Summary of the Year 2004

News:
2004 - Wikipedia
2004 Year-End Google Zeitgeist
Special Report - CNN

Tragedy:
The South-East Asia Earthquake and Tsunami

Lists:
500 lists - Fimoculous.com

Technology:
The Top Tech Stories of 2004 - Yahoo News
The Tech Year So Far - Dan Gillmor
A Year of Innovations - Business Week
A Look Back - John Battelle's Searchblog

Blogs:
2004 Year in Review - Intelliseek's BlogPulse

Links:
The Best Links 2004 - kottke.org

Search:
Top Searches 2004 - Yahoo
2004 Searches - AOL
Web's Most Wanted 2004 - Lycos

Media:
Top CyberJournalist stories of 2004

Trends:
What's The Buzz? - Clickz

People:
2004 Global Business Influentials - CNN

Space:
2004: The Year Space Tourism Finally Took Off - Space.com

Video:
Space - Rocketboom
Internet - Rocketboom

Audio:
The Gillmor Gang - IT Conversations

Brands:
Image Winners - USA Today

Books:
Best Science Books of 2004 - Paul Kedrosky
Barron's 25 Best Books of 2004 - Seeking Alpha

Science:
The top 10 news stories of 2004 - New Scientist

The South-East Asia Earthquake and Tsunami

News:
Wikinews
Google News
Topix.net
BBC News
Yahoo News
Guardian

Wikipedia:
2004 Indian Ocean earthquake
Tsunami

Blogs:
The Southeast-Asia Tsunami & Earthquake blog
Quake, tsunami blogger roundup - CyberJournalist.net
Technorati
Daypop
Instapundit
Boing Boing
Screenshots

Images:
Flickr
BBC News
The Killer Wave - PunditGuy

Video:
The Jason Calacanis Weblog
Cheese and Crackers
Rocketboom
Contemporary Insanity
Waxy.org

Audio:
NPR
How the Earthquake affected Earth - NASA

Help:
Tsunami Relief - Google

Survivors:
Evelyn Rodriguez
Asia Disaster Survivor: Happy to be Alive - Sofia News Agency
Scenes from a disaster - Guardian

Opinion:
Daily Tsunamis - Emergic.org

Future:
The Tsunami Next Time - WorldChanging

See also:
How Earthquakes Work - Howstuffworks

The Interactive Future

"A two-day explosion of interactive sight, sound and technology from the student artists and innovators at ITP."
Link
Source: Tisch School of the Arts at NYU

Video:
Rocketboom

See also:
Multimedia - Wikipedia

Flying and Innovation

What do Adam Curry, Richard Branson, Larry Ellison, Marc Pincus, Jeremy Zawodny, Nova Spivack, John Robb, Doug Kaye, Joe Kraus, Philip Greenspun and Eric Schmidt have in common?

1. They have terrific ideas.
2. They love flying. They are pilots. All of them!

See also:
Innovation - Wikipedia
Flight - Wikipedia
Aviator - Wikipedia
IdeaFlow - Corante
Innovation Weblog

Museum of the Future

"The DaVinci Institute has set its sights on creating a museum of future inventions designed around our pursuit of inventions that will create a spot in the history books for people who develop them. The museum will be composed of multiple pavilions, each with its own scientific concentration, sponsored by businesses from around the world."
Link
Source: The DaVinci Institute

See also:
Museum of the Future - Slashdot
Science Fiction Museum
Future - Wikipedia
Futurology - Wikipedia
Timeline of the future in forecasts - Wikipedia
Science fiction - Wikipedia

Lifetime Digital Memory -2

What's the next big thing? Videoblogging?
Videoblogging - Wikipedia
Videoblogging - Yahoo Groups

What about Lifetime Digital Memory?
http://divedi.blogspot.com/2004/06/lifetime-digital-memory.html

Blogs + Email + IM + Social Networks + Social Bookmarks + Wiki + Photos + Audioblogging + Videoblogging = Lifetime Digital Memory

See also:
The New Moore's Law
Digital Lifestyle Aggregation - Google Search
Web 2.0
Semantic Web - Wikipedia
The Future of Information Architecture - Christina Wodtke
The BitTorrent Effect - Wired
Eric Rice
PVRblog

Discuss:
Social software intellectuals - Tribe.net

Audio:
Gordon Bell - MyLifeBits and the Memex Vision - IT Conversations

Google Library

John Battelle reports:
"Google is working with Stanford, the University of Michigan, Harvard, Oxford, and the New York Public Library to make millions of books available in its index."
Link
Source: John Battelle's Searchblog

Google vs. Amazon?

