“… we’re in the midst of a massive global reinvention. Not just a shift from analog to digital, but a shift from centralized control to distributed systems. From isolated single user experiences to a global social fabric. These mobile devices are the of Gutenberg presses of our generation. This is not a bubble, this is a revolution.” – Blog post
Category Archives: Science & Technology
“The Viral Me”
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In The Viral Me (GQ), Devin Friedman heads to Silicon Valley for a closer look at social networking. Don’t let the length of this piece scare you off, it’s worth the read. A few of my favorite ideas:
“Your smartphone is now, or will be, your basic interface with the world.”
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“I think old people like me (I’m 38) often do this stuff (social media) to feel like the world hasn’t yet left them behind, but we don’t have any natural hunger for it. It’s kind of like androids having sex: We know we’re supposed to do it, but we’re not really sure why. Meanwhile, and infuriatingly, we know that humans just like to bone.”
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“(Silicon Valley) might be the last place in America where people are this optimistic. The last place in America where people aren’t longing for a vague past when we were the shit.”
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“Flood the social layer with information you want out there about yourself.”“If you’re confused by the term social layer, think of the word layer as meaning “lens.” The social layer is one lens you can look through to see the content of the Internet. Who you’re connected to, what they’re connected to, what they like and don’t like.”
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“More and more people are going to have careers where they move from one thing to another fairly publicly. And what people are really investing in is your track record. Your brand. What you do and what you say and what you think are just as important as your skills.”
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“An open society isn’t one where people have access to the real you. It is simply providing access to the identity you very carefully construct for human consumption.”
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“I believe that more people are going to work for themselves, and more people are going to do what they’re passionate about. … What we’re talking about is monetizing passion. Monetizing authority.”
I can’t wait for people my age to get the fuck out of the way. Die, retire, whatever. Admit that you don’t get it and probably won’t get and make room for the bright young men and women who live the ideas expressed in this article.
When the technology disappears
“One of the things I love about the iPad, for instance, is when you’re using the iPad, the iPad disappears, it goes away. You’re reading a book. You’re viewing a website, you’re touching a web site. That’s amazing and that’s what SMS is for me. The technology goes away and with Twitter the technology goes away. It’s so easy to follow anything you’re interested in. It’s so easy to tweet from wherever you are.”
— Twitter founder Jack Dorsey on Charlie Rose
True Superpowers
“Then I turn on one of my favorite machines. It’s about the size of a book. It has a glowing window inside it. A single page. But I only need one page because its contents change at my command. Sometimes there are words, sometimes photographs, sometimes both. The photographs can move and talk. The stuff in the book can be written by anyone in the world, even as I’m reading it. There’s more in that book than I could ever read. It provides me with unbelievable advantages. Anything I don’t know, I can find out in a few seconds. I can get instructions on how to do pretty much anything that has ever been done. I can summon complete histories of almost any person or culture you could name, expert opinions on anything at all, unlimited advice, unlimited entertainment, unlimited information. I can buy pretty much anything from where I’m sitting, and have it brought to my door. I can even write anything I want and publish it myself. I don’t need permission or credentials. The whole world could read it.”
— David Cain shares A Day in the Future
Carl Sagan: The Frontier Is Everywhere
I like the notion of the next, more evolved version of the human species. And I hope –and expect– a good dose of machine intelligence will be part of Man 2.0.
Saturday afternoon thoughts on the iPad
Today I’ve been reading a book with the Kindle app on my iPad. When I come across a word or a name I’m unfamiliar with, I double-click and jump over to the dictionary app or Safari/Wikipedia. Or I’d hear the ping of a new email or text message (which I usually check, but not always)
If a big story breaks (like the shooting in Arizona) I can watch news updates for any number of sources.
I’ve started taking this connectedness for granted. Yeah, we’ve been doing this for a while on our laptops, but something about getting all of this from a little slab of aluminum and glass propped on my chest amazes me.
Even the book I was reading when all of this occurred to me. I came across it in a blog post… downloaded from Amazon… and started reading on the same device where I first learned of the book. All within 5 minutes. Damn!
A bunch of Mac Heads meet most Saturday mornings at the local coffee shop. Bigger than usual group this morning and as I looked around, we all had iPads. As far as I could tell, nobody brought their laptops.
