s registry – or is there a way I can add it to my own registry?

The answers are different for food I consume or pencils, for example, but it’s useful to be able to maintain the identities and care instructions for clothes and appliances. It’s useful for my bicycle to be ID’d so I can identify it (and so can the police) if it goes astray.

In the personal identity world, we have the notion of federated identity; the unique individual (however defined) is the token by which different records are linked. In the RFID world, we’re just starting with the notion of identity. If we think about these questions from the start, can we do a better job of keeping the world straight? Do we want to? Individuals are comfortable maintaining multiple identities or at least multiple facets of their identities – two addresses, for example, for weekday and weekend or home and work; a different last name for dealing with the stepkids’ school officials; a “duh” password for a host of online content sites and more serious security for communicating with merchants who have your credit card. Will it be the same for products? Or will the ePC actually establish and maintain its hold as the one true place where things are identified and classified? What are the benefits and what are the costs?

When a person buys something in a shop, there’s this notion of deactivating the tag. The real issue is not about the thing or its tag; it keeps its identity. It’s who has control of the thing’s history – especially its history going forward.
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So far we have seen just one start-up that has glommed on to this idea, and we're not srue yet whether the entrepreneur in question isactually building a workable service. Just as consumers use banks to keep their money, it’s unlikely they would manage their personal registries themselves; product-ID banks would compete for the consumers’ business, perhaps offering pre-identified toasters!

Privacy: Where the data is

Despite the obsession with tags, both among investors and among self-styled consumer advocates, the real issue around data and RFID is more with the data it generates than with what’s on the tags. Most tags don’t carry much more than their own identity: what kind of thing they are, plus a unique serial number. The interesting data comes from the context: where the item travels, who purchases it, and so forth. The directory of what things are is public; it will be the EPC. But that’s like a domain name; it gives you the pointer, but it doesn’t necessarily give you access to the data. That is, I can find out what kind of product a certain number refers to, and I may have the unique serial number. It’s like a license plate… I know you are Fred Jones, but I don’t know anything else about you. What good is that? at least product categories are helpful…

But you can rest assured that IBM, for example, is not about to provide public access to its tracking information; that’s between IBM and the logistics suppliers it uses, and perhaps the retailers it is shipping to. Likewise, Banana Republic is not going to let anyone (other than its selected marketing partners) know who purchased that cunning red linen sweater. Most of the data generated by the movements and readings of the tags will be as proprietary as most business data is today.

There are privacy issues, however. As in other areas, the sheer volume of data extant in the world is going up, and if you cross-reference it you can find out a lot. For now, though, the RFID numbers are indexed around the products, not around the people. That is, you can find all the people who purchased red linen sweaters, but you can’t (because of RFID) find out all the things Juan or Alice purchased. (You could, of course, if you had access to all of Banana Republic’s data and Benetton’s and Nordstrom’s and all the other places they buy their clothes.) The records are likely to be more accurate because of RFID, but it doesn’t make much difference to know which sweater out of the lot Juan is wearing and which went to Alice.

Where such things do matter is with food and product recalls, where you may want to be able to find a particular item and the particular customer who bought it.

The more scary scenarios have to do with people’s things being recognized as they walk along the street tk. Those are not beyond the realm of possibility, but they are far from being realistic, or from having any kind of business justification.

On the plus side, you can imagine a system that manages interactions between products – pharmaceuticals, for example, or that monitors the products in your household so that you can automatically reorder them – most likely with a shopping list that says something like: “You have reached [based on past consumption patterns] one week’s supply of the following products. Check the ones you wish to reorder: Sunmaid Cinnamon Raisin Bread. Swiss Miss Sugar-Free Cocoa Mix. 16-oz Grape-Nuts….” Of course, there needs to be a lot of software to manage all this, from recognizing the incoming signals to fetching product IDs from the Web and recognizing what kinds of things fit into what categories.

These kinds of applications will mostly be in consumers’ control. The software for drug interactions will come from manufacturers and – this is where the public registry comes into play – from third parties and medical experts (or more likely, health insurance companies) who understand the interactions between drugs from different manufacturers. The data gets federated in the consumer’s home, though there may be a system by which the client’s health insurance company monitors whether the customer actually removes the pill jar from the medicine cabinet every evening at 10 pm.

