Jeff Han , or the End of the Mouse as We Know It...

The coolest innovation out of NYU computer lab offers a new vision of how we interact with computers. Visualize this: a completely robust pressure sensitive monitor. You touch, sculpt, drag, drop, type, write: with gestures and touch.

You shrink, expand, pivot images, select new angles, get beyond static dimensional views... by touching two points, creating a line and flipping at will. Even in the simple demos, here's what it means...no more mice. No more keyboards. Completely organic interfaces. Design software will never be the same. "Pick up" a virtual paintbrush and literally touch the screen: all the benefits of digitization, with the interface of natural touch.

It's a complete wow! I can't wait for this to get to market. Jeff Han, self satisfied, excited and joyful: hats off.

Joy, Sort Of.

Bill Joy, the brilliant founder of Sun, takes the stage. He sits, he is thoughtful, he is having a conversation. He is telling us a story, a fireside chat. A chat on civilization and power- specifically, the dependency civilization has on a key principle: the restraint of power. Specifically, that the majority of individuals and institutions, both voluntarily and through systems and codes, will refrain from using the power available to them, in the greater interest of all.

The threat now, as suggested by many here already but called out most clearly by Joy, is the current assymetry of power: now, one (or a few) nonconforming individuals can destroy the whole (how many can you think of, o denizens of fraidycatplanet- in the current culture of fear and scenario production i am sure a hundred come to mind easily...and here's a real one: Joy tells us that you can now download the 1918 flu pandemic virus instructions on the 'net.)

Potential offensive uses are so varied, that it is impossible to defend against all scenarios. So how to defend? You can't give up the rule of law to fight an asymetric threat, says Joy, but then moves on, to articulate where he is putting his time and energy now, in his role as a venture investor as Kleiner Perkins.

What's he looking at? He's looking at software, processing power. Moore's law continues. He's looking at environmental problem solvers, such as new materials (a wonderful explanation of the properties of carbon nanotubes- you say you want a materials revolution?- you got it)

Where there's a big pause, pay attention- Joy's third bucket?

He's looking at pandemic and biodefense technologies. In fact KPCB has put together a $200M pandemic and biodefense fund...looking at things like antivirals, surveillance, diagnostics. (a Joy quote: Where you invest affects distribution of the outcome- may be obvious, but reinforces the rule- if you want to know what matters to someone, follow the money- that applies to governments, investors, companies, individuals)

In addition to making an impact with investment, Joy suggests policy solutions...What if you let market forces manage risk, not regulation....What if instead of the FDA, pharma companies had to be insured for new drug risk- that is they had to convince actuaries not the FDA of efficacy and safety?

Where Joy loses me, and my hackles go up, is in his assertion of another proposed policy...and that is an assertion that in order to help the "good guys" you need to limit access to information. That lack of access to information is the price of the rule of law, he says.

The question is, in an era where the credibility gap between goverments and populations, who are the good guys, anyway? In a wag the dog society, who are the good guys? With governments and militaries that have a history of abuses, from Guantanomo to Abu Ghraib, governments that have selective attention to the trends and pieces of information that matter to them...with discoveries happening apace in government, NGO and in the private sector, it doesn't seem that hiding or locking things up is the answer. Maybe tracking and correlation and AI linking access history and identity....will consider this more.

Joy clearly is passionate and creative, and procreative, a person who care deeply.

I wonder, do people who care deeply become cynics in self defense? Just in case things don't work out? Is depressivity correlated to romantic vision? Not saying that is the case with Joy, I don't know him, but I notice this in other people- that brilliant people who are moved, touched, see beauty and possibility, sometimes see its fragility in high relief as well.

More to come....

