Convergence, or just a tangled mess of ideas?
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What is it that matters to you? Mobile Workshop The word "convergence" is responsible for a lot of confusion in the industry. In some circles it means the coming together of all voice, video and data on an IP network with delivery based on the circumstances or "presence" of the user.â¦
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Blog: How close is modern science to an era when technology can restore lost motor functions. Scientists say we're getting close-but a huge effort still remains.
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Like many, I was pretty shocked by the recent Microsoft-EU deal to settle the long-running investigation into interoperability issues.  This was not so much because of the way Microsoft has used every kind of delaying tactic it could before eventually agreeing (for the nth time) to try harder in the future.  My real dismay was provoked by the gap between appearance and reality â a chasm that I think bodes ill for the future of open source. read more
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Frank Hayes says 2008 is the year to wrap our brains around the whole virtualization idea. Mark Hall disagrees.
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Some are questioning the fit between the two companies from the perspective of open-source tools and APIs.
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A formula for Web schemes: a lot of mathematicians, a lax legal system and Western targets.
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Is there something new that open source development methods and values can bring to the economy? How about something old?  I think the answer may come from the developing world, where pre-industrial methods and values persist and offer some helpful models and lessons for a networked world that's less post-industrial than industrial in a new and less impersonal way. This began to become apparent to me a few years ago I had a Socratic exchange with a Nigerian pastor named Sayo, whom I was lucky to find sitting next to me on a long airplane trip.
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The always provocative Brad Templeton, who hung out with a large cadre of geeks at the Internet Identity Workshop (IIW, or IIW2007) last week, has some cautions about new identity systems, even if they are all &quot;user-centric&quot;. These cautions lie in a paradox: &quot;The easier it is to give somebody ID information, the more often it will be done. And the easier it is to give ID information, the more palatable it is to ask for, or demand it.&quot; The italics are his.  Here he hits on the problem of market power asymmetries (vendors strong, customers weak) that have been with us for the whole Industrial Age, and are with us still. I think we have a way to overcome those, and that Brad's Paradox may provide exactly the conceptual hurdle we need to see before we can make progress. \
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Culture minister announces mystery strategisers A convergence think tank intended to shape government new media policy is to begin work in the new year, Culture Secretary James Purnell announced last week. The think tank, he said, is intended to "bring together expertise from the worlds of broadcasting, telecommunications and internet services to consider consider the opportunities and challenges we might face."â¦
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We're really talking mobile convergence Mobile Workshop For the last part of our mobile workshop weâre looking at mobile convergence. After our customary market observations, weâd love to hear your experiences with converged mobile and fixed voice and data.â¦
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As long as I've been involved in the tech industry there's been the concept of The Year of X, where X has been artificial intelligence, personal information managers, local area networks, CD-ROMs, P2P. Proclaimed by tech pubs, most likely to help their ad sales reps sell space, they focused the attention on areas the industry was investing money, in hopes of being there when lightning strikes, when wealth is created, as it often is in the tech industry. Sometimes the "year of" prognostications are right, more often they're wrong.  In that sense, there's no doubt that 2007 is the year of the social network in Silicon Valley. This may not be the year when huge wealth is created, but I don't doubt that the area is fertile, and I don't say that lightly, because I'm often a contrarian when it comes to self-induced Silicon Valley euphoria. There are a couple of ideas I've been getting ready to write about, I'm not quite ready yet, but here they are anyway. 1. When people get together to discuss Twitter, and perhaps other social networks (and Twitter is that, a bare-bones social network), they often discuss as if there were a common user experience, but this is a misperception, there are many different experiences, they may group into large subsets of the users, and they may not. Some food for thought. On Twitter I try to keep a ten percent ratio of people I follow over people who follow me. For other people, maybe most, the ratio is 1-to-1, they follow approximately the same number of people as follow them. Scoble follows thousands of people. For him Twitter is like a very fast chatroom. For me it's like weblogs.com on a busy day in 2002. I've seen people who follow 0 people, for them Twitter is a publishing environment. Very different experiences. To each of them Twitter is a different product. Note that when reporters cover Twitter, before they've become users, they probably write about the home page at Twitter, where complete strangers report on the kind of spaghetti sauce they like. That may be why so many articles dismiss Twitter as useless.  2. Integration is so tempting, but elusive. The other day a friend on Twitter wrote about a movie he liked. I looked it up on the NY Times movie review site (a newly revealed location now that their archive is open and a very valuable one, another topic I plan to cover, the wealth of the NY Times archive). I would have then liked to have clicked over to Netflix to order it. And even better, I'd have liked to have looked at what other movies he likes. Now we're very close to having this, we just need a way to co-relate two identity systems, Twitter's and Netflix's. And think of the value in integrating Amazon with Twitter. The mind explodes at the possibilities. This is what I meant when I said earlier "they&#185;re not trivial problems, they&#185;ve been there since the Internet outgrew academia and started being used for commercial purposes." This issue is now coming to a head, as the users can see the next step clearly. How to integrate the systems is known technology, but it's not a solved problem economically and politically. We need to get clear on the opportunities, and feel free to dream when the barriers between the networks come down.
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I&#39;ve always been mixed about the Open Source movement because while my feelings suggest that this is surely a great innovation in software development scene, there are other (many) things that I don&#39;t agree with.
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This book attempts to demolish the notion that ''new is better.&quot; For the most part, it succeeds. Sergio Zyman and coauthor Armin A. Brott build a solid foundation for their argument that innovation can be disastrous for the bottom line. Innovation is like a sugar high, they say -- a quick fix that just doesn't work.
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Blog: The term mind share gets thrown around quite a bit these days. The essence of the term may be confusing, but whatever it means, Sony somehow seems to have it.
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There is a dissonance between two camps of modern liberal ideology, both of which have had a deep influence on my thinking. On the one hand there is the green ideology that advocates buying locally produced products or growing your own and the general  reduction of energy usage. On the other there is the drop the debt coalition that is attempting to help the developing world drag itself up and become a richer place.   This article is my attempt to resolve their influence on my own beliefs, with regards to philanthropy.
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Fast company It&#146;s a familiar tension in business. Business people think designers are mere stylists; designers think business people are Neanderthals who forfeit quality for profit. That&#146;s because traditional business runs on logic that is inductive (using observation to prove something works) and deductive (using principles to prove that something must be). But designers rely on abductive reasoning. Huh? It&#146;s ...
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Microsoft is applying for a patent for an operating system that starts out crippled.  You must pay to do things like take the throttle off network speed, disk access, install drivers, install software, and more.  Trust me, I rarely even visit Groklaw, even if this is my second consecutive blog entry with a link to a Groklaw article. My VarLinux.org readers posted the article, A Brave New Modular World, and I had to share it.