See also:
Search Engine Watch
Google Blog
Google Print
Google News - WebmasterWorld
Google Library - Google News
Google - Topix.net
Search Engines - Topix.net
Online search engines news - Moreover
Digital library - Wikipedia
Amazon.com - Wikipedia

Summary of the Week

"The week of December 6, 2004: Startups are worth their salt, gas-guzzling economies to take another hit, router whiz Tony Li rejoins Cisco, and rumors of the next iPod hatch."
Link
Source: Red Herring

Google Zeitgeist
Link

See also:
Week at a Glance - BBC News
Trends - BlogPulse
Yahoo Buzz Index
Daypop Top 40 Links
Technorati
Blogdex

Google Suggest

Google has a new suggestion:

"What is Google Suggest?
As you type into the search box, Google Suggest guesses what you're typing and offers suggestions in real time."
Link
Source: Google Labs

See also:
Google Suggest - Google News
InsideGoogle
John Battelle's Searchblog
Google Blog
Google Blogoscoped
Google Suggest - WebmasterWorld
Suggested Search - Davenetics
Google - Topix.net
Search Engine News - Topix.net

Art Mobs

iPods + Mobile Phones + Smart Mobs = Art Mobs

Link
[via Marc Canter]

Audio:
EventLab - Corante

Video:
Rocketboom

See also:
Smart Mobs - Wikipedia
Mobile Phone - Wikipedia
Podcasting - Wikipedia

The Future of the Car - 2

"Toyota has announced a concept vehicle that is intended to provide a form of personal mobility that 'seeks to attain a greater balance' for individuals who want to enjoy freedom of movement, harmony with society, and harmony with the Earth's natural environment. This accomplished by supporting the union of the driver and the vehicle."
Link
Source: Space.com

See also:
More pics of Toyota's i-unit personal mobility vehicle - Engadget
The Future of the Car
The Future of Aviation
The Future of Travel
Cyborg - Wikipedia

Living Forever?

"Life expectancy is increasing in the developed world. But Cambridge University geneticist Aubrey de Grey believes it will soon extend dramatically to 1,000. Here, he explains why."

Dr Aubrey de Grey says:
"Ageing is a physical phenomenon happening to our bodies, so at some point in the future, as medicine becomes more and more powerful, we will inevitably be able to address ageing just as effectively as we address many diseases today.

I claim that we are close to that point because of the SENS (Strategies for Engineered Negligible Senescence) project to prevent and cure ageing.

It is not just an idea: it's a very detailed plan to repair all the types of molecular and cellular damage that happen to us over time."
Link
Source: BBC News
[via Geek News Central]

The Prophet of Immortality
"Controversial theorist Aubrey de Grey insists that we are within reach of an engineered cure for aging. Are you prepared to live forever?"
Link
Source: Popular Science
[via AlwaysOn]

Fantastic Voyage: Live Long Enough to Live Forever
"Immortality is within our grasp . . .In Fantastic Voyage, high-tech visionary Ray Kurzweil teams up with life-extension expert Terry Grossman, M.D., to consider the awesome benefits to human health and longevity promised by the leading edge of medical science--and what you can do today to take full advantage of these startling advances. Citing extensive research findings that sound as radical as the most speculative science fiction, Kurzweil and Grossman offer a program designed to slow aging and disease processes to such a degree that you should be in good health and good spirits when the more extreme life-extending and life-enhancing technologies--now in development--become available. This bridge to the future will enable those who dare to make the journey from this century to the next . . . and beyond."
Link

Audio:
The Long Now Foundation: library

See also:
Transhumanism - Wikipedia
Immortality Institute
KurzweilAI.net
Fundamental limitations on 21st century biotechnology

The Anglosphere Challenge

James C. Bennett thinks the English-speaking nations (the anglosphere) will lead the world in the 21st century:

