If you live in cooler climes (or in my case, near the sunny beaches of Canada), this time of year marks some fun rituals. Flu shots, chicken soup, and Buckley’s Cough Syrup are just as festive as the snow that blankets the city. While not fun for the flu sufferers, city public health officials see this time of year in a different light. Spikes in disease activity often come as a surprise, inundating emergency rooms and walk-in clinics with the relief-seeking masses. Being able to predict when those masses will turn up at your emergency ward has some distinct benefits. You can schedule the appropriate staff to ensure that people get the right attention promptly, and you can get a jump on pinpointing the causes of these outbreaks (food, water, the person beside you while you were trapped on the tarmac). So how do these medical oracles get their information? And what does Google have to do with it?
Kevin Kelly’s Lifestream is one of my favorite blogs. Earlier this week, Mr. Kelly wrote a post titled Evidence of a Global SuperOrganism, in which he seriously entertains the idea that the Internet (working as a distributed brain) with cloud-based software (roughly analogous to the mind) could develop into a self-aware, semi-autonomous superorganism.
Central to this development is an increased sense of autonomy from human interactions (such as self-repair, stabilizing feedback loops, and self-directed traffic management) and “smartness,” — something that already exists in an ever-increasing form in the computational clouds of Google and Amazon, which are constantly learning about how it is that we use language, and form an understanding about how collective human behavior can be used to anticipate the actions of an individual. Read More »
Welcome back to another edition of the Wikinomics Roundup: Week in Review, where I capture in brief, some of the thoughts, discoveries, and discussions that graced the blog throughout the past week.
This week in the roundup:
Jeff DeChambeau discussed privacy and digital surveillance
Dan Herman introduced us to ‘vote swapping’ and identified how this Web 2.0 technology now has the potential to influence elections
Don Tapscott highlighted some new research findings in order address a common misconception about video games and gamers
Denis Hancock reviewed some of the pitfalls of the traditional crowdsourcing model and introduced us to Poptent
As Michael Geist wrote last week, the Internet has become a system that never forgets anything, and there are more and more tools that allow people to mine information from the darkest corners of the Internet. That’s become a fact of life, but it’s to be expected: people are participating in a digital medium, with full understanding that data storage is cheap and archives are plentiful, so chances are good that the things they say will be on hand, somewhere, for the foreseeable life of the Internet.
So, are email and sms messages, like public discussions, simply part of a technology that is inherently tracable, or given the targeted nature of email and sms, are they granted a special class of privacy from the rest of the bits that float bout the ‘tubes?
I’m not sure how the average citizen in the UK would feel about their own tax dollars being used to breach their privacy, but it could be a concession that people are prepared to make for their “national security.” This paricular instance aside, it seems as though the reliability and security of connections is becoming less and less trustworthy, so the honus for protection of data is being placed on end users — maybe it’s time for us all to generate some PGP private keys!
Welcome back to another edition of the Wikinomics Roundup: Week in Review, where I capture in brief, some of the thoughts, discoveries, and discussions that graced the blog throughout the past week.
This week in the roundup:
Jeff DeChambeau revealed the new beta of the Wikinomics blog
Ian Da Silva uncovered the power of the social web for consumers
Patrick Harnett introduced us to Wesabe and money management on the Web
Andrea Bettello shined the light on a different type of TV experience
In case you missed it, you can catch the last roundup HERE.
In May Ian had an interesting post about the environmental impact of data centers – the power hungry workhorses of the internet. As he pointed out a typical server rack needs an equivalent amount of power to 300, 100-Watt light bulbs. With over 7000 data centers in America alone, the largest of which need nearly 200 megawatts of power, the carbon emissions will indeed soon be rivaling those of the airline industry.
Companies that operate data centers are now thinking of clever ideas to save money on running (and cooling) these football field sized facilities. Solutions include locating the centers in cold climates, near hydroelectric or thermal energy or in abandoned mines with access to cold water. Google, one of the largest operators of data centers, with an estimated 1 million servers, has recently filed a patent for one of the most novel ideas. The internet company wants to locate data centers on floating barges a few kilometers from shore. The idea is to use the power of waves to generate electricity and the water to cool servers.
While the industry’s carbon footprint is quickly growing it is encouraging to see such innovative thinking. It would be interesting if the same companies that revolutionized the online world did the same to power management.
