The link points at a 3D printer called RepRap that can replicate itself. Yes, it’s a printer that can print out its own design.

“[RepRap] has been called the invention that will bring down global capitalism, start a second industrial revolution and save the environment…”
– The front page of The Guardian, November 25, 2006.

The technology has been around for a while, but what makes the device interesting is that it costs 500 dollars to build yourself.

In the future you will go to The Pirate Bay, download a 3D model of Louis Vuitton’s latest bag and print it right out to give to your girlfriend on Valentine’s Day. The chinese factories for pirate goods will go out of business. In short term, they will switch to supplying the market with 3D scans of high-demand goods from all around the world, thus catalyzing the big switch. Stuff will flow into sweat factories, not out.

If you think The Pirate Bay is in the center of a generational shift and cultural transformation, check back again once the 3D models start flooding in. People who will be upset next will be designers, craftsmen, architects, manufacturers and those who supply the market with competitive traditional distribution channels.

Even more interesting will be the creativity of individuals who now with abundant access to virtual models of original physical designs, will create mashups unleashing iterations of cultural artefacts and cultural advancement never seen before by mankind.

In fact, the good itself is not going to be interesting anymore. A new page will turn that depicts the emergence of new behavioral patterns around objects. The mobile phone turns into a device for controlling a web of objects. The objects that we care share a history with us that has been digitally recorded, broadcasted, stored and linked with our surroundings. We will index our environment like maniac librarians.

The bottom line is that our current lifestyle of using material goods is not sustainable. We have to go for it, despite the Luddites who reject the new technology because of it’s potential short term negative consequences. The trade-off is far too great for this opportunity to be missed.

The manufacturers in the world of 3D-printers will be in the same situation where record labels are with digital filesharing or where mainframe manufacturers were with the advent of personal computers. New business models will emerge from this friction, rebuilding new avenues that will propel us right out of the galaxy – or inside our own minds and bodies as we start experimenting with bio technology.

The Pirate Bay for bionics will appear.

I would be leeching and mashing up artificial life and cyborg body extensions. If that doesn’t anger someone, then I don’t know what could. At that very moment I would be ready to upload myself to the digital planetary consciousness just to escape the political nightmare.

Go and read Bruce Sterling’s Shaping Things for more.

I did a presentation about the Horizon Report findings at the International Technology in Education (ITK) conference in Hämeenlinna, Finland. NMC Director Larry Johnson was kind enough to participate virtually on stage with me. In the presentation I go through six main trends and give my own take on these:

• Within a year: Mobiles and Cloud Computing
  
• 2-3 years: Personal Web and Geo-Everything
  
• 4-5 years: Semantic-aware Appliations and Smart Objects
  

The slides and the video recording are available below. For english speaking readers some of the slides are in english.

Most conferences are organized and provided from the top down. Social technologies, peer-production and open innovation models provide new opportunities for people to organize events from the bottom up. Social media applications can support event planners and participants before, during and after the event. Many alternative approaches exist, but most of them still demand a lot of technical skills, vision and labor from the part of organizers. There are also a lot of interesting concepts for running more participative events physically and how things might connect to virtual environments, but the information is scattered around the web. In my presentation I will go through some of the most interesting concepts, ideas and tools for running better, digitally mediated events. I have applied some of these principles for a project called Bantora, that I’ve been working on lately. Early on in the development we paid attention to what happens before an event: how people find each other online and turn their passion and ideas into great events. Everything starts and ends as digital. In this presentation I will go through lessons learned about the role of social media at events and how to make the best out of it. Finally, I would like to present a vision of how better events could fundamentally change the way we interact and do our work.

Thanks to everyone for participating. Here are the slides and the recording is already available here (57min), recorded with Adobe Connect. Please provide feedback below.

