I was wondering today what it would be like for motorsports if you took the drives out of racecars. And made them remotely piloted or autonomous. We are on the cusp of this idea being technically possible. I bet those cars could go around the track even quicker if they didn’t have to haul around -and try to keep alive- a human driver while hurtling around a track. They could go really fast.

Engineering challenges aside from making a driverless or fully autonomous racecar, would it still be fun to watch? Can you get emotionally invested in a contest of robots?

If at the next airshow they had predator drone racing, would you go see?

Of course without the risk to human pilots, you could take it a step further. Those racecars could really battle each other. Or my personal vote, machine gun-mounted robot biplane dogfights. Now that would be a sport.

Partly related: Darpa Grand Challenge

Introducing Lift@Home Toronto and DemoCamp 2019 [ticket link]

LIFT Conference is an international tech conference based out of Geneva, with events in Switzerland, France and Korea. For the first time this year, Toronto has been invited to participate as part of the Lift@Home. Lift is not your usual tech conference in that it tends to mash up web tech with arts with humanism and futurism. Cool stuff

To give this event a special Toronto flavor we’ve teamed up with the Toronto DemoCamp community. But, there’s a catch! We want to see demos only of things you can’t build today. We want to see demos from the near-medium future of 2019. Predict the future one decade out. This is DemoCamp 2019.

Our presenters have a fairly open ended but challenging design brief. We’ve tasked them with imagining a future state of the world, to make a bet on what might happen to the earth, technology, society in the next decade, and then present to you what will be the killer demo in the year 2019. So unlike normal demos, we don’t want to see working code. We want to see stuff that would be impossible or hopelessly impractical today, but could be the killer app in just a decade more.

Each presenter will have a hard limit 12 minutes to present their visionary design, and you the audience will have several minutes to question, to critique and discuss. (What’s your revenue model!? etc.)

There will be a couple special guest presenters as well as 3-4 open slots. There will also be good prizes for the best demo in the open category.

If you, and/or your handpicked team of future-visionary design all-stars would like to sign up to be a presenter contact me for watch for further instructions (application form coming soon).

DATE: November 17th, 2009
TIME: 6:30pm
VENUE: Drake Hotel… or TBA
LINK: GET YOUR TICKET HERE to LIFT@Home Toronto

^{Lift@Home Toronto is being organized by: Francesca Birks, Mark Kuznicki, Michele Perras, Milena Vujanovic and Thomas Purves}

What might the Future hold? Inspiration for our presenters

UPDATE: Sign up here if you would like to present!

Resources
19×20x21.org 19 cities with 20 million people in the 21 century
gap minder Great for extrapolating demographic and economic trends, will the U.S. and English still dominate the web in 2019?
The paleofuture blog (guess what in 2019, we probably still won’t have jetpacks)
Climate Change forecasts (google)
Demographics Trends (google)
Globalization Trends (google)

Enabling factors
Ubiquitous connectivity – wireless broadband may be the dominant form of connectivity by 2019
Falling costs of telecom – The long-run cost of bits trends to zero
Moore’s law, It’s hard to undersestimate the exponential nature of moore’s law. every 18 months silicon gets by a factor of 2 (choose any combination of) cheaper, faster, half the size, better battery life
A globalized interenet – e.g. there are currently 7 new undersea cable projects heading for Africa. People around the world now get a full featured netbook for a few hundred dollars, a mobile phone for much less. They are only getting cheaper
Biotech, civil, chemical, materials, environmental & genetic engineering – What progress will be made, what will advances in these fields enable?

Disabling factors?
Environmental decay
The cost of energy
The cost of green energy
Global conflict
Pandemics
Death of Journalism
Economic stagnation
Religion, fundamentalism and anti-science superstition

Context – What is possible in a decade?
How far we’ve come, Killer Products/demos of 1999:
- Napster launches
- The first candy-colored apple iBook is introduced (”the first laptop for ordinary people” says Apple)
- Blogger, livejournal launched (the seeds of web 2.0)
- Online banking starts to go mainstream
- MSN Messenger launches
- Internet explorer 5
- IEEE proposes new wireless standard called 802.11b aka “wifi”
- Intel Pentium III reaches 10 million transistors in a desktop CPU (fyi: in 2009 the intel announces chips with 3 billion transistors)
- GM cancels the EV1 setting back electric car development for a decade
- George Bush announces he will run for nomination for the Republican Party

About 16,000 words have succumbed to pressures of the Internet age and lost their hyphens in a new edition of the Shorter Oxford English Dictionary.

No one has time for the poor hyphen anymore. It seems to be going the way of the semi-colon semicolon into the club of beleaguered punctuations. OTOH perhaps it’s high time some of these over-prevaricating compound word-sandwiches got off the fence and decided for once and for all if they were to be one word or two. But boy, 16,000 is a lot to drive off a cliff all at once. The poor little bastards probably never even saw it coming.