"The Anglosphere Challenge is a new and different look at where globalization and information technology are taking the world, and specifically the USA and the other English-speaking nations. Unlike most of these observers, Bennett believes that these forces will not create a borderless world, nor will the process of globalization lead to a homogenized world culture. Instead, Bennett argues that what is emerging is a series of distinct but overlapping globe- spanning linguistic-cultural phenomena, which he terms 'network civilizations'. (The Anglosphere, or English-speaking network civilization, is the first but by no means the last of such entities.) Within these network civilizations, cultures with strong civil societies can cross intra- civilizational boundaries with ease, widening the scope of easy interaction, particularly for smaller, entrepreneurial ventures. The task of the emerging era, then, is one of creating political forms of cooperation appropriate to these network civilizations. Bennett argues that such a form, which he terms the 'Network Commonwealth', is already emerging. Unlike national or imperial forms of organization, network commonwealths are characterized by extreme decentralization and lack of compulsory mechanisms. Network commonwealths will serve to replace the trade and defense functions once performed by large economic states. Bennett's book contains a detailed discussion of the English-speaking world and why its strong civil society, and resultant entrepreneurial market capitalism and constitutional government will likely result in the Anglosphere's retaining the lead role in the next stages of development, the multiple and simultaneous scientific-technological revolutions sometimes called the Singularity, and the emergence of the Network Commonwealth.."

Link
[via Chicago Boyz]

See also:
The Pentagon's New Map - Thomas Barnett
The Chinese Century - Moore's Lore
Fantastic Voyage : Live Long Enough to Live Forever - Ray Kurzweil, Terry Grossman

The Future of Media - 2

Google, Amazon, Microsoft, Friendster, social networks, blogs, New York Times, Googlezon, Google Grid, EPIC...

Link
Source: Robin Sloan 2004
[via SiliconBeat]

Transcript:
Robin Good
[via Loic Le Meur]

Audio:
Media online in 2014: Google Grid, GoogleZon, EPIC - Web Talk Radio

See also:
The Future of Media
Google Broadband?
The New Moore's Law
Future Vision - Vodafone

Update:
Epic 2015 - Google Blogoscoped

The Global War of the 21st Century

Global Guerrillas
"Networked organizations, infrastructure disruption, and the emerging marketplace of violence. An open notebook on the epochal war of the 21st Century."
Link
Source: Global Guerrillas

The Advent of Netwar
"The information revolution is leading to the rise of network forms of organization, with unusual implications for how societies are organized and conflicts are conducted. 'Netwar' is an emerging consequence. The term refers to societal conflict and crime, short of war, in which the antagonists are organized more as sprawling 'leaderless' networks than as tight-knit hierarchies. Many terrorists, criminals, fundamentalists, and ethno-nationalists are developing netwar capabilities. A new generation of revolutionaries and militant radicals is also emerging, with new doctrines, strategies, and technologies that support their reliance on network forms of organization."
Link
Source: RAND

Wikipedia
Terrorism
War on Terrorism

Counterinsurgency Operations - TerrorWiki
Link

Spetsnaz's First World War
Link

How can we describe this new kind of war? Let's connect the dots...

Features:
- law vs. corruption
- order vs. disorder
- civil society vs. organized crime
- accelerating change vs. static decline
- hierarchy vs. networks
- units vs. swarms
- power vs. weakness
- post-industrial tecnology vs. industrial tecnology
- globalization vs. traditional values
- creativity vs. diligence

Storyboard:
The Pentagon's New Map
Warfighting in the 21st Century – The Remote, Robotic, Robust, Size-Reduced, Virtual Reality Paradigm

Gallery:
PM Soldier
Objective Force Warrior
Future Combat Systems - Institute for Creative Technologies

Scenarios:
Scenarios - Innovation Watch
The Chinese Century - Moore's Lore
The Anglosphere Challenge
Timeline of Future Technology and Social Change
Robotic Nation - Marshall Brain
Future War Technologies of the 2030s
Future War Technologies of the 2060s

Audio:
Intelligent Defense - IT Conversations
Thomas Barnett - IT Conversations
Bruce Schneier - IT Conversations
Supernova 2004 - IT Conversations
Pop!Tech 2004 - IT Conversations
O'Reilly Emerging Tech - IT Conversations
Nanotechnology - IT Conversations
Massive Change - Radio