If you’re anything like me, you tend to enjoy things that may be a little beyond your budget. And if you’re really like me, you tend to enjoy them far more often than you should. But I’m going to avoid any discussions of my own indulgence, but use them as a segue to mention Wesabe. It’s an open source community that tracks your spending habits and shares them with the group. If prediction markets are for harnessing the “Wisdom of Crowds”, this truly does try to capture the “Frugality of Crowds”.
Welcome back to The netGuide, where I talk briefly about some of my findings from across the web and how they help solve old problems in new and creative ways. This week…
We’re going to investigate the idea of search and information management with searchme.com, a great search engine that has quietly made its way onto the scene, but which has unique advantages to search.
What’s special about this search engine is that when you query a topic, the websites returned to you are displayed visually (similar to Apple’s cover flow) rather than in list form. A picture is worth 1000 words so they say, so it makes sense that with 1 quick look at the preview pane of a website, you can better filter your results, and roughly gauge the quality of the website (by it’s professionalism and aesthetic, available content, and general message). It’s clear that you receive less information about all items, relative to each other, in one glance than with traditional search engines like Google, however what you do see, you are given more information about - this represents the tradeoff between these two methods of search. The obvious benefit is the handling of media search, such as video and images, which you can view in pane, as opposed to Google’s one page of smaller pictures (which does not handle video search well). The second benefit is not quite as obvious and speaks in large part, to how we interact with the Internet at large…
Photosynth (ted talk, demo page, our coverage), a project acquired by Microsoft, made for one of the coolest tech demos to grace the internet in a very long time. The experience that Photosynth provided by inferring 3d structures from collections of 2d pictures made for a very rich — and jaw dropping — user experience. But not rich enough, it seems: Microsoft has a competing project another such tool from some people on that team, developped jointly with the University of Washington. Introducing Photo Tourism (project homepage, /. coverage). Check out the video:
Like Photosynth, Photo Tourism assembles its 3d models from photos on flickr. Photo Tourism, however, allows you to not only add your own photos to a 3d set, but “walk” between the locations where your pictures were taken, virtually. Photo Tourism also allows a user to rotate their point of view around a landmark or object, and can even determine if photos of that landmark/object were taken during the day or at night, grouping them accordingly. This results in a very high “feels like you’re there” experience, but what’s the next step? Read More »
One rainy day earlier this summer, nGenera’s Gov 2.0 Program Director, Dan Herman, locked three summer interns in a room (Ben and Jude, and I) and asked us to think about what life - and government - would be like ten years from now. One of the results was the following short story about a day in the life of a man named Donald, in the year 2018. Hope you enjoy.
7:00 AM. The alarm rang, and Donald pressed the confirm button to silence it. His bedroom monitor switched on and began playing his morning video feeds.
Lost in the quest for more data is the ever increasing cost of building and cooling server farms.A great article in Business Week proposes the idea of building a massive server farm in a small fishing village 35 minutes south of Reykjavik, Iceland.The location is ideal, because it has a lot of vacant land, it is naturally cold (Iceland), and it has access to cheap geothermal energy.The graphic below shows how servers are cooled, and how much the energy cost of cooling them has increased in recent years.
The demand for more server capacity will continue to grow exponentially as both the number of web users grow, and the data becomes more complex.Although energy costs are still relatively small, they have the potential to spiral out of control.Am I the only one who sees the Great Canadian North as the possible future server farm capital of the world?There is endless, cheap, land, plenty of wind for power, and it’s naturally very cold.However, Siberia may give it a great run for its money.
Do people see this as a problem in the future, or will more efficient alternatives replace the concept of the server farm for our ever-increasing data needs?
The BBC has announced an upcoming tv special: Britain From Above. The special makes use of aerial photography and computer visualization to show the flow of traffic, the use of telephone networks and even the flight-plans of planes in British airspace. It’s very cool and somewhat frightening, that’s a lot of public data, I’d like to see where it’s all from, and to see if spill over into the public domain. Data enthusiasts might not have the resources and horsepower of the BBC, but I’m sure that some pretty cool mashups could be done with other data sets. For instance, how much is travel/cab usage different on days with bad weather? What percentage of British drivers speed? And just how many people really do phone their parents after an episode of Dr. Who?
Look for the special on bittorrent trackers sometime after August 10th.
For a few months now, my friends and I have been using this software called Dropbox. It’s really cool, check out the video:
Dropbox is a service that synchronizes files between computers and the web. Once you add a computer to your Dropbox account, the Dropbox software creates a folder in your My Documents folder, the contents of which are synchronized across all computers linked to your account, as well as the Dropbox server. Whenever files are changed, only the difference in the file is updated across the network, minimizing bandwidth requirements. You can also have shared folders with other users, the files update as they normally do across all computers in the network. Finally, all old versions of the files are stored, and are accessible via a web interface at the Dropbox website. While my friends use this mostly for swapping photos and legally acquired mp3s, the possibilities for business are many.
