Future

(Prospective) New standard: Near Field Communication: 10cm interactions

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NFC is a protocol based on proximity and physical contact. A bit different from BlueTooth,

It enables the user to exchange all kinds of data, in complete security, simply by bringing two devices close together. Its short-range interaction greatly simplifies the whole issue of identification, as there is a lot less confusion when devices can only 'hear' their immediate neighbors. (...) NFC technology is being jointly developed and promoted by Philips and Sony as a means to overcome the dizzying complexity of modern technology in our increasingly connected world. (...) The technology is in essence a contactless short-range interface technology operating on the 13.56 MHz frequency band with a read/write range of up to 10 cm. It will enable people to effortlessly connect digital cameras, PDAs, set-top boxes, computers and mobile phones.(Philips).

[Prospective] Thomas Malone on Organizations of the 21st Century

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Global Business Network proposes a conversation with Thomas Malone about how he envisions organisations of the 21st Century (in his new book The Future of Work: How the New Order of Business Will Shape Your Organization, Your Management Style, and Your Life).

Malone believes that over the next few decades, organizations will undergo a major—in some cases radical—transformation. The dotcom boom and the e-business craze were but early symptoms of this coming transition. Indeed, Malone thinks that we’re currently experiencing a period akin to the biological concept of punctuated equilibrium, where the more stable hierarchical systems of organization are being disrupted and decentralized models are being invented through trial and error. The trend line is moving inexorably toward decentralization, Malone argues—and the emerging organizational model of open source is an early indicator of other models to come. But because of the lag time between technological change and cultural change, most people are still trapped in centralized mindsets that were formed to effectively align with organizational models of the twentieth century. That’s not only true of current leaders at the top of hierarchies, but emerging leaders throughout the organization.

(Prospective) Telcos: a sectorless industry?

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Business Week's paper about the fact that in a few years, Telecoms will be a sectorless industry with phone, cable, and even power companies all selling the same communications services.

Just four years ago, the world of communications was reassuringly compartmentalized. Customers bought cell-phone service from a wireless phone carrier. Pay TV came from a cable or a satellite company. Local-phone service was provided by -- what else? -- a local-phone company. And Internet access came from an Internet service provider. (...) Suddenly, there's no limit to the number or types of companies that can compete for the attention of customers who used to belong to the phone industry

(Prospective) Battle of the living room: consoles or PC?

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NYT about the so-called 'battle of the living room': who is going to win: PCs or consoles. Consoles might win but since video games are a driving force for innovation and growth on PC, this may cause problem to PC makers... It seems that the lately digital convergence converges to a digital divergence.

Unrelated but still interesting Nintendo is planning to release its new Gameboy DS, which will contain two screens so that a player can view two aspects of a game simultaneously. Nice :) I would like to test this kind of stuff. They want people to train for multitasking or what! I am looking forward to see how players react to this.

(Prospective) Techno Animism

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Mike Kuniavsky in his paper in adaptive path explains that he is

convinced that, as networks of smart objects permeate our environment, people’s attitudes toward technology will become more animist. In other words, we’ll start to anthropomorphize our stuff.(...) So how will people react to a ubiquitous computing world? It’s already difficult to predict how technological objects will behave when their functionality is hidden in black boxes and radio waves. Once these technologies are widely distributed in everyday objects, the environment they create will become too difficult for us to explain in purely functional ways. In other words, because we have no other way to explain how things work, we will see the world as animist. Animism is, in its broadest definition, the belief that all objects have will, intelligence, and memory and that they interact with and affect our lives in a deliberate, intelligent, and (in a sense) conscious way.

I like this :

What heavy computer user has never had the urge to search for house keys by doing a “Find File” on their bedroom?

[Prospective] technorati is my social software

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After few test on friendster or tribe, I have to admit that I don't like those social software. Why is that:1/ I have to log in other systems 2/ I have to subscribe 3/ My purpose is not to make friends but to find people who have the same interests.

Thus, the first social soft I use is my blogroll (where I put sites I read on a regular basis or people I am in contact with to talk about my research projects, my ideas and so on). The next step is to use google to find who cites me but is not always accurate. So the ultimate tool, for my use, today is definitely technorati ! I can see who I link, who links me and all that stuff is weighted thanks to a reputation system.

So as Red Herring asks 'what is the next google?', I would definitely say it's technorati !

[Prospective] Howard Rheingold on reputation system

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Rheingold on social networks, reputation systems and all this stuff at SXSW:

The question I ask is, What could we do walking around that we can't do now, given a simple reputation system? There's any number of things. If you want to connect with someone who's looking at the same problem, you can do so with a few keystrokes. We all do that. When we're walking down the street, we're surrounded by people we don't know. Some of those people may have common cause with us, but we don't know who they are, and we can't trust them so far.
There's some experiments going on with ride sharing. There's a big payoff there. If you're a big company like Boeing with 70,000 employees going to the same place in Seattle, you're paying the city a lot of money to pay for the wear and tear on the roads.
But the thing with reputational systems is that only geeks change defaults. The ability to coordinate and find common cause with people goes beyond selling a bike or finding a date.

