Thursday, October 28, 2004

Where is the Robot-Valley?

"Will Silicon Valley, the unquestioned center of the computer tech boom, also become the 'Silicon Valley' of robotics? According to Pete Markiewicz, the Valley mindset, along with the other factors that created the virtual worlds of the PC and Internet, might not be well suited to the development of devices that must operate in the rough-and-tumble of the real world."
Link
Source: Robotics Trends

Osaka Emerging as Robot City
"A new Straits Times article says there are 154 firms in Osaka, Japan with robotics-related patents and many more working on robotics technology. The city has become the center of robot technology in Japan and possibly the world. Japan expects to be the world leader in the production of next-generations robots, a market projected to be $46 billion by 2010. Osaka is also hosting a RoboCup competition this month."
Link
Source: Robots.net

World's greatest android projects
"There are 73 major android projects around the world - 34 are in Japan, 10 in the US, 7 in Germany, 5 in Korea, 3 in China, 3 in the UK, 2 in Sweden, 1 in Australia, 1 in Thailand, 1 in Singapore, 1 in Bulgaria, 1 in Iran, 1 in Italy, 1 in Austria, 1 in Russia, & 1 in Scotland."
Link
Source: Android World

World Robotics 2004
"How many robots are now working out there in industry?
Worldwide at least 800,000 units (possibly the real stock could be well over one million units), of which 350,000 in Japan, close to 250,000 in the European Union and about 112,000 in North America. In Europe, Germany is in the lead with 112,700 units, followed by Italy with 50,000, France with 26,000, Spain with 20,000 and the United Kingdom with 14,000."

"Are we seeing any service robots in our homes?
At the end of 2003, about 610,000 autonomous vacuum cleaners and lawn-mowing robots were in operation. In 2004- 2007, more than 4 million new units are forecasted to be added."
Link
Source: UNECE

Maps:
Robotics - Meetup.com
Artificial Intelligence - Meetup.com

See also:
RoboNexus
Robots - Google News
Artificial Intelligence - Google News
Robots - Topix.net
Robotics news - Moreover
Robots - Engadget
AI in the news
Artificial intelligence - Wikipedia
AI and A-Life - New Scientist
Everyday Robots
Generation5
Robotic Nation - Marshall Brain
Anime and Robotics: A Symbiotic Relationship
The Great Robot Race - Wired
KurzweilAI.net
Mechanical Spirit
Human Being 2.0
Electrical Engineering and Computer Science - MIT OpenCourseWare

Audio:
Robots - IT Conversations
The DARPA Grand Challenge - IT Conversations

Discuss:
Robots - Tribe.net

Tuesday, October 26, 2004

Brazil in Space

"Brazil’s first successful rocket launch is being touted as the South American country’s initial foray into the commercial satellite industry.

However, the VSB-30 prototype tested on Saturday at the Alcantara Launch Center, located in the northeastern Amazon jungle, has a payload capacity of 870 pounds and maximum altitude of 155 miles, leading some to question its commercial applications.

'Most of satellite radio and satellite TV is in a higher orbit level. At a lower orbit, there’s really no [commercial] market there,' said Camille Osborne, communications director at the U.S. Satellite Broadcasting and Communications Association (SBCA)."

Link
Source: Red Herring

See also:
Brazilian Space Agency - Google News
Brazilian Space Agency - Topix.net
Brazil Successfully Launches Its First Rocket To Space - Slashdot
Brazil - Wikipedia
SpaceShipOne wins X Prize
The Final Frontier

Discuss:
Space Travel - Tribe.net

Mini-Microsoft

"Let's slim down Microsoft into a lean, mean, efficient customer pleasing profit making machine! Mini-Microsoft, Mini-Microsoft, lean-and-mean!"