In the presentation I also point at one of my projects called Bantora, that we opened last week for public beta. Bantora is about events++, making better events, time/space extended events, events that utilize social technologies and just get more of the good stuff out there. Keep in mind that we are just starting there, a lot of corners might be a bit rough, things are evolving in the next few months but we definitely would like to hear your feedback on how it could be improved.

This event (Spaces for Interaction) comes obviously at the right time regarding my personal interests. Maybe it’s about time for x-events to become a reality?

I would be interested in if someone knows about some other cool non-traditional face-to-face methods or some creative uses of social technologies at events that I have missed. Anything interesting coming to mind?

The original finnish presentation video (40 minutes) is available below, thanks to Saija Remes for pro editing:

The seminar itself also got some online media converage at IT-Viikko and Digitoday.

The first article in the series is about the paradigm shift in education and learning deals with the structure itself that is supposed to give us all we need to be successful in life at the current moment: the education system.

It’s all so good to talk about new media, 2.0, participation, collaboration, real-time web, mashing-up, agile development, remixing, or lifestreaming but what value do these discoveries have when as soon as we turn our heads home and to our kids we still force them to go through an education system that embraces none of such fantastic discoveries?

And while you are at it, you might as well continue and read Stephen Downes’s words on how to be successful (if you think the education you have is not getting you anywhere meaningful).

Photos linked to respective owners.

The only blue-haired finn at the conference.

Walking on rope while doing three pecha kucha speeches in a row (20 slides, 20 sec per slide, automatically advancing).

Some more talking with a 20 sec per slide limit.

Playing flower sticks in the beginning of round 2.

More stick skillz.

Some contact juggling in the beginning of round 3.

Bruce Sterling addressing the crowd like a pope.

“Mobile sinners!”

The speakers and organizers after the event, right before going to the bar. Thanks folks, I enjoyed every moment of it.

The popularity of the event for me points towards increased interest of people to know more about the mobile world. We are at a brink of transformation due to new market entrants (giants like Google and Apple are now Nokia’s new respectable competitors), convergence of the existing social web with the mobile (the web embracing functionality within the iPhone or new Nokia devices as an example), increased volumes, increased number of users and increased complexity in our society.

It’s all about emergence. An entirely new thing is emerging from this interconnected electronic mycelium.

I have a feeling that the question we pose today is wrong. It’s not about mobile anymore. For some people, mobile means the devices that we carry around as we move, usually hooked up to a cellular network. The truth is, the activities we go through online with computers and what we do with our “mobiles” cannot be seen as separate anymore. This convergence means our language needs to change or our culture will never understand its future.

As ordinary physical items enter the same network, it’s not going to be about virtual or physical activities anymore. Both will be different faces of the same coin. It’s not going to be about context or not. Context will be the primary component of everything. The primary device will no longer be a “mobile”, but more like something that interacts with the network in a highly contextual way. Ideas, people and physical objects will be part of the same network in a very literal sense.

“Mobile” providers and operators will face competition from many unpredictable directions. In addition to cellular networks, the devices will interact with a wide variety of other networks, starting from physically fixed WLANs to constantly changing MANETs (mobile ad-hoc networks), where every node in the network is moving arbitrarily. The internet of things seldom stays stationary. In a world where everything becomes densely connected, you cannot clearly define the market and opportunities within. Magic wands, cyborg technologies or matrix aside, what we are going to see is not the future of mobile but something entirely different.

The mobile is like the horse wagon. If Henry Ford had asked people what they wanted, they would have said “faster horses”. It’s the language and our experience of the past that limits our understanding of the future of “mobile”. We need to drop the word and come up with new metaphors to open our eyes. We need new telescopes, binoculars and cleaner eye glasses.

We need to go to the roots of what mobile (latin: mobilis) truly means. Let’s see what the dictionary says about this.

