A recent article in Computer Weekly questions the timing for smart electricity meters, saying now is not the time:

Had the decision to refresh the UK’s meters been taken six years ago, when the government’s finances were stronger, there would be little argument. But the size of the national debt, the untested carbon saving, and the likely redundancies, suggest the case for smart meters now is unproven.

By 2020, all British households will be fitted with high-tech “smart meters”, which will make Great Britain the first country on earth to undertake such an overhaul for both gas and electricity usage monitoring. With smart meters, readings can be taken remotely and provide homeowners with real-time data on their energy usage and help save money on bills.

A couple of very interesting presentations looking at where we are today and where things are heading…

• Economy + Internet Trends – Presentation from Web 2.0 Summit

and…

A couple of months ago IBM started running an ad campaign under the banner of Smarter Planet.   When people asked me why I was getting into the areas of data and analysis, I showed them the ads.  Something really just clicked with me.

Smarter Planet is about looking at issues and problems more intelligently and using technology (especially data analysis) to make improvements.  It’s a really broad campaign, covering a wide range of areas.  There’s also a lot of web resources – a blog, twitter feeds, videos, podcasts.  Big Blue are betting big on this and they want people to know it.  Check out this interview with IBM’s CEO.

And it’s not just IBM – Wired UK are unlocking the Digital City this month too…

Smarter resources:

Introduction website for Smarter Planet

Building a Smarter Planet – the blog

Smarter Planet on Tumblr

Smarter Cities on Tumblr

Follow on Twitter:  @ibmbizanalytics, @smarterplanet

My Smarter Planet links – the Spare Cycles Delicious page for Smarter Planet / Smarter Cities links.

IBMAdvertising’s Channel on YouTube – get the message direct from the source

A video of an excellent lecture given by Vint Cerf at the Singularity University.  This covers a number of different points:

• a little history of the internet

• the current problem of running out of IP addresses and the importance of moving to IPv6

• the growth of Asia to become the dominant user base on the internet (and the coming of non-Latin character support in domain names – eg use of cyrillic and other alphabets)

• the growing numbers of mobile devices and sensors connected to the internet, and some of the technical issues this raises

• copyright

• semantic web

Perhaps the most astounding thing that comes out of this in in the last ten minutes or so – the interplanetary internet.  Now, when I first read the phrase a while back I thought it was some flight of fancy, some far off prediction.  But it’s happening now – amazing…

An excellent discussion of Google Wave on a recent episode of This Week in Google – as much as people can figure it out at this point in its development…

• This Week in Google – Episode 10

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

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)

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 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.