See also:
Terrorism - Google News
Terrorism News - Topix.net
Defense Tech
John Robb's Weblog
"If We Run Out of Batteries, This War is Screwed." - Wired
What It Takes to Win the 40-Year War - Fast Company
Schneier on Security
Singularity Watch
Belmont Club
Bruce Sterling
William Gibson
KurzweilAI.net
DARPA
Moore's Lore - Corante
Brain Waves
Responsible Nanotechnology
Army Wages War on Modern Menaces - Wired
Project for the New American Century
The Digital Pearl Harbour
The Nuclear 9/11
Human Being 2.0
Inside soviet military intelligence - Viktor Suvorov
The Future of Intelligence
Special Operations Technology

Accelerating Change 2004

"The Accelerating Change conference is a production of the nonprofit Institute for the Study of Accelerating Change (ISAC)."

"AC2004 emphasizes three main themes (Physical Space, Virtual Space, and Interface) with selections from twenty subtheme categories. We approach these themes using four concurrent dialogs (Science, Technology, Business, and Humanism) and three fundamental processes (data-guided Analysis, informed Forecasting, and agendas for Action) that lend insight and foresight to today's most relevant and powerful examples of accelerating technological change."

Topics:

• Physical Space (Tangible Things and Networks)

• Virtual Space (Simulations and Virtual Life)

• Interface (Data, Management Systems, and Convergence)

Link

People:
Shai Agassi
Executive Board Member, SAP

Jaron Lanier
Founder, VPL Research; Advisor, National Tele-Immersion Initiative; Computer Scientist, Composer, Artist

David Brin
Physicist, Science Fiction and Nonfiction Writer

Doug Engelbart
Inventor of the Mouse; Digital Interface Legend; Founder, Bootstrap Institute

Dan Gillmor
Business and Technology Columnist, San Jose Mercury News

Helen Greiner
Co-founder and Chairman of the Board, iRobot

Steve Jurvetson
Managing Director, Draper Fisher Jurvetson

Peter Kaminski
CTO and Founder, Socialtext

Peter Norvig
Director of Search Quality, Google

Christine Peterson
Founder and Vice President, Foresight Institute

John Smart
President, ISAC

Rich Skrenta
Co-Founder and CEO, Topix.net

Gordon Bell
Project Director, MyLifeBits, Microsoft BARC

Brad Templeton
Chairman, Electronic Frontier Foundation

Will Wright
Founder, Maxis; Creator, Sim City, The Sims

Dana Blankenhorn
Technology Business Journalist and Consultant

Link

Audio:
IT Conversations

See also:
Accelerating Change 2004 - Technorati
Pop!Tech
TransVision 2004

How George Bush won the election

Jason Kottke has a great point of view:

"I don't think America is that divided. I think most of us are ill-informed in two major ways, 'conveniently' split along the lines of the two major political parties available to us. We're told we have two different choices -- you're rooting for this team or that team and the other team is the enemy -- and we believe that and organize our beliefs accordingly. There's a lot of fear and emotion involved on both sides. I can't count how many times in the last two days I've heard self-righteous 'liberals' call the entire middle of the country 'stupid'. Kerry voters, we need to get over ourselves...we're not special. We're not informed by some superior intelligence that gives us a unique insight into how the world should work. We buy into the Democratic Party/liberal/anti-conservative/fear the church crap in the same way that our 'red state' brethren buy into the Rebublican Party/conservative/anti-liberal/fear the gays bullshit.

Half the country is not stupid. We're all stupid. We're convinced several times a day to do things that aren't in our best interests. We work too hard. We're drinking, eating, medicating, and smoking ourselves into early graves. We overextend ourselves on credit. We knowingly stay in emotionally or physically abusive relationships. We let television raise our children. We're deliberately mean and nasty to people we don't like or agree with. We learn science from the Bible. We stay silent when speaking out would help someone. We fear the future. We fear death. And we're lazy about our beliefs and convictions and we let the Democratic and Republican Parties dictate the political agenda in America by pushing our emotional buttons. Red, blue, black, white, brown, yellow, purple, and retina-burning yellow-green...we all share the blame.