You may find this creepy, or you may find it a great way to increase health care compliance, reduce medical costs and perhaps even increase the general welfare. It all depends on exactly how these systems are rolled out, how much choice individuals have in their use, and what restrictions are placed on the collection and use of the data. You can have software the monitors drug interactions without reporting back who took the drugs.. or you can wire a system to do just that.

Many of these questions aren’t at all new, but we still haven’t figured out what to do about them. RFID just pours a little more data onto the fire.

Blogger's block (from Sochi)

2003-06-05T18:56:00.000-07:00

Blogger’s block

As a new blogger, I am learning that the only way to do it is to do it regularly; otherwise you end up pitting back-clog against current events, and you postpone everything to another time… I need to remind myself that a blog is just a list of pointers with annotations.

And then of course here in Sochi (on the Black Sea coast in Russia) I’m limited to dial-up, although it’s the first place I seem to have a moment to relax. (On the other hand, I’m beginning to realize why WiFi is so useful to blogging, even though in theory it should be irrelevant: it’s just easier to do this if you can be online all the time and go update your blog during those inevitable dull moments, checking on URLs as you go.)

I’m at the key conference of the year for the Russian computer/software/Internet market (modeled on my own PC Forum, FWIW!) – 160 people, which comprises the critical mass of this market. The formal sessions start today; yesterday was tennis and frolicking by the pool and intense hallway discussions. I’m expecting to see lots of progress since last year. There are now about 150 installations (in various stages) in Russia, and it has become fashionable to talk about business processes. The country isn’t quite at the Cluetrain stage yet (!), but there’s an interest in efficiency and effectiveness now that was rare just a couple of years ago.

Some back-clog: Just over a week ago, I was in Venice – yes, on business!! Amazingly – visiting Terry Glen Phipps, the cio of Benetton , to talk about their efforts in RFID. I also got to the meet the new ceo, Silvano Cassano; Benetton is at an interesting stage as a company overall, with new management taking on more of a role from the family founders. And yes, Venice was everything you may have read or seen: Terry took a group of us out to dinner; we arrived in Venice by boat and toured around certain half-deserted waterways on a warm, somehow tourist-light evening… the result is at www.edventure.com .

Now that I have broken the blogger’s block, I hope to have more soon.

A parade of interesting people

2003-05-16T15:11:00.000-07:00

THis week I met with a variety of interesting companies, starting with SJ Labs, a voice over IP company. I went into the meeting skeptical, and came out enthusiastic, especially after a brief demo. I've just gotten two cell phones, one for the US and one for Europe (more because of billing issues than rechnical roaming problems), and started a blog. To be truly modern, I think, I need VoIP on my PC....

Next came my old friend Chris Houle, who has now joined Quantrix, a startup that offers more powerful modeling than you can get in a spreadsheet, but complementary to a spreadsheet and as simple as one. Think Improv, the stunning modeling tool that Lotus developed for Steve Jobs' NeXT machine, or Metaphor, the company that came (indirectly) out of PARC.

I also had a discussion with Don McLagan, ceo of Compete. this is an interesting company that tracks behavior of (anonymous) users, primarily so that marketers can accurately predict sales and best figure out how to go after specific markets. What intrigues me is what I see as a trend towards analysis of nonquantitative data; I also recently wrote about a company called Intelligent Results, which analyzes call-center reports to understand the prospects for delinquent loans. (It will be up on my Website shortly.) If anyone comes across any more such examples, I'd be eager to hear about them. I hope to take this on as a serious topic sometime in the fall. (Google recently bought Applied Semantics, whose AdSense also fits into this category.)

Back to the blog

2003-05-11T13:55:00.000-07:00

Yeah, it's well-known that most blogs die in infancy... but I couldn't bear to let that happen to this one. My problem is not lack of interesting things to do, but lack of time to write about them. (Plus, many of the "events" in my life are private.meetings..) It's easy to get excited about writing a blog in the company of other bloggers, as at Tim O'Reilly's Etech conference... but then when you go out into the real world, it's different.