Highlights:
  • Microsoft needs to reduce employee size. It’s too big. It doesn’t need a quicky Atkins-equivalent. No, it needs to get itself on a corporate exercise program that will shed itself of unwanted groups and employees. And stay on that.
  • Microsoft needs to stop hiring. It’s hard enough finding the scarcest of treasured corporate resources: the talented individual suitable for working at Microsoft. Stop hiring, trim down, and rebalance those precious scare employees inside to where they can be more productive and make products that delight our customers.
  • Re-interviewing: all employees below a certain life-time review average need to re-interview. Those that don’t make the cut the second time around get to look for new opportunities elsewhere.
  • Unleash employee driven innovation with a Microsoft Labs community area.
  • Less research, more application.
  • Continue the community effort and make it so if you’re not leading cool innovation, your butt is dedicated to some time per week helping out in the community, sharing all that wonderful knowledge between your ears. Reward that!
  • Back to Basics. Win32 and C++. Bread and butter. Not everything can run in the freaking CLR.
  • Re-energize the home market. The home market is pretty tepid with-respect-to Microsoft-branded software. It can’t take that much effort to invigorate Microsoft for the home user and make it cool.
  • Start working vigorously on Internet Explorer again. Winning the browser wars, dusting off our hands, and running away screaming from IE to the Next Cool Thing represents the very worst in less-than-competitive behavior.
Link

See also:
Robert Scoble
Microsoft Watch

IPod vs. Mobile Phones

"The cell phone is the 800 pound gorilla of portable devices; dedicated digital music players are going to be fads.
... The cell phone has already defeated the standalone PDA (who has those anymore?)
... will defeat the standalone digital camera
... will defeat the standalone MP3 player (iPods included)
... will defeat the USB Flash Drives

... and will eventually largely defeat a large segment of the desktop/notebook computer market.

Add a significant amount of storage to cellphones and not only will standalone MP3 players and USB memory sticks take a major hit, but everyone will jack their cellphones into a workstation via USB or FireWire and have a portable computer sans monitor/keyboard with them at all times (and those that have laptops merely for address books, documents and email will no longer have much need for lugging around a notebook computer).

(--UNLESS-- cellphone size decreases to the point where it becomes earpiece sized in the coming 5 to 10 years where the decreased size disallows increased on-board storage capacity. But in this case, the cellphone is likely to displace music players via virtual internet accessible storage.)"

Link
Source: Forums - PC Magazine

See also:
156.4 mobile phones shipped in Q2 2004 - IT Facts
Apple's global market share is 1.7%, drops out of top 10 vendors - IT Facts
Google Broadband?
The New Moore's Law

Monday, October 25, 2004

Google Broadband?

Olivier Travers suggests:

"But looking at Google Desktop and its local web server comes a more intriguing thought. How about partnering with or acquiring a large ISP/WISP (say, Earthlink) to deliver an affordable service bundle with symmetrical bandwidth, static IPs, reliable DNS, and self-publishing with Blogger, Picasa and Hello. Let millions of personal web servers bloom and piggy back on that big wave of user-generated content.

Google would basically reindex their customers' sites (just a directory on their desktop really) on the fly, and share the results with the rest of the world (or not) based on user settings (do not confuse the wedding pictures and the honeymoon video, ok). And now it makes sense to give software for free because you have other ways to bill consumers and learn about them. How's that for increasing targeted ad inventory while diversifying your revenue sources, and wiring yourself into people's life as well as within the fabric of the internet?"

"Anyway, imagine the landscape 5/10 years from now with ubiquitous PDA/cam/phones/whatever, lots of connectivity all around, more occasions and ways to generate content and to put it online instantly. Uploading pictures to a damn server with restricted storage just to share them with friends and family is akin to going to the telegraph office to send messages. It's just a transient state in the infrastructure that doesn't make any sense in the long run (provided we eventually get decent security on the desktop).

Google is not going to win against Microsoft or even decisively beat Yahoo by going through predictable motions. GBrowser is just a way to wave a red flag at Microsoft with 'please come and squash me' written on it. I find it funny that the same people who get all wet about the GoogleOS are claiming that operating systems are a commodity and there's no money in there anymore. So why should Google do it then?

Instead, Google has to keep being disruptive and unpredictable. Microsoft never made much out of its broadband investments, Yahoo is humming a boring song with SBC, AOL TW is toast. Incidentally all seem to confuse the Internet with TV. Maybe Google could really turn the tables. It's all about empowering end users..."

Link
Source: Olivier Travers

See also:
Why Google Will Defeat Yahoo! in the Web Hosting War - SitePoint
Google Job Opportunities - Google
Google's Next Steps or Google in 2010
The New Moore's Law
Google Desktop Search
Web 2.0
Akamai

Friday, October 22, 2004

The New Tech Visionaries

"These folks are a little older and more experienced than back in the '90s heyday. However, they're just as inspired and determined."