Data Dancing Through the Time Space Continuum

Hans Rosling’s data presentation made me cry. Who thought that data could do that? He has captured the data from 1960 to now on 50 different variables globally, and animated it in a progressive way to show the correlation between family size, life expectancy, income, GDP, and advances the data points on fast forward- to paint the portrait of a changing planet. The voiceover adds color- when significant policy decisions, wars, leadership changes have enabled progress and gap closing, and when they have hindered it- we watch with dismay as the life expectancy bubbles in Africa fall downward like tears, like falling dying children as the AIDS epidemic begins, while the life expectancies in all other parts of the world are falling. We are educated about sweeping generalizations- and shown the differences within Africa, within Asia, about distribution curves even within countries. And the need for us to be contextual about all the approaches we take with our solutions- context is king. And finally, with this beautiful data, which is public and tells such powerful stories in the hands of this master, we are challenged to unearth it and make it free. He gets a round of applause when he says- the data is there, in all the databases- but it’s hidden behind stupid passwords and fees- and presented in a boring charts, which are meaningless to the interpreter. Now, we take this public data, we put software over it that animates it, we iberate the UN’s information for analytics, and we are left with only one challenge- the fast aggregation and integration of all data from all these databases around the world- so that we can really mine it, picture it and understand it. The software for animating the data is at gapminder.com. And his dynamic racing intellect and kinetic energy may just change the world.

The $100 Laptop Initiative

Nicholas Negroponte is brilliant and delightful. In addition to many other projects and passions, he’s been connecting the unwired world, especially kids in Africa, with computers as far back as the 80s. And his vision is powerful and strong: a laptop for every child, an education initiative that gives power tools and access to children everywhere- digital literacies, access and creation. A completely powerful, storage, processing machine for $100 or less. One that can be hand cranked in areas where there is no power, where the screen can be read indoors or out, as a traditional foldover display screen or flipped to act as a tablet PC or console. Linux based, leveraging open source technologies (read no windows support required), embedded mesh wireless access. They seem to have though of everything. And it’s a cool green iPoddy-iconish thing.

And he’s doing it. In 2007, they aim to ship 5 million pieces- a little more than $100, but the price should come down. The manufacturer, Quanta, currently produces about a third of the world’s laptops, so this production claim has legitimacy.

Opening session shoots off

Dancing from a top of the funnel, futurist Erik Petersen frames the big question: will the world in 2025 be better- that is, with LESS disease, despair, poverty, injustice, conflict, or should we prepare for a world that is more dangerous? He outlined the major trends that are shaping earth to 2025, and married his broad sweep at what’s next with a plea that we attempt to repair the pervasively flawed economic and governance structures which result in devastating “short-termism”, making our “leaders” more like “managers”, and our “strategy” more like “tactics”.

Erik’s Top 7
Population:
o We will be 8BN strong in 2025, up from 6.5 BN now.
o The distribution of the population around the world will shift in ways that make the impact more significant than the absolute numbers.
o The distribution by age will foundationally shift.

Strategic Resources:
o Need to double our Food and Water production by 2025, in a way that preserves usable land and does not degrade it.
o At the current pace, with no alternative energy, China will be importing 10million barrels of oil per day- as much as the US, in 20 years.

Technology:
o Computation, Biotech and genomics, and nanotech force foundational shifts.
o Disparities must condense (today, a baby girl born in Japan has a 50% likelihood of seeing the year 2100, in Afghanistan, that baby girl would have a 1 in 4 chance of dying before she was 5).

Information:
o Death of distance.
o Knowledge proficiency.
o Critical trends in accessing, shaping and leveraging information.

Economics:
o Today, the world’s richest 225 individuals have the same amount of wealth as the world’s poorest 2.7 BILLION people! (this income stratification at the very top is not generally reflected in broader sigma analytics)
o Integrated economics will continue to strengthen.

Governance:
o Of the TOP 50 economies in the world, 15 are corporations.
o The 22nd largest economy in the world is WalMart.
Governance in an interconnected world requires innovation.
o Dynamic coalitions must emerge
o Atomization, dispersion, fragmentation do not happy governments make.


