Augmented Reality in a contact lens

Seems that we are not that far away from having the technology to display augmented reality information built directly into contact lenses… wow.

• Superhuman vision may be on the horizon

• Kurzweil Was Right: Bionic Eyesight Is Within Reach

Data is all around – and analysis is the future

To my surprise, my recent post on Wolfram Alpha and data analysis has been very popular.  I made a couple of points that stand out, the first is a quote that I keep returning to:

Data analysis, visualization, and other techniques for seeing patterns in data are going to be an increasingly valuable skillset. Employers take notice.

… and the conclusion of the post where I said:

I see this viewpoint all around me at the moment

Here are some more examples that I’ve come across since the original post.  I understand that the subject is more likely to come up in these sources (!) but it seems clearer now than ever before.

• BBC: More or Less – a radio show that deals with numbers and statistics in the news.  About 10 mins from the end there is an interview with Google’s Chief Economist who says (from the M or L website for this episode) that “the growing availability and role of data give people who can analyse and understand it the edge.”

• Computer Weekly: Recognising value in data (PDF – direct link)

Review: Here Comes Everybody

After the relative disappointments of the last two books I’ve read (Grown Up Digital and Free) this one by Clay Shirky really does stand out.  I’ve known about this book for a while and even bought a copy as a present for somebody, so I decided it was time to take a read for myself.  I wasn’t disappointed.

The text has a real “warm” feeling to it, with the odd splash of humour.  You feel that Shirky has really thought about what he wants to say and has taken time to express his ideas.  He puts his ideas forward very clearly and there are many moments when you go “yes, that’s true” or “I hadn’t thought of it that way.”  His main point is that people will come together (for whatever purpose) if you remove the barriers to that happening – and that is what is occurring now with the use of technology and online social tools (email, blogs, wikis and more.)

One area where he excels is looking at the media, in particular newspapers and journalism .  His chapter “Everyone is a Media Outlet” sums up the main points incredibly well, especially in relation to the effect of amateurization on the profession of journalist.  What is a journalist these days – who qualifies? – now that anyone can publish their own content to the world, effectively for free.  Where others can spend countless thousands of words dealing with the plight of newspapers, Shirky can seemingly simply conclude:

If everyone can do something, it is no longer rare enough to pay for, even if it is vital.

And when you think about it, that is one of the core problems news organisations are facing, pure and simple.

This book easily joins the group of iconic “technology / business” books such as The Long Tail, The World is Flat, Wikinomics,  The Search and (for me) Outliers.  Read it today, sleep on it and feel more informed tomorrow.

The X Prizes and Peter Diamandis

The October issue of Wired UK has a great article on the X Prizes and the man behind them, Peter Diamandis.

As I was looking at Kevin Kelly‘s blog pages I found a link to the Long Now Foundation (a really interesting idea) and, in turn, a fascinating talk that Peter Diamandis did there last year.  Well worth checking out the article and the talk.

Wolfram Alpha and data analysis

A recent article in The Guardian looks at Wolfram Alpha, the answer engine (rather than search engine), now that a few months have passed since its launch.  It got some mixed reviews and my experiences whilst trying it ranged from “wow – it gives me the answer and all this other information too” to “why doesn’t the damn thing understand what I’m asking.”

However, there is a lot of promise here, especially as it is seen – according to the article – as a multi-decade project.  It is based on Mathematica, an application that looks hugely complex and needs further investigation.

I’m interested because I believe that determining and visualising patterns in data are going to be an important part of doing business in the future and a way of tackling important issues.  They are part of the Web Squared idea by John Battelle and Tim O’Reilly:

Data analysis, visualization, and other techniques for seeing patterns in data are going to be an increasingly valuable skillset. Employers take notice.

Nor is this phenomenon limited to the consumer web. IBM’s Smarter Planet initiative and the NASA-Cisco “planetary skin” project both show how deeply business will be transformed by the sensor web. Oil refineries, steel mills, factories, and supply chains are being instrumented with sensors and exactly the same kind of machine learning algorithms that we see in web applications.

I see this viewpoint all around me at the moment – now it’s time to do something about it…

• Mathematica

• Mathematica – Data Analysis and Mining

Review: Free

I was always concerned that the main point of the book – that you can make a successful business even though you do not charge for your product – would be too simple.  I was pretty much right.  The main point of the book, in fact, turns out to be “in a digital world, do not charge for your product, but find something else to charge for that is related to your product.”  That idea is less revolutionary – at some point you will need an income, which means that something you do will not be free.

The book is interesting – especially when getting to the original meaning of the phrase “information wants to be free” – and is worth your time reading or listening (I downloaded the unabridged audiobook, which is read by the author.)  You won’t feel that you have wasted your time, will appreciate the thought that has gone into the book -  but this is not going to rattle you to your very core.