Who are they?

Ross Mayfield - Socialtext
enterprise social software

Svetlozar Nestorov - Mobissimo
travel search engine

Mike Horton - Crossbow Technology
sensor technology

Hosain Raham, Alex Asseily - Aliph
mobile-phone headset

Mark Fleury - JBoss
open-source software

Link
Source: Business Week

See also:
Mobissimo - Google News
Socialtext - Google News
Crossbow Technology - Google News
Aliph - Google News
JBoss - Google News

Thursday, October 21, 2004

The New Moore's Law

"The affordability and ever increasing capacity of data storage is affecting all aspects of business and daily life. Peter Cochrane predicts what's coming next and what sort of changes will occur once the petabyte is commonplace."

Peter Cochrane has some wonderful observations:

"...TB storage systems anywhere. It seems that Moore's Law has migrated to storage. We are now within an ace of the TB PC and laptop..."

"Only four years ago my son built and installed our first terabyte (TB), or about 1,000GB, home storage server at a cost of $4,000. A month ago we installed the second TB for only $600. What a drop in price and physical size - two parallel drives instead of five."

"We are now within an ace of the TB PC and laptop. My guess is that by 2015 we will also be using around 10GB of RAM. You may think this ought to be enough for most individuals and businesses but when you imagine movies may soon be distributed digitally at around 6 to 12GB each, you can see it all being eaten away. And how about all 26 million books in the Library of Congress? It will need around 1TB too.

The technology to realise hard drives up to and beyond 100TB is emerging in the R&D labs whilst petabyte (PB), or about 1,000TB, systems have already been engineered at great expense for specialised applications. I see no limit on the horizon to the growth of information storage as we have yet to enter the quantum world of the really small."

"But I think there is a more fundamental question we should be asking. We will be faced with an infinite and distributed sea of bits - much of which will not be itemised, catalogued, categorised or labelled in any way. Moreover, there will be duplication and storage corruption on a global scale. The really big question is: how the heck are we going to identify and locate anything in this mostly uncharted sea?

Will today's search techniques fit the bill? I think not - they are far too crude. We are going to need much higher degrees of sophistication to the point of machine cognition in recognising scenes, contexts and relationships in our data. The first machine capable of realising such a capability will probably arrive around 2010 in the form of an adaptive supercomputer and, given our rate of progress, on a PC scale by 2030 or earlier.

Now for the kicker: I cannot see how a fully centralised or fully distributed system spanning the global network will satisfy our future needs. Seems to me an agent-based hybrid scheme is the only contender that will do. Right now I don't see how we are going to do that but artificial life plus artificial intelligence in an evolvable form seem to be strong contenders."

Link
Source: Silicon.com

See also:
The Other Exponentials - Technology Review
Lifetime Digital Memory
What 2034 will bring
Moore's Lore - Corante
John Battelle's Searchblog
Search Engine Watch

Thursday, October 14, 2004

Google Desktop Search

"Google Desktop Search is how our brains would work if we had photographic memories. It's a desktop search application that provides full text search over your email, computer files, chats, and the web pages you've viewed. By making your computer searchable, Google Desktop Search puts your information easily within your reach and frees you from having to manually organize your files, emails, and bookmarks.

After downloading Google Desktop Search, you can search your personal items as easily as you search the Internet using Google. Unlike traditional computer search software that updates once a day, Google Desktop Search updates continually for most file types, so that when you receive a new email in Outlook, for example, you can search for it within seconds. The index of searchable information created by Desktop Search is stored on your own computer.

In addition to basic search, Google Desktop Search introduces new ways to access relevant and timely information. When you view a web page in Internet Explorer, Google Desktop Search 'caches' or stores its content so that you can later look at that same version of the page, even if its live content has changed or you're offline. Google Desktop Search organizes email search results into conversations, so that all email messages in the same thread are grouped into a single search result."

Link
Source: Google

Google vs. IBM
"Google will transform itself into a 'big iron' computing company. Desktop first. Enterprise data centers next. They are already thinking past Microsoft."