Speaking of, I'll tell you who's smart. Karl Rove is smart. Karl Rove knows all of the above and used it perfectly to his advantage. It's not necessarily that America as a whole validated the actions of George Bush over the past four years...it's that the Republican Party got more of their people to the polls than the Democrats did. Looking out across America, what's one of the largest groups of people with a single strongly-held set of beliefs? The evangelical Christians. They comprise a large portion of the US population and believe in God more strongly than most other groups believe in anything. The Bush camp used a coordinated campaign to speak directly to those people and put their strong belief in God in direct opposition to what the other side stood for: liberals want to kill innocent babies, allow gays to marry, and let non-Christians run the country/world. To an evangelical Christian, the fear that those things will happen is almost overwhelmingly unbearable. Based on that emotional appeal, they turned out in droves, voting for Bush in greater numbers than in 2000 and overwhelming the increased turnout on the other side of the aisle.

The Democrats, with ill-defined fears of a mishandled Iraq war, America's place in the world, personal freedoms, anti-science agenda, the economy, and Bush's general stupidity, couldn't muster the same kind of turnout. They and their supporters ran a more decentralized campaign, with blogs, 527 groups, and assorted other groups all having their own agendas. Liberals had a million slogans, initiatives, and platforms, each tailored for a different group of people. In theory, this was lauded as a fantastic idea...you could reach more people with less organization and target small groups of people with exactly the message that would appeal to each group. But it didn't work out that way. The top-down campaign with the one focused message targeted at a large group of people won out."
Link

"New America" Vs. "Old America"
"Most Europeans never took kindly to the Bush Administration's way of dividing the continent into 'Old Europe' and 'New Europe.' As luck would have it, we got our hands on a memo one of Europe's top prime ministers received from his foreign minister to help him understand what's at stake in today's U.S. presidential election."
Link
Source: The Globalist

Maps:
Election Map - New York Times
Election Map - USA Today
Election result maps - University of Michigan
Purple Haze - Boing Boing
We've gone Map Crazy! - The Big Picture
We've gone Map Crazy, part II! - The Big Picture
Research - PatrickRuffini.com
Young Americans - collision detection
Kerry in 2004 - Meetup.com
Bush in 2004 - Meetup.com

Photos:
Photos tagged with election2004 - Flickr
Photos tagged with election - Flickr
Photos tagged with electionday - Flickr
Photos tagged with vote - Flickr

Charts:
Google Zeitgeist - Election 2004
Election Watch 2004 - Technorati
Campaign Radar 2004 Summary - BlogPulse

See also:
US Election 2004 - Google News
2004 Presidential Election News - Topix.net
Back to basics - Economist
Vote USA 2004 - BBC News
Ultimately It Comes Down To Taste - Adam Rifkin
Spooks and Goblins - The J Curve
Still Missing the Big Picture About This Election - Daily Kos
The Failure of the American Experiment - kuro5hin.org
Magnanimous Defeat - BarlowFriendz
Rise of the Religious Right in the Republican Party

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

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

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

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

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

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?

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

SpaceShipOne wins X Prize

SpaceShipOne won the $10m Ansari X-Prize! The New Space Age began today. Period.

See also:
How SpaceShipOne Works - Howstuffworks
X Prize - Google News
SpaceShipOne Captures the X Prize - Slashdot
X Prize Won! - Space.com
X Prize - Google Images
The Final Frontier

Audio:
SpaceShipOne Takes X-Prize - NPR

Discuss:
Space Travel - Tribe.net

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

The Final Frontier

"Does Virgin Galactic herald a new era of space tourism?"

"The news that Sir Richard Branson has signed a deal to take paying passengers into space suggests the Ansari X-Prize has achieved its goal of bringing space tourism closer to the masses."

What's next? The Moon, Mars or space colonies?

Link
Source: BBC News
See also:
Space.com
Space Travel - Google News
Space colonization - Wikipedia
Space science news - Moreover
X-Prize - Google Images
Space - Slashdot
Space - About.com
How Space Tourism Works - Howstuffworks
Richard Branson - Google Search
Richard Branson - Google News
Space elevator - Wikipedia
Interstellar travel - Wikipedia
Aeronautics and Astronautics - MIT OpenCourseWare

Discuss:
Space Travel - Tribe.net

The Future of Media

"Imagine today is September 8, 2014, a Monday. Your tasks today are to self-publish your new e-book, Really Bad 3-D PowerPoint 2015, and to find and purchase a book or article about the music of the Canary Islands from an authoritative source. Both tasks will be relatively easy."