Given the versioning, synchronizing and web accessibility, integrating Dropbox with a company wiki would fantastic. No more uploading and downloading the latest version of files, you’d just open the file in your Dropbox share and save it when you’re done. Then, if you had to grab it from another computer, you log in through the web interface and download the latest version. It basically makes every file a wiki.
This system is similar to the new Mobile Me platform that Apple has announced, and is a solid step towards the world of cloud computing and storage. The concept of Wikinomics brings about lots of potential, but software like Dropbox really empowers users to collaborate en-masse easily and quickly. I highly recommend it.
Also, I’ve got 10 invites to give away, post a comment with your e-mail if you’d like one.
Last week at nGenera’s Enterprise 2.0 conference, I was in the audience for Hagai and Jeff’s presentation of their research on prediction markets (PM) and their role in the enterprise. While PM present a significant opportunity for companies seeking to harness the collective intelligence of their workforce, they have yet to be deployed on a widepread enterprise basis. A few companies that have delved into the PM space with varying degrees of success include Best Buy, Electronic Arts and Arcelor Mittal.
PM harness the wisdom of crowds approach to knowledge creation and management, and I want to share a chart that Hagai and Jeff prepared to help compare and contrast variations on this approach to “none of us is as smart as all of us.” Read More »
Last Thursday, Google introduced its GOOG-411 service in Canada, the first non-U.S. country to have the free phone directory service. If you’re like me and detest being charged high fees for services that could be free, (such as ATM transactions and in this case, directory assistance) than GOOG-411 may be just the service for you.
Enabled by Google’s tremendous index of online data, mobile and landline users can now call 1-800-GOOG-411 and by following the queued prompts, receive the phone number, address and even a map of a desired business anywhere in the United States and Canada.
One of the first questions that came to mind when reading about this service when it was launched in 2007 was “What’s in it for Google?“ Despite the fact that the retrieval of such data is a natural extension using Google’s readily-available data and capabilities, it was not immediately clear why Google would provide such a service for free when local phone providers charge anywhere from $0.75 to $1.50 for similar, if not lesser services. Read More »
As my colleague Lawrence notes in his latest blog, the potential abuse of personal data shared by users in social networking spaces is of increasing concern. But key to the discussion is the potential value that such shared data might create for the owners of that data.
Amongst the discussions at our Government 2.0 meeting at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government was a debate over the merits of data sharing, and whether the collection of citizen data in the name of public safety and service delivery outweighed the risks of abuse and the potential for infringement of personal freedoms and privacy.
To kickstart the discussion, one of our colleagues shared this video from the American Civil Liberties Union that highlights a perhaps perverse or perhaps not-so-perverse future:
A very interesting report was just released by the Princeton Centre for Information Technology Policy advocating for the increased release of government data for public consumption, and for letting independent providers, rather than government websites, dissect and present that data. We’re very big fans of both, and have spent considerable time researching the potential offered by the democratization of government-held data. In fact, as part of our Government 2.0 project we have a couple of projects in progress on this topic. Included amongst them is a short report by nGenera collaborator David Stephenson on the potential of data visualisation platforms such as Swivel, ManyEyes and Google Motion Chart. You can view one of David’s recent presentations on the topic here.
As for the Princeton report, Government and the Invisible Hand, it provides added support to the belief that the data that resides within agency firewalls could lead to significant public value if made freely (and easily) available to the rest of us.
The report notes:
Note: Actually I just realized that the company which produces phidgets is at phidgets.com. Apparently they’re located in Calgary, Alberta, so much closer to home for Canadian readers of the blog.
All of it works via USB connections and they offer things like servo controllers:
MySociety.org has created some superb interactive maps that use simple sliders to interactively display how commute time ranges intersect with home prices - all compiled from public data. The map itself was created by Stamen Design (also producers of the Digg Labs visuals)
Wikinomics and Risk Management The economic "risk bubble" has broken, and it's going to take significant changes to restore long-term confidence in the financial services market. In Risk Management 2.0: Overcoming the Current Financial Crisis and Restoring Stability and Prosperity with a New Perspective on Risk, Bob Tapscott and I outline how this industry needs to be redesigned to [...]