"With the looming death of the CPC model what's next for Google? Google is developing out the next paradigm in search - distributed computing paradigm. Google core assets is smart people and computing power not some old outdated spider algorithm.

Google's real competitor is IBM not Microsoft. Google will transform itself into a 'big virtual iron' company. Their IP is in large systems development deployed on the Internet as a platform where Internet advertising is today's app. You will see Google sequence into other apps with similar network-effect revenue models.

Next up for Google tie in the enterprise data center with some of that Google 'big iron' computing technology."
Link
Source: AlwaysON

Reviews:
Google Desktop Search Launched - Search Engine Watch
Google Your Desktop - O'Reilly Network
Search Engine Lowdown

Comments:
Search Engine Watch Blog
Google Launches Desktop Search Tool - Slashdot
John Battelle's Searchblog
Google's new search terms - CNET News.com
Google Toolbar and Desktop Search Applications - WebmasterWorld
Google Desktop - kottke.org

Audio:
The Gillmor Gang - IT Conversations

See also:
Google Desktop Search - Google News
Desktop Search - Google News
Google Desktop Search - Topix.net
Desktop Search - Topix.net
Google Desktop Search - Daypop
Google Desktop Search - Google Search
Desktop Search - Google Search
Blinkx
Google's Next Steps or Google in 2010
Google Broadband?

Thursday, October 07, 2004

Web 2.0

"The Web 2.0 Conference is of, for and about the leading figures and companies driving innovation in the Internet economy. The conference will debut with the theme of 'The Web as Platform,' exploring how the Web has developed into a robust platform for innovation across many media and devices - from mobile to television, telephone to search."
Link

People:
Jeff Bezos, Mark Cuban, Marc Benioff, Mitchell Kapor, Tim O'Reilly, Marc Andreessen, John Doerr, Mary Meeker, Craig Newmark, Marc Canter, Jerry Yang, Lawrence Lessig...The technological elite...
Link

Topics:
- The State of the Internet Industry
- The Mobile Platform: The Future of Mobile
- The Platform Revolution
- The Architecture of Participation
- Media is a Platform
- Music is a Platform
- Lessons Learned, Future Predicted
- Geolocation: The Killer Map
- Search is a Platform. Where is it Going?
- The Telephone is a Platform
- From the Labs
Link

Companies:
Amazon, Yahoo, Microsoft, Google, eBay, Idealab, IBM, CNET, Akamai, Tivo, AOL, AT&T, Benchmark Capital, Macromedia, Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, Salesforce.com, Ask Jeeves, Six Apart

What's new?
Snap, Jot, Rojo, SpikeSource

Trends:
Web Services, Personal Web Search, RSS Advertising, China
Yahoo Search Blog
Initial thoughts on Web 2.0 - Deep Green Crystals
The China Internet Report - Morgan Stanley

Presentations
Link

Web 2.0 Conference Coverage
Link

Audio:
The Web 2.0 Weblog
IT Conversations

Photos:
Flickr: The Web 2.0 Pool
Flickr: Photos tagged with web20

See also:
Jeremy Zawodny's blog: Web2 Archives
Web 2.0 - Adam Rifkin
John Battelle's Searchblog
Marc Canter
Evan Williams
Jeff Jarvis's blog
Denise Howell
Om Malik
Web 2.0 conference - Google News
Web 2.0 Conference News - Topix.net
Daypop
Feedster RSS Search
Welcome to the internet 2014 - BBC News
The Long Tail - Wired

Sunday, October 03, 2004

The Innovation Economy

October 11, 2004 BW Magazine Table of Contents

THE PROMISE OF INNOVATION
This Way To The Future
From energy to biotech, we may be on the cusp of a new age of innovation.

Voices Of Innovation: Steve Jobs
Chairman and CEO of Apple Computer and Pixar Animation Studios

Scouring The Planet For Brainiacs
Worldwide innovation networks are the new keys to R&D vitality -- and competitiveness

Voices Of Innovation: Cherry Murray
Senior vice-president of physical sciences research and a veteran at Lucent Technologies' Bell Labs

Photo Essay: Building On The Past

Photo Essay: Global Brain Power


WHAT'S AHEAD
Flying High?
Long the innovation leader, the U.S. now has serious competition from abroad. Is America's research lead in danger?