SO rather than try to recap the entire two weeks, some highlights (remembering that blogs originated not as commentary, but as listings plus annotations).

Last weekend I was at the Santa Fe Institute's board meeting, an interesting occasion. The Institute has been tremendously successful in its initial mission - to spread the science of complexity/emergence/adaptive systems throughout the world, and now it has to produce an encore...which it is doing in tantalizing areas such as astrobiology, economics/game theory, and the like.. I have been a trustee for nine years, and now my last term is up, but I still love the place. We heard some interesting talks, among others, by Marc Feldman, David Krakauer, Ellen Goldberg and George Cowan, all affiliated with SFI.

Later in the week, in a delightful counterpoint, I heard my own brother, George Dyson, give a talk to a small fundraiser/donor thank-you at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, where we both grew up, and where he is a resident scholar this year. It was intriguing to be a trustee at one place, and (indirectly) staff at the other. George's talk, which delighted the other people there as much as it did me, touched on the Institute's history and its luminaries, including Janos von Neumann, Einstein, Oppenheimer and (recently died) Julian Bigelow, of whom George is a great champion. In short terms, Bigelow built the machine that von Neumann designed. But a lot of what George has discovered in the archives is touchingly human - memos about the computer guys taking too much sugar at the Institute teatime in the great hall, discussions of where to put their offices - next to Goedel in a spare room, or in more spacious digs in the basement next to the men's lavatory... (there was a certain prejudice amongst some of the scientists against mere engineers.) And my favorite memo - the one banning children under 10 years old from dining privileges!

More soon, I promise! (just putting the stake back in the ground....)

Alien; BrainMedia

2003-04-28T18:17:00.000-07:00

An interesting weekend:

Alien Technology visit

The irony of RFID chips is that there are so many of them you have to handle them more like a liquid than a collection of things, yet their function is to identify objects uniquely. Alien Technology’s edge is to manufacture them cheaply enough that you can afford to add identity to things as cheap as a $2 pack of razor blades, a T-shirt, or as small as a syringe or a bottle of pills or even individual pills.

The company began in the early 90s as Beckman Displays, founded by Steve smith, a Berkeley professor who still shows up every Friday (plus for board meetings). It’s run by Stav Prodromou, a long-time semiconductor executive.

Went to see Alien Technology down in Morgan Hill. They are the people who are making RFID chips, the little tags that will fit into consumer packaged goods and the like, enabling better tracking for supply chains and better stocking and management of inventories in stores. Their edge is that they manufacture chips just like anyone, but they have automated the process of assembling them by creating what amounts to a film of holes that the chips are shaped just right to fit into. The sheet full of tiny holes goes through a bath full of floating chips, and comes out with thousands of chips positioned just right. The solution is slightly sticky, so when the film is dried the chips are firmly stuck on. Then the film is pulled through another machine that etches the leads onto the chips, and then the tags are ready to be attached to antennas and to products. Aside from the supply chain and retail applications, I personally am looking forward to using these to track my luggage. And yes, I did indeed come away with a souvenir luggage tag…

Lots more to come on the uses and the potential abuses of these things; I’ll be writing about it at length for the June issue of Release 1.0. They will make the whole physical world visible to computers, and “knowable” from any point on the network.

On Sunday, I got a visit from BrainMedia, which uses compression-decompression technology to deliver streaming music so compressed that it sounds awesome over a cellphone (as long as you use good earphones). The idea is to model the human auditory system and focus on delivering only the sounds that humans can hear, without wasting effort on what they can’t. FWIW, this works specifically for music; with voice, you typically get best results by modeling how the sound is produced rather than how it is heard. That’s why voice typically sound so much better than music over cell phones; the compression they typically use is optimized for voice. Now BrainMedia’s challenge is the business model and finding good partners.

Today, something totally different: A conference on the Russian business/political environment, taking place on Capitol Hill in Washington.