Link
Source: Clickz
See also:
Dissecting the Media: Trust and Transactions - Due Diligence
Smart Mobs
Media - Slashdot
Many-to-Many
John Battelle's Searchblog
Media - Wikipedia
Online Journalism Review
Columbia Journalism Review
We the Media
Napsterization
CyberJournalist
Poynter
PaidContent.org
Media Diet
Media Giants - PBS
Rushkoff's NYU Class
MIT Media Lab
Comparative Media Studies - MIT OpenCourseWare

Discuss:
Media Junkies - Tribe.net

The Social Future

"Cory Doctorow, Pat Murphy, Kim Stanley Robinson, Norman Spinrad, Bruce Sterling, and Ken Wharton address the environment, copyright, social trends, terrorism, war, world government, and the upcoming Presidential election."

"But Bruce Sterling's thinking that the leading trends are coming from outside North America: 'I used to think that the USA, being an innovative, high-tech polity, would be inventing and promulgating a lot of tomorrow's social change. I don't believe that any more. These days I spend a lot of time looking at Brazil, China, India, and Europe. Japan and Russia, interestingly, are even more moribund than the USA.' "

Link
Source: Locus
See also:
Socked Between the Eyes with an Ice-Cold Futurist Scenario - Bruce Sterling's blog
Asia's Growth
Brazil is Hackers Nirvana
The Metrosexual Superpower
Brazil in Orkut - Smart Mobs
Brazil Switches from Microsoft to 'Open Source' Software - NPR

The Quantum Nightmare

"We must awaken to the threat of a quantum computer getting into malicious hands."

"Computing the risk: 'I have developed a fear of what a quantum computer could do in the hands of evildoers with wealth and resources,' says Stephen Page. 'We must start building safeguards now.' "
Link
Source: Betterhumans

Transcending Moore's Law with Molecular Electronics and Nanotechnology
Steve Jurvetson, Managing Director of Draper Fisher Jurvetson, has an interesting point of view:

"Once quantum computers become available, engineers working at the nano-scale will be able to use them to model and design nano-scale systems just like today’s aerospace engineers model and design airplanes—completely virtually—with no wind tunnels (or their chemical analogues).

This may seem strange, but really it’s not. Think of it like this: conventional computers are really good at modeling conventional (that is, non-quantum) stuff—like automobiles and airplanes. Quantum computers are really good at modeling quantum stuff. Each type of computer speaks a different language.

Based in Vancouver, Canada, D-Wave is building a quantum computer using aluminumbased circuits. The company projects that by 2008 it will be building thumbnail-sized chips with more computing power than the aggregate total of all computers on the planet today and ever built in history, when applied to simulating the behavior and predicting the properties of nano-scale systems – highlighting the vast difference in capabilities of quantum and conventional computers. This would be of great value to the development of the nanotechnology industry. And it's a jaw-dropping claim. Professor David Deutsch of Oxford summarized: ‘Quantum computers have the potential to solve problems that would take a classical computer longer than the age of the universe.’

While any physical experiment can be regarded as a complex computation, we will need
quantum computers to transcend Moore’s law into the quantum domain to make this equivalence realizable."

Link
Source: Draper Fisher Jurvetson
[via Northwest VC]

See also:
Quantum computer - Wikipedia
How Quantum Computers Will Work - Howstuffworks
Centre for Quantum Computation
Quantum Computers - Google News
Quantum Internet Search

Top 10 Trends in Innovation

"Thomas Frey: As part of preparing for the upcoming Colorado Innovation Summit, the research team at the DaVinci Institute has spent the past few months reviewing hundreds of factors influencing innovations in the US. Using a scoring system designed to assess the overall impact of each of these factors; a group of the Institute’s staff and advisors weighed in.

The effects of globalization are clearly evident as R&D money begins to shift to China and India. And the baby boom demographic is also creating havoc both in the areas of retiring scientists and engineers and our country's ability to backfill these vacancies with competent new hires.

The proliferation of new technologies is also evident in the sheer volume of patent filing and the vast number of products in the marketplace.

Three categories of technology made the list as being the most promising areas for innovation. These areas include mobile and wireless, biotech, and entertainment. It was felt that these areas would be dominated by U.S. innovations for many years to come."