I appreciate the take on ride sharing, it's something I was thinking about.

(Prospective) nowpunk is the new trend

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As bruce sterling mentioned in his SXSW talk (notes read in cory doctorow's craphound), NOWpunk is the new trend after cyberpunk and steampunk.

sf novel, but not set in the future. Gibson's doing this too. It's a trend among aging cyberpunks. It's not cyberpunk, it's not steampunk, it's NOWpunk.

(Prospective) Gifted Economy/Economie du don

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Fondation Babyrule proposes a new concept: le "don à l'étalage". That means putting free artifacts (fanzines, cds, videos) in shops without any authorization :)

Le Don A l'Etalage est une pratique consistant à déposer des objets gratuits, disques, fanzines, vidéos dans des rayons de commerçants sans leur autorisation. BABYBRUL et FUZZKHAN développe cette pratique avec un disque audio gravé de FUZZKHAN, "Thèmes et fuite de Nouvelle BABYLONE 1", depuis le début de l'année 2003, chez des gros disquaires tels FNAC et VIRGIN, et désormais également dans les médiathèques municipales.

(Prospective) the world started in 1996

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Nice take on google (appeared circa 1996) and libraries in Star Telegram:

"For a lot of kids today, the world started in 1996," says librarian and author Gary Price.

Library circulation dropped about 20 percent at major universities in the first five years after Internet search engines became popular.

A generation ago, reference librarians were the most powerful search engines on the planet. But the rise of robotic search engines in the mid-1990s has removed the human mediators between researchers and information. Librarians are not so sure they approve. Much of the material on the World Wide Web is wrong, or crazy, or of questionable provenance, or simply out of date.

"How do you authenticate what you're looking at?" asks librarian Patricia Wand of American University.

Students typically search only the most obvious parts of the Web and rarely venture into what is sometimes called the "Dark Web," the walled gardens of information accessible only through specific databases, such as Lexis-Nexis or the Oxford English Dictionary. And most old books remain undigitized.

So where are we heading to? Smarter search engine? New ways to authenticate content ?...

(Prospective) Ideas for google in Wired

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Paul Boutin in the last wired issue proposed four ideas in order to improve today's ultimate tool:google.com.

Crawl 'em all Google has 3 billion pages in its database, with AlltheWeb and Inktomi close behind. But there may be a trillion more pages hiding in plain sight - in online databases such as WebMD and The New York Times' archive, and they can't be reached by hopping from one link to another. To get at them, a search engine needs to submit a query to each site, then consolidate the results onto one page. CompletePlanet lets visitors search more than 100,000 such databases, but only a few subjects at a time. No current service is powerful enough to churn through all trillion possible results at once.

Keep 'em all Google is fast replacing Lexis-Nexis as the research tool professionals turn to first. But Google lets you search only its most recently crawled version of the Web. Pages that were changed or deleted prior to the last crawl are lost forever. The Internet Archive's Wayback Machine preserves a fraction of the Web's page history. What if you could search every version of every page ever posted?

Follow the feeds News sites and blogs are supplementing their pages with RSS feeds - a service that pushes new content to subscribers as soon as it's published. Google doesn't track RSS feeds, and bloggers gripe that their posts take two to three days to show up in search results. An engine to which Web site owners could upload RSS would provide the latest version of every page.

Don't give away the formula When Google debuted in 1998, its search results were free of the marketing pages that clogged other engines. Even though Sergey Brin and Larry Page had published their PageRank formula while at Stanford, it was tougher to fool than other scoring systems. In 2000, Google gave out a free PC toolbar that displayed the PageRank value of any Web page, unwittingly handing Google gamers a cheat sheet.

[CoolTech] Replacing the mix tape for the 21st century: the iPod swap

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Nice paper in The Village Voice about how ipod could replace mixtapes.

if you met someone cool and cute, someone you wanted to know better, you might make that person a mix tape (...) Today, such compilations are an anachronism. Most stereos don't even have tape decks anymore. Countless couples will probably trade mix CDs this Valentine's Day, but the point-and-click process of CD burning is rather sterile; Of course, there's one dramatic difference between an iPod and a mix tape: Mixes are entirely constructed. An iPod, by contrast, keeps no secrets. The iPod records what songs have been played both most recently and most often, so it quickly becomes a record of the owner's internal aural landscape. Listening to someone else's iPod is thus an intimate, almost invasive activity. On the scale of personal exposure, it's not exactly trading diaries, but it's much more revealing than a mix tape.