Mobile: Changeable in appearance, mood, or purpose

Adaptable, versatile and migratory. From the point of view of the devices we will see rapid change in appearance and purpose. The mobile devices of the future bear little or no resemblance with the mobile devices of the past. The functionality will be context dependent. From the point of view of our society, we will have tools that help us to adapt to changing conditions and increase our connectedness. We need abilities to migrate from one situation to another in the increasingly changing environment. Yesterdays concepts, tools and metaphors will not work as-is. We need new ways to sense what is changing and adapt accordingly. That’s called effectiveness.

Mobile: Undergoing a shift in status

The social groups we belong to are no longer physically fixed. Electronic tribes will cross cultural and physical boundaries in ways never seen before. The traditional social levels connected to status, merit, power, race and relationships embedded in the fabric of our society will undergo major reconfiguration. The bottom-up and decentralized way of getting things done will become easier as we go forward. In a very McLuhan way, the electronic medium will profoundly involve men with one another.

Time will define our communities: long-term, short-term or ad-hoc. Boundaries will also define our communities: physically connected, ideologically connected or virtually connected. It will be harder and harder to experience the boundaries in a traditional sense. The boundaries blur, therefore time and experience of being connected becomes primary.

We will live in multiple metaverses. Meta+universe implies there are layers to our universe hidden from the previous paradigms of experiencing. Instead of multiple lives – in the metaverse – we will live through multiple personas. In latin, persona means mask. Our masks will be undertaken and carried by avatars. In Sanskrit, avatara means a descent from higher spiritual realms, a god. We will have god-like abilities and our lives will be an interplay between different personas fabricated by ourselves or emerging from our interaction in these contextual virtual worlds. The mirrors of ourselves will reflect who we truly are. Digital environments are capable of extending our experience of being.

Mobile: moving or changing quickly from one state or condition to another

Frequent relocation, fluidity and flowing freely. Increasing complexity implies we are no longer machines, or cogs in a machine. Our organizations will become organic; our tools will support this organic nature. Organic enterprises are like organisms, capable of adapting to changing conditions. Contextuality in learning, knowledge work, collaboration and business strategy requires dynamic and modular behavior. Static cause-and-effect, predictability and tight control are an afterthought. Albert Einstein once said, “a person starts to live when he can live outside himself“. The same could be said about organizations. The unpredictability of complex systems means that there are non-linear changes in time and there will be no silver bullet.

As you may see, by examining the roots of mobility and reflecting the changes we face today, we can no longer go forward by just talking about mobile devices and other devices. There is no need to separate ourselves in two groups, one of them being mobile and one of them being the fixed web. We no longer need to separate our developer communities to mobile developers and the rest. Engineers, programmers, visionaries and designers from various fields are tackling with the same problem. We need new avenues unifying the creativity and passion of people doing basically the same thing: building a better technologically empowered future for mankind. We need a revolution – of language and mind.

We need to reframe the question. With every new technology, it’s not the technology that changes us, but the frame that changes along with it.

RTE community idea is to bring together private sector (companies & service providers), public sector (policy makers & related associations), researchers (Helsinki School of Economics has a competence center around Real-Time Economy issues) and the crowd of people, who struggle with digitalization in their daily working life.

Real-Time Economy points towards a world where transactions, interaction and processes happen simultaneously in real-time. The industrial era of linear cause-and-effect is behind us, organizations need to understand non-linearity, complexity and agility in increasingly changing conditions. The first step is perhaps wide adoption of electronic invoicing to save time and trees, but Real-Time Economy also includes the way collaboration is done in the future and how businesses work with their customers.

Real-time doesn’t mean things that happen literally in real-time, but depending of context things should happen without any unnecessary delay in an integrated, simultaneous and networked manner. We believe this kind of world for business and commerce is not yet very well understood and we want to bring together different players working on this arena.

Real-Time Economy Community will represent Finland in the World Summit Award (WSA) 2009 contest next year.

“We might already be beyond the age of speed, by moving into the age of real-time. The move towards real-time is one way out of the world of speed” - Ivan Illich (1996)