Google News

2003-04-25T14:20:00.000-07:00

Google News

2003-04-25T11:30:00.000-07:00

Breakfast w David Weinberger

I had breakfast – by explicit prearrangement – with David Weinberger this morning. He’s a longtime friend whom I haven’t talked with in a while. He’s giving a speech this afternoon that I will have to miss (because I am going to see Alien Technology to learn about RFID).

So I asked him to give me a sneak preview. It’s about ambiguity and explicitness. …and in the context of this conference, it explains the problems – and the allure – of social software. Then ensued a conversation, with both of us trying to divine the implicit issues around ambiguity and render them into explicit words. [not to worry; this doesn't steal his thunde. he sent me an outline of his talk, which is much more about groups.]

DW: ambiguity is good!

ED: you mean the richness of human interaction, etc.

DW: yes, but I want to get beyond that. Examples: In politics, you’re with us or against us. Friendster, making friendship explicit? You can’t. there’s also an ethical aspect.. In the list of possible situations [single, married, etc.] “open marriage” is a dead giveaway.

ED: Ethics! Yes, it’s the most interesting question left [after technology, strategy, policy]. Without ambiguity, there is no free will.

DW: Explicitness is an act of violence. You think it’s archeological: You take something and dust it off, but in fact explicitness reduces things; it destroys. ….That’s why groups stay away from constitution writing.

ED: But they don’t stay away from constitution-writing. It’s more like moths to a flame. They can’t stop it. But they can’t handle the explicitness. It’s like pre-nuptial agreements.

DW: And the same with digital ID, Web personas. We’re drawn to them, but they’re destructive.

DW: But I’m ending with hope. That there’s now hope for social software to move from its past – harsh and glaring and topdown – to a new, emergent, bottom-up form that preserves the ambiguity. There’s an art to doing explicitness well, so that it’s not destructive.

ED: And it’s that possibility of artfulness that keeps drawing us – techies and would-be techies – to it.

2003-04-24T10:26:00.000-07:00

test [sorry, just fooling around!!]

2003-04-24T10:25:00.000-07:00

Day 2 -

Second lesson: If you're going to start a blog, it helps to have friendly, helpful people around. Sam Ruby of Intertwingly (and IBM and Apache) kindly set up an RSS feed for me. Thanks, Sam!

Now on to substance:

Yesterday Google announced that it has acquired Applied Semantics. The network here at O'reilly is down right now (yikes!) so I can't get a link, but here's an excerpt:
"Applied Semantics' products are based on its patented CIRCA technology, which understands, organizes, and extracts knowledge from websites and information repositories in a way that mimics human thought and enables more effective information retrieval. A key application of the CIRCA technology is Applied Semantics' AdSense product that enables web publishers to understand the key themes on web pages in order to deliver highly relevant and targeted advertisements."

Clearly, if you can do it to match to ads, you can do it for other things... I visited this company in January, and was intrigued by what they are doing... though at the time, they were focused on ad-serving plus domain-name generation - i.e. instead of generating a random new name such as e-pizza.com or e-jeans.com, it would come up with eatpizza.com or wearjeans.com. Hardly a great contribution to the welfare of humankind, but it enabled AS to get revenues rather than [further] equity investment from VCs.

Now I guess they're selling equity after all - but in exchange for the ability to apply their technology in one of the world's largest content sandboxes.

From Google's side, interesting too! Last month at PC Forum I was pestering Sergey Brin about whether Google would move beyond mostly abstract algorithms to more explicitly semantic analysis... watch that space! (or I'll watch if for you.)

2003-04-23T16:18:00.000-07:00

Well, there's no time to start a blog like when you run into Ev Williams at a conference (thanks, Tim O'Reilly) and he offers to help personally to set you up with your very own blog.

As I was saying to the bloggerati this morning (Doc & Allen Searls, the Davids of all persuasions, Richard Soderberg, Geoff Cohen, et al.), a lot of what I do is stuff I simply can't write about: internal meetings with portfolio companies, corporate regime change, private briefings and such. This blog will be an experiment covering the things I *can* talk about. But now I need to give this machine back so they can close the exhibit....