[TheWorld] Lunar Property

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I always find amazing the way people tend to appropriate things. Moon and Mars (it belongs to yemenite I saw somewhere: Three men from Yemen sue NASA for trespassing on Mars) offer a nice potential :Lunar Embassy and its bank Lunar Embassy Bank or Lunar Republic Society... all wants to sell parts of the moon or even mars/venus... private companies "ne recule devant rien" as we say in french !

HOWEVER: as stated by the Moon Treaty:

All activities on the moon, including its exploration and use, shall be carried out in accordance with international law, in particular the Charter of the United Nations, and taking into account the Declaration on Principles of International Law concerning Friendly Relations and Co-operation among States in accordance with the Charter of the United Nations, adopted by the General Assembly on 24 October 1970, in the interest of maintaining international peace and security and promoting international co-operation and mutual understanding, and with due regard to the corresponding interests of all other States Parties.

[Prospective] Joel Kotkin against an urban revitalization panacea

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City scholar Joel Kotkin argues against the idea of an urban revitalization panacea in an interview for Metropolis Mag. He is critical of Richard Florida's book The Rise of the Creative Class</a (Florida argues that cities attracting hip young "creatives" will fare best in the twenty-first century.).

A piece of Florida's theory is correct. There is a niche for these kinds of boutique cities, but the idea that there's this formula that other cities can follow is shortsighted. He never addresses the issue of affordability. I do a lot of focus groups. When you talk to young people what you find is that many things influence their decision on where to live. It's true that people in their early twenties are interested in cool urban amenities. Then something really bad happens to them: they turn thirty. And when they hit thirty they start thinking, Well, do I want to live in a Motel 6 and pay $3,000 a month? Can I get a job? Maybe I'd like to get married and have children.

One of the worst aspects of the Florida book is that he takes the 1997--2000 period and extrapolates it out as this new paradigm. His work has become an excuse for cities to say the way we're going to pursue development is by creating entertainment districts. Let's show we have more brewpubs than some other place. It doesn't work that way. Jane Jacobs had it right: a great metropolitan economy doesn't lure a middle class--it creates one. (...) How do cities prevent their declines? There are several ways. A lot of it is just blocking and tackling: reducing crime, improving transportation, providing education and public safety

This is certainly true:

Recently I visited Paris, and the only vitality I saw there was when I got out into the ethnic neighborhoods, the African neighborhoods. The term museum city is not a compliment.

Kotkin also believed in suburbs:

How do you see America's urban landscape evolving in the next ten years? The next great frontier is going to be the urbanization of suburbia. We will see the development of more urban villages. You have too many people who cannot afford to live any place near work. Land pressures, environmental pressures, NIMBY-ism, and people's exhaustion with the commute will lead to the creation of denser, more self-contained environments.

in

"Autres bâtiments vendus par le conseil général, un immeuble avenue Foch (6e) et ceux qui abritent actuellement les archives départementales rue Servient (3e) et rue de Montauban (5e). Archives qui seront regroupées dans un nouvel immeuble construit sur un terrain du département du Rhône derrière la ligne de chemin de fer, près de la Part-Dieu. Une partie de ce même terrain sera d'ailleurs vendue d'ici peu à la communauté urbaine."

City, shit and the future of shitty cities

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I am glad reading in space and culture (the new weblog by Anne Galloway and Rob Shields) that there is a course at London Consortium about shit and civilization: our ambivalent relationship to ordure in the city, culture and the psyche.

Our societies are, quite literally, founded on shit. Civilization means living in cities and cities are confronted, in a way more dispersed settlements are not, with heaps of garbage and ordure. Ancient cities are now identified by the mounds raised above the surrounding terrain, called tells. Tells are heaps of rubble, garbage and ordure into which cities have crumbled. Cities have always left the poor to scavenge and to live from re-cycling garbage. In many contemporary third world cities slums have been built on and around the town dump.

Slums - favelas, barrios, shanties - have no sewers. Ordure is carried away in carts or by open drains. Yet we exhibit a fundamental ambivalence to shit, and see it as the opposite of civilization, rather than its inevitable accompaniment. It is repressed, literally driven underground by sewers, and driven into the unconscious by taboos and toilet training. Yet we cannot leave shit alone. We tire of aseptic modernist urban utopias, and seek the bustle and confusion, and the dirt of a 'real' city.

There is indeed, as the author mention, a "scatological urge", we cannot ban shit from culture. My point it not that I like to play with dirt or with my poo. Certainly not, but we should maybe reconsider the value of dirt and dishes. Using it for power supply ineach of our home is an option. Another one would be William Gibson's idea of Bay Bridge as a hobo/hipster community in Virtual Light.