Robert Wright:

History is directional, and is net positive.
It tends to complexity and interconnectedness.
Zero sum, or win lose games are not the model in most of the world.
Non Zero Sum Games- that is, all ships rise and fall with the ocean- win win or win lose- is actually the model…in an increasingly interconnected world, the awareness of interconnectedness will drive people to act in new ways (“transatlantic business class morality”). And those new ways, also directional, must align with absolute morality, in the direction of the positive.

Anecdote on moral progression: 2,500 years ago, citizens of a particular city-state saw themselves as human, and citizens of other city states as sub human. The next moral evolution was to see other Greeks as also human, but not, say, Persians. Now, most people believe that any human regardless of religion, race, etc, is fully human (I might beg to differ that in certain cultures that applies to women yet)- this is absolute morality trending positive over time.

The current threats to our well being- growing lethality of hatred, and the “death spiral of negativity” which is action, overreaction, counter action, hatred, action….etc.require a major round of moral progress in the world, particularly in places where the grassroots cannot readily see the interconnectedness, and so CANNOT ACT intelligently in the pursuit of their own self interest, and frankly, neither can we as the “west”,

Wright suggests that there is a mandate here to take some kind of moral review of one’s own existence- why are we hated, in an effort to product empathy, in an effort to product change, in an effort to interrupt the cycle of hatred.

More coming....

Spring at TED2006

Crisp blue February morning in Monterey. Opening ceremonies, so to speak, begin at 2 Pacific, but early buzz pre-created in the upper deck of the Monterey Marriot- where mini sessions in the new-this-year TED University are going on in 16 breakout rooms. These are as diverse as the head of Yahoo! Europe enlightening on how to conduct a symphony, optimizing personal performance through genetic expression, which is controllable through nutritional choices in the immediate term and in the aggregate, to what I learned from being paralyzed.

In the halls, during what looks remarkably like passing period, I see Steve Jurvetson with his trademark look of vibrating curiosity, Arch Meredith energized and incredibly how do you say , Chez Lui, in this space... and out on the deck Gillian, met last night on the hop from LAX to Monterey...she's the executive director of Witness, Peter Gabriel's brainchild which uses video and film to address human rights challenges on a global scale: Witness . Everyone should help her achieve their mission! Only in transparency can change happen, and this is what Witness enables.

Open-ness everywhere, as the assumption is "excellence is the norm".

One session, on asking better questions, causes me to think yet again about the ladder of inference, and how quickly different people go up that ladder- that is to say- misinterpret and react based on their own filters. How can we ask better questions, and become self aware enought to know when we are going up the ladder of inference in an abrupt manner. This is a very important question in our organization, and assessing how quickly people go up the ladder and how to interrupt that cycle is pretty critical to our culture- there's not a lot of room for conflict due to miscommunication.

Another, which was sadly difficult to hear, was on the new literacies for children- aural, visual and digital, and how our emphasis on number and letter literacies is a legacy that will not serve our children well. Moreover, there is an assertion that there are 4 kinds of thinking- creative, critical and synthesizing (or constructive)- and that we are trained in the critical thinking skills, but not necessarily in the others. Will post links to this when they become obvious.

Another was on the future of advertising, and the utter and complete reinvention thereof in the coming years- how all the old rules are gone, and its wild wild west of relationship and engagement with the customer. My only questions are: does the customer care enough to engage? How can a brand marketer think, with the 1000s of micro purchase decisions a customer has, that they will truly engage on more than a few key decisions? An audience member brought up relevance versus relationship- it seems the answer is in a combination of the two.

There is an air of expectation here, as things are getting ready to really kick off.

Lessons for SpringCM, and we have not yet begun....
1) Are we asking the right questions, to get to true root causes in our market facing stuff?
2) How are we creating a 2 way dialogue with our customers and prospects? Greg- get that chat and IM pulled through the site?

Smooches.