Voices Of Innovation: Shirley Ann Jackson
President of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and president of Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute since 1999.

Commentary: Can Uncle Sam's Cash Still Unlock The Future?

Online Extra: Counting the Femtoseconds
The Energy Dept.'s 20-year R&D plan aims to push the frontiers of fusion power, supercomputing, and nanotechnology

Photo Essay: The Best Of What's New
A raft of ideas that could well change your life

Nanotech: Universe In A Grain Of Sand
Scientists are finding that ultratiny materials behave in unexpected ways.

Online Extra: Nanotech: Big Concept on Campus
Academia is fast becoming the center of this promising technology's universe, with states helping to pay the way

Where Our Energy Will Come From
From seabed gas to pebble-bed nukes, a scouting report on tomorrow's sources.

Voices Of Innovation: Wallace Broecker
A professor at Columbia University's Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory and a leading researcher on the issue of global climate change.

Aging Is Becoming So Yesterday
Tantalizing new discoveries suggest the possibility of reengineering the body.

Online Extra: A Longevity Company's First Steps
Elixir Pharmaceuticals is still young, but its all-star team is aiming squarely at one of humanity's oldest dreams

Voices Of Innovation: Craig Venter
A pioneer in decoding the genomes of everything from microbes to humans, and president of The Center for the Advancement of Genomics.

Reinventing The Wheels
Fuel cells, crash-proof cars -- auto makers are forging the future now.

In A Tight Spot -- And Loving It

How Will TV Survive Its Own Reality Show?
To thrive in the Internet Age, the industry must remake itself.


GLOBAL HOT SPOTS
An Old Hotbed With New Crops
This time around, the Valley is nurturing startups that combine info tech with emerging technologies.

Voices Of Innovation: Roger McNamee
An innovator in venture-capital investing and co-founder of the Silver Lake Partners and Elevation Partners funds.

Getting The Best To The Masses
A wave of innovation is yielding high-quality goods that India's poor can afford.

Voices Of Innovation: Faqir Chand Kohli
Former chairman of Tata Consultancy Services, India's software outsourcing pioneer, and a champion of cracking the country's adult literacy problem.

Huawei: More Than A Local Hero
The telecom gear maker aims to be a player in global innovation.

Voices of Innovation: Yuan Longping
Director general of China's National Hybrid Rice Research & Development Center and a pioneer in hybrid rice technology

The Old World Becomes A Little Newer
The trend toward collaborative innovation will help the Continent revive its R&D.

Voices Of Innovation: Tim Berners-Lee
The London-born inventor of the World Wide Web is now at Massachusetts Institute of Technology working to create the new "Semantic Web," a radical leap that would greatly improve how people and machines locate and use data on the Web.


MANAGING FOR INNOVATION
Building An Idea Factory
Inspiration is fine, but above all, innovation is really a management process.

Online Extra: At P&G, It's "360-Degree Innovation"
Chief Tech Officer Gilbert Cloyd on how the consumer-goods giant moves technology and ideas both internally and externally

Photo Essay: Idea Factories

Voices Of Innovation: Jeff Hawkins
Creator of the first PalmPilot PDA and Handspring smart phone and author of the book On Intelligence, about the human brain and intelligent machines.

Reaping The Wind
GE's energy initiative is a case study in innovation without borders

Voices Of Innovation: Amory Lovins
CEO of the Rocky Mountain Institute, a nonprofit energy and environment policy think tank

SciFi: Novel Inspiration
Otherworldly fantasies can evoke solutions to real problems. Science fiction has been honorably doing just that for decades

Online Extra: 15 Great Science Fiction Novels
Eric Rabkin's personal favorites

Photo Essay: Lessons From Sci Fi

Commentary: Are The Copyright Wars Chilling Innovation?

The Search For Tomorrow
BusinessWeek's new index examines corporate R&D and capital spending

Commentary: How To Sharpen The Innovation Edge

Online Extra: Industry And Academia Weigh In (extended)
IBM's Sam Palmisano and Georgia Tech's Wayne Clough talk about their National Innovation Initiative, due out in December

Link
Source: BusinessWeek
See also:
AlwaysOn
Corante
Fast Company
Red Herring
Business 2.0
Wired