Free links:

• Download the audiobook for free (direct link)

• Listen to the audiobook on Spotify

• Original Wired article:  Article: Free! Why $0.00 Is the Future of Business

• More recent Wired article:  Tech Is Too Cheap to Meter: It’s Time to Manage for Abundance, Not Scarcity

• Wired UK:  Free: An excerpt from Chris Anderson’s book

• Free: the first reviews are in (some debates over the ideas in the book)

How Ray Kurzweil is killing the printed newspaper

Okay, best to come clean at the start, Ray Kurzweil is not actually killing the printed newspaper, but his talk of exponential growth in the fields of computing power and storage (and more) have gotten me thinking more specifically about this.

The future of the printed newspaper is something I’ve dealt with a couple of times before (see here and here).  But recently I’ve greatly reduced the time I believe it will take before a news organisation will distribute its content on paper.  I used to think it would be about 20 years (when the printing presses finally pack up and it is not worth replacing them.)  Now I think it will be within the next 10 years. Why?  Read on:

- demand is dropping away:  August 2009 ABCs show The Guardian down 2.5% compared to last year, which is approx 7000 copies a day.  The Times dropped 17,000 a day, the Independent 30,000 a day and the Telegraph 39,000 a day.  Sunday papers: 12% year on year decline for The Observer and a scary 26% decline for the Independent on Sunday.  Any sales increase comes from DVD give-aways.  This is an industry where success is judged by not losing sales as quickly as your competitors.

- one step to reduce costs is to reduce the number of pages printed (the cost savings can be substantial), but how much can you do this before damaging the core product, therefore reducing demand further?

- increasing the cover price whilst delivering less will hit demand sooner or later when people realise that value for money is getting distinctly worse

- companies like News International and The Guardian have invested millions in new printing presses in the last few years in a bid to make a printed paper look modern – going smaller format, full colour, mainly in response to the Independent going tabloid.  This is spending money to stay still (or to slow the rate of decline) whilst they try to figure out what the next step is.  This is hugely distracting to the process of looking to the future but better than not having an industry

- the exponential rate of improvement in computing and the subsequent reduction in cost give people more options for where to get news and the devices used to consume it.  As a result, the devices will become far more powerful and will most likely change their form factor too – augmented reality glasses with ubiquitous internet access, anyone?

- probably most important is that advertisers are going to get fed up with the limited options for their adverts.  The best a newspaper can do is to send different ads for different editions so that they end up in different parts of the country (some have to be different because of differences in, say, bank holidays or shop opening hours.)  It’s limited and imprecise, hard to measure and not interactive in any way.  The improvements in technology will allow (and are allowing) greater targeting of audiences, better feedback and broader types of ads with greater interaction.  In general, what is not possible with today’s technology will be possible in a year or two’s time, so the impact will only get worse.  We are already seeing advertising revenue decline, leading to a remarkable change in financial performance in the last year – something that cannot be explained solely by the recession.

Kevin Kelly on Moore’s Law and exponential growth

The reason I found the Singularity University so interesting is because I’d recently read Was Moore’s Law Inevitable? by Kevin Kelly on his brilliant blog The Technium.  The blog is astounding and will make you think every time a new piece comes out.  Comes with the highest recommendation.

The browser is disappearing

Firefox starts to go transparent (next year).  Then it will disappear (2010 – 2015).

Operating systems go web-centric rather than browser-centric.

When?

Right now.

Further thinking: longer term, greater scale at the Singularity University

Logo by David Orban on Flickr

Just listened to a podcast about the Singularity University.  It’s fantastic that people are thinking in this way.  Look at the curriculum – amazing.  Here’s a taster, just one (Networks and Computing Systems) of ten areas covered:

Calling on the rich resources of leading-edge companies and academics in Silicon Valley, this track covers the explosive growth of computer power and networks, focusing on three key revolutionary areas: (1) Emerging and future computational and storage technologies, including 3D molecular computing, nanocomputing, DNA/RNA computing, plasmonics, spin storage, memristors, optical storage, photonics, quantum computing, pico- and femtotechnology, and autonomic computing, addressing important issues such as reversible computing, the limits of information representation, scalable computing systems, and future petascale and exascale supercomputers; (2) Future user interfaces, such as augmented reality, virtual reality. virtual worlds, blended reality, virtual agents, bots, lifelogging, breakthroughs in computer graphics, holographic and 3D displays, teleimmersion, telepresence, haptic interfaces, personalized learning, and extracting knowledge from massive volumes of data via data analysis, data mining, and information visualization; and (3) Intelligent networks, including nth-generation Internet, smart search engines, the semantic Web, smart grid, shared vs. dedicated Lightpath Internet, cyber-physical systems and sensor networks, security and privacy vs. transparency, mobile and location-based computing, cloud computing, Interplanetary Internet, ubiquitous wireless networks and ubiquitous computing, mesh networks, adaptive networks, embedded networks, and the global physics grid.

Lightpath Internet? Interplanetary Internet? Mind fuck central!