It occurs to me that Head-Smashed-in Buffalo Jump is probably Canada’s most hyphenated place. Though it is true they no longer drive great herds off the cliffs anymore. Another dead media. The buffalo are all gone now.

Link: Thousands of hyphens perish as English marches on

The Jewish mother is the secret weapon of the Isreal tech success. It’s a state of mind. All of your life you aspire to prove to your mother that you are not an idiot. (This is a lost cause). But this is a matter of culture that create success. In particular jewish culture it is panic and guilt. And if one morning you wake up and you don’t feel guilt then you panic. This is what Yossi Vardi, the great Israeli entrepreneur and generally hilarious guy is telling us, somewhere amidst the first 37 minutes or so of his answer to David Crow’s question, the first introductory question of the night I might add of “how would Toronto recreate Israel’s vibrant startup scene”.

It’s like the piano and the pianist. You need infrastructure the finance, the support, the institutions but you need the pianist drive and aspirations and community. You need attitude towards failure that means failure is not shameful. The biggest barrier to innovation is the fear to look stupid.

You have to have an ecosystem. It’s not just one component, it’s the education, the government, the media, the community.

Why do you invest in so many companies? The nominal answer is that I am greedy and want to make money The true answer is that I love to work with smart and young people. Newton said if I have achieved greatness it is because I stood on the shoulders of giants. In my case I stand on the shoulders of children.

I don’t read business plans, I consider it a personal offense to give me one. Business plans are a sub-genre of science fiction. The common thing with business plans and sausages, is that the only people who are eating them don’t know how they are made.

I don’t like demos because you have to fake that you like it. Either they think that you don’t get it or they think that you are just being considerate. and at my age you can only fake an orgasm so many times a day.

So I look first for talent. You have to go to the talent. When I see a talented kid, I feel like I am collecting rare butterflies. To find the talented kid in the class, you don’t ask the teacher, you don’t ask the parents you ask the other kids in the class. So I ask my investees to help me find talent. Then I look for character (no jerks).

I don’t do diligence, I like to fund the proof on concept. If after half a year the kid is still doing what he said he would do six months ago then he’s doing it wrong. Talented, nimble, nice character is what you look for in people

As last word, David asks Yosi Vardi one last piece of advice for entrepreneurs. Says Yossi, quoting Paul Getty, an oil man: there are three rules for success
1. rise early,
2. work hard,
3. strike oil.

—————
A word from our sponsor. Rogers Venture Group formed in January, already they have funded a few mobile startups. Ready to start all the way a seed stage, as well as provide connections, resources and access of Rogers. Always looking for powerful ideas and amazing talent. Founded among others, Thoora presenters and techcrunch finalists. [Rogers Ventures is pretty cool, you may want to get in touch]

Demos:

Agilebuddy “Simplyfying Scrum Online”
Part of brightspark companies. brings soc media to dev teams. Apparently 75% of companies still using outdated techonologies (that means excel) for managing projects. The problem with this demo is that it is not a demo. We are supposed to be compassionate to the demoers but there used to be rule about powerpoint. Some screenshots now, it’s pretty much facebook for your project with a wall and comments per item etc.

Assetize
First of three startups in Toronto to emerge from extreme ventures incubation program. Assetize lets social media users monetize their accounts. The idea is to connect brands with micro bloggers on for example twitter. They “know” what users are talking about and connect them to advertisers. Slick interface for buying adds or setting up. Waiting for the wicked problem of economics in social media. No one micro-blogger has enough traffic to make any money at this, let alone spam their friends for pennies. the examples are say semi-pro tweeters like NBA news or women’s fashion twitter account. This isn’t for you personal twitter. Yossi’s question, what is the reaction of the users. Answer oh they love it. honest.

iStopOver
another brightspark venture. It’s like post-money night at dc. istopover is ebay for home owners. This is another powerpoint demo arg. Does someone need to borrow my rocket stick so they can do a proper demo? They also provide a secure escrow service for the rental so it’s lower risk for the renters. It’s hip to be frugal and the world is more social now so these trends apparently fit in. By god man where is the demo? Question about safety: a lot safer than craigslist because you can get to know each other on facebook first.

Locationary
Trying to solve the web problem of local information. The place database created by you. Google search fails frequently at common local searches this is true. So he wants to create augmented reality and so forth. Marketers and internet companies pay 20billion/yr for local databases. Data is free to use, free to add and crowdsourced model. so all this is fine but how does it get populated. It’s a gold rush model, first one to populate gets a piece of the revenue stream.