Highlights:

1. The Age of 100 Million Products
2. Patent Filings Reach All-Time High
3. The Next Big Thing was Invented Over 25 Years Ago
4. R&D Investment Shifts to China and India
5. The Great Talent Gap Continues to Grow
6. Time Compression Driving Consumer Behavior
7. Aging Marketplace Driving Biotech
8. Transition to Mobile and Wireless Driven by Desire for Freedom
9. Entertainment: A Hotbed for Innovation
10. Politics Trumps Technology & Business

Link
Source: DaVinci Institute
[via Impact Lab]

See also:
Innovation Watch
Battelle - Technology Forecasts

Future Humans

"The corporate culture issues surrounding the arrival of a new application can be daunting. The ethical dilemmas around RFID can be polarizing. But within the next few decades, CIOs are going to face something that will make such problems seem juvenile—the issues surrounding human enhancement.

A new book, Citizen Cyborg (Basic Books, October 2004), by Dr. James Hughes raises serious questions about how society must come to grips with technologies that can improve human senses, intelligence and life spans. As a result of nanotechnology, genetic engineering, new pharmaceuticals and high-tech implants, CIOs will be faced with quandaries they'd have trouble imagining today."

Link
Source: CIO
[via AlwaysON]

See also:
Transvision 2004
Betterhumans
Sentient Developments
Anders Sandberg's blog

The Agents are coming

"Autonomous agents could one day play a key role in everything from setting market prices to creating more resilient networks."

"Over the past year, NASA has been uploading software into the Earth Observing-1 satellite, turning it into a testbed for autonomous agents. The agents -- software programs that are able to learn and can function independently -- are used to manage experiments and operate the spacecraft.

The effort is part of a technology initiative that researchers say will reshape IT over the course of many years. Autonomous agents have the potential to become an extraordinarily powerful technology, with the capacity to learn, experiment and act independent of human control. Agents could ultimately improve productivity, increase software reliability and change the operation of markets, particularly supply chains."

Link
Source: Computerworld
[via KurzweilAI.net]

See also:
Agents of Change
Autonomous Agents - Future Now
Software Agents - Google News
Virtual tourists in Switzerland - Economist
Software Agents - Yahoo News
Agents - AI in the news
Software Agents - MIT Media Lab
Virtual Worlds
Robotic Nation Evidence

The Future of the Car

"Mind-reading cars. An end to traffic jams. Big Brother behind the wheel. A live-aboard 'recreational-utility vehicle.' The tinkerer who’s going to save the world. Upside-down racing."

Link
Source: Popular Science
See also:
Tomorrow's Safer Cars - BusinessWeek
Dan Neil and the Cars of the Future - NPR
Why Hybrids Are Hot - Wired
Robotic mobility - Robotic Nation Evidence
Automobile - Wikipedia
Car - Google News
Auto News Categories - Topix.net
Automobiles - Yahoo News
Automotive industry news - Moreover
Cars - About.com
Future Car - Google Images
Concept Auto Design - Tribe.net
The Future of Aviation
The Future of Travel

The Nanotech Report 2004

"The Nanotech Report 2004 (TNR 2004) is the premier research guide for nanotechnology. The TNR 2004 profiles more than 1,000 companies and features new investment frameworks and strategies, company and academic profiles, patent licensing opportunities and trends, competitive data, interviews with Nobel laureates and industry experts, profiles of the most influential players in nanotechnology, and a technical primer."

Highlights:

• Forecasts the impact of nanotechnology on the Chemical, Textile, Computing, Transportation, Energy, Healthcare, and Homeland Security industries
• Provides a nanotechnology roadmap
• Identifies the potential winners and losers in the emerging nanotechnology industry
• Explores the research initiatives at leading government laboratories
• Presents compelling interviews of academic researchers at the forefront of Nanotechnology
• Ranks the most influential people in the field
• Highlights venture capital and worldwide government funding trends
• Identifies the top private nanotechnology companies most likely to IPO

Link
Source: Lux Research
[via del.icio.us]

See also:
Nanotechnology - Google News
Nanotechnology News - Topix.net
Nanotechnology - Yahoo News
Nanotechnology news - Moreover
Foresight Institute
Responsible Nanotechnology