Someday soon I’ll stop noticing the wonderful things the iPad (and similar devices) brings to me. But maybe there will something new and even more amazing.
20 Dying Technologies
George points us to a list of technologies that are in various stages of dying. If you’re skeptical, you can get a little of the reasoning in this slideshow at Businessweek. Or is it Bloomberg? Whatever.
- Combustion engines
- Consumer video cameras—MiniDV, Flip cameras, camcorders
- Credit cards
- Desktop (tower) PCs
- DVDs and Blu-ray
- Digital music players
- E-readers
- Fax machines
- Game consoles
- Pagers
- Dash-mounted GPS systems
- Keys
- Landline telephones
- 3D television with glasses
- Metronomes and tuners
- PDAs
- Point-and-shoot digital cameras
- Power cords
- Remote controls
- USB memory sticks
I’ve already said goodbye to some of these and can easily live without most of the rest.
Business Communication in the 21st Century
Spoke with Business Communication class (20 students?) last night. I was channeling Jack Black (School of Rock) with a splash of Robin Williams (the English/Vietnamese class in Good Morning Vietnam). Which is to say I knew I’d never be invited back. I almost always learn more from these little talks than the people I’m speaking to. And I’m usually surprised.
- only a couple of smartphones in the class, although everyone had a mobile
- very little engagement with social media. Maybe half the class had Facebook account; a few had heard of Twitter but weren’t sure what it was; only experience with YouTube was watching a video forwarded by email; no bloggers
- Only one hand went up when I asked who had read a book in the past year. This set me off on a short rant about reading and vocabulary and the obvious –to me– relationship to communication (business or otherwise)
I’m pretty sure this was their first encounter with the idea that social media might be an important part of business communication. When the subject of the iPad came up, the first question was “Can I run Word on the iPad?” followed by “How do we print?”
I was reminded how ingrained MS Word has become in our business culture. Most folks don’t know there are other word processors.
I responded to the print question with, “What do you want to print?”
“Uh, a report for this class?”
“Why not save it as a PDF and email it to the instructor?”
It was clear from the look on the instructor’s face this might not be an option.I suspect college business communication courses still involve a lot of paper. Maybe even mail merge (shudder).
My final transgression was telling them to watch Office Space, any season of The Office, and to read Scott Adam’s The Dilbert Principal. And forget everything else.
End of the desk-top era
I’ve had a computer on my desk at home since 1984. A lot of them. Zenith, Gateway, IBM, Dell and, most recently, a Mac Mini. No longer. I’m selling the Mini.
Oh, there are still lots of computers around the house. The MacBook Pro long ago became my main box (slab?). And there’s the iPad and the iPhone. But it felt like the end of an era.
This weekend I’ll replace my printer and scanner with a wireless all-in-one from HP and as I started making room, I was struck by how many usb hubs and power-strips were being relegated to a box in the closet.
Yesterday I had a chat with one of our IT guys about where things are headed from a business perspective. Are we getting closer to the day when a company tells a new employee they can use their own computer (any flavor they choose) and hook into the company content via the cloud.
I took a little further and suggested the device of chose would be some sort of tablet, not a laptop. Whatever shakes out, things are going to be much different for the users and the IT folks who support them.
The “human cloud” and the future of work
I’ve been working almost 40 years (more if you count high school and college jobs) and a lot has changed in how I work; where I work; and –obviously– the work itself. Smarter folk than I are thinking about this, too:
“In the same way that high-speed Internet access disrupted the corporate IT market, creating a “cloud” of web-enabled infrastructure, the human cloud is shorthand for how the web has disrupted the way we work. Companies rely on dispersed teams to get the best talent available regardless of location (or price) and many are using crowdsourcing and other innovative means to achieve their goals.
Meanwhile, many people who work in this new cloud have lives that look nothing like they would have even10 years ago: they may have contracts with a variety of clients, outsource themselves and their skills through a third-party service like Elance or ODesk or collaborate with coworkers in opposing time zones. The companies they work for, and with, may not even know what they look like, or where they live. This is the reality of the human cloud and it is changing us (and the companies we work for) in ways we may not fully realize yet.”
Given the “webby” nature of my work, I have a good bit of contact with the “human cloud” and find myself wondering how I would function there.