Superheroes Alliance
Our demoer today was born in 1986. Facebook made him verify his date of birth to login. It’s a social RPG, in facebook where you can create little superheroes in an image based game. And you can fight with/against friends and build up alliances (which helps with vitality). You can level up, you can hire sidekicks, you can buy vehicles. He just hired a ninja for 150k. Mostly played by males mostly 30 and up. Ok I think I would play this as a casual game. But not for 12hrs a day. Monetized by selling a virtual currency called science points and special items. Cash-flow positive, some users have spent triple digits. Next up is a celebrity game for women, where you can have showdowns with your girlfriends. Says Yossi “real world is the escape for people who cannot play online games”

Thoora
Gets a big cheer for “so we’re not going to show a powerpoint and just go straight into the demo”. These kids are good. Thoora aggregates the blogosphere, the twittersphere and news stories to aggregate everything that everyone is talking about right now. This is pretty cool. Indexing 80M blogs and 4.5k news sources. Has ways of viewing news, by blogger view and by discussion. They also filterout say 80 different news stories that are actually just the same AP story. So this is technocrati mixed with google news, mixed with twitter trending topics all in one big “will it blend” moment. The money quote: “Aggregating is not that hard, all you gotta do is: sit down, think, and do a lot of crazy science”.

That, my friends, is how you strike oil.

My alma mater, the Rotman School at UofT has a great track record of bringing in some great speakers to Toronto and as well there’s a lot of excellent research that comes out of the school itself. I would say unfortunately though you may not hear about it if you are not on the alumni mailing list. The good news is they now have a Twitter stream (you should follow it) and here are a sampling of some of the public events I’d like to check (but there’s even more):

Sept 22: “Design and the Emotion Commotion – A Counter-Intuitive Emotional Design Approach and its Application to Things to Come” August de los Reyes, Principal Design Director, Microsoft Surface

Sept 30: “The G20 and the Future of the Dollar” Professors Wendy Dobson and Paul Masson (I’m fascinated by macroeconomic trends, especially when there isn’t a test afterwards)

Sept 30: “Constant Dissatisfaction: Google’s Approach to Understanding New Media” onathan Lister, Managing Director and Head, Google Canada

Oct 30: Rotman Leadership Conference Barbara Stymiest, COO, RBC Financial Group; Leigh Gallagher, Senior Editor, Fortune Magazine; Robert Deluce, CEO, Porter Airlines; George Butterfield, Co-President, Butterfield & Robinson; Jonathan Greenblatt, Co-Founder, Ethos Brands; Henry Gonzalez, VP, Morgan Stanley; Robert McEwen, Chair and CEO, US Gold; Andrew Winston, Founder, Winston Eco-Strategies; Michael Lee Chin, Chair, Portland Holdings; Don Morrison, COO, Research in Motion; Beth Comstock, CMO, GE

LINK and to sign up: Rotman events page

This morning I had the pleasure to be the guest pundit at the breakfast meeting of the Toronto CIO organization. The question of the day was to embrace social media tools within the IT structure of traditional large enterprise and how to attract and retain talent amongst the younger and net-savvy generation. In their words:

“‘“Why We Won’t Work for You:’ Many bright, young minds elude large corporate employers. We will seek to gain an understanding from these individuals why the traditional corporate workplace, policies and social network lacks appeal. Discussions will focus on managing policies surrounding social networking in the workplace and how to effectively engage the commitment and maximize the contributions of this valuable corporate resource.”

Here’s some of my notes of that conversation:

• Try to spend most of your day enabling rather than denying the use of technology
  Security and privacy and compliance are all important but if you don’t spend at least as much time balancing those needs against productivity, agility and user frustration it won’t be that long before you have no users left.
• The future of IT is about being coaches not nannies
  There are two types people in your organization those that know they deserve better IT and those poor souls so conditioned by years of using the same 4 MSOffice apps on the same crappy hardware that they have no idea. Get out there and give them both the coaching and access to tools to be effective, not just the long list of policies of what you are not allowed to do with your computer.
• The future of IT is about seeing tech support as an opportunity driver not a cost center
  Too often I see organizations chasing false economies in technologies. Minimizing support costs, is not the same thing as maximizing productivity. The lowest “total cost of ownership” for IT assets is to just deny your employees access to the functions of their computers. Incidentally, this is pretty much the mindset of how Windows Vista was designed. We need to give our IT managers the right incentives and recognition for driving increases in firm productivity and employee work/life satisfaction.
• GoogleApps have raised our expectations.
  One might wonder why Google can, for free, give me GBs upon GBs of instantly searchable and magically archived email while meanwhile my fortune 500 enterprise gives me draconian inbox limits and painful searching and archiving.

• Blocking webmail or Facebook is futile.
  You lost this battle the day the iPhone was launched. Increasingly employees will be bringing their own pocket computers (phones) and connections with them no matter what you think about that.
• There is no clean separation between working and social life.
  Work contacts are also social contacts, twitter/Facebook/IM et all are versatile and multipurpose tools. By using them at work you might tap your twitter network to help answer a pressing work-related question, you might be using FB or IM to more efficiently balance work and life stay in touch socially with friends/family and thereby be able, willing to spend more time in the office.
• Take a tour of a startup
  Want to know what’s possible and what of the latest tool work in the real world. Leave the office for a day and take a tour of a startup, one of your small vendors or digital agencies and see what tricks, what cloud apps, what Google Apps the small companies are using.

• Trust
  It’s also about trust, if you can’t trust your people to get their job done and use the tools and internet access responsibly, then why did you hire them? If you can’t trust your employees, your clients or the public with open forums to communicate with each other and give you honest and authentic feedback then what kind of operation are you running?
• Enterprise2.0 as transformational
  Finally, there was a lot of talk about the end-game in social media in the enterprise. Better tools as an enabler of a flatter and more empowering organization to be able to identify and nourish leaders, especially younger or more junior leaders that otherwise might be buried in your org structure.

What other advice would you add?

Anyone else surprised and a little underwhelmed by the apple “It’s just rock and roll but we like it” event today? For a music update, the nano got a vaguely bizarre video camera update as apple’s answer to the flip video. An answer to a question to a question I’m not sure who was asking.

While the most obvious device strongly rumored, and begging for a camera the iPod touch got nothing. Nothing except some minor and overdue price and capacity adjustments catching up to the continuing fall in flash memory prices.

No camera for the iPod Touch and, more significantly, no 2x the speed upgrade either like the iPhone received earlier this year. Instead the iPod continues to labour with a cpu architecture now three years old. Less than ideal for a supposed gaming platform and supposed wunderkind pocket web computer.

And as for any kind of augmented reality applications or fun games incorporating realtime video or picture taking, you can forget about those too.

Why would apple miss this boat?

Well my guess is that it’s not intentional. Look no further than the huge backlog on iPhone3GS deliver. As an anecdote, my girlfriend Michele ordered hers online back in July and it has yet to show up. Sounds to me like apple is continuing to suffer some serious manufacturing or chip-yield issues, my guess with the cpu or one of the other key logicboard chips like the graphics chip that both the 3GS and any would-be 3-series iPod would be built off of.

It’s not uncommon for a new chip or a chip built on a new silicon process to have yield (number of working chips per wafer) or binsplits (number of usable chips that will run at the desired speed/power requirements). And the new ARM 11 cpu and the new GPU are both new chips AND being fabbed on a new smaller silicon process.

If they are having yield problems it makes sense that the already launched 3GS is eating up all the chips that Apple can get their hands on.

It’s hard to believe that apple would have intentionally let the 3GS shortages carry on this long and it looks like an upgraded iPod touch is a casualty of Apples struggles to ship enough iphones.

UPDATE: correction – the two more expensive versions of the iTouch do have the new processor. perhaps the problem could be related to rumored issues with the camera module itself?

You might also call this CaseCampWorthTheWait, this one is bigger, huger and also larger than ever, featuring a full on mini-conference followed by a casecamp classic. The latter part is free as always, but your donations ($50 is suggested) is going towards SickKids. Eli Signer the superhuman behind CaseCamp and his team of rockstar collaborators have an ambitious target to raise $50,000 for the hospital for sick kids, specifically:

Funds raised at CaseCamp Benefit will go towards transforming the Critical Care Unit Waiting Room at SickKids Hospital in Toronto.

The Critical Care Unit at Toronto’s SickKids Hospital delivers round-the-clock care for children in urgent medical situations. The waiting room, located outside the unit, is a space designated for the families and friends who are visiting patients. Visitors use this room in a variety of ways: some are only dropping by en route to being admitted to the CCU while others will set up camp there for an extended period of time. The space must cater to a diverse population with multiple needs and preferences. Currently the space is in dire need of a renovation. -more

Great content, great cause, case closed.

When:

Wednesday, September 16th, 2009

Where:

CiRCA 126 John St. Toronto ON

What:

CaseCamp Conference

A grounding in internet culture and a crash course on social media strategy & tactics

CaseCamp Classic
The original! Four cases studies, followed by networking fun and drinks

LINK: CaseCamp.org

Scoble has a great rant up today on twitter’s failing as a platform. This is similar to Jevon’s epic (and correct) rant on why you shouldn’t build a business on Facebook… or otherwise on someone else’s platform. At least not unless you are prepared to take the risks.

Risks being: did you know that twitter’s search history only goes back a few weeks? Did you think that all those pithy tweets and all those nice things folks may have said about you in @replies would be around forever as an archive or historical record? Don’t count on it.

Maybe, if we’re lucky, Twitter [see illustration] will be around forever, maybe if we’re lucky they’ll keep alive the archives of bit.ly and twitpic etc. so in the future we’d have some idea of what those links were pointing to. Maybe part of that business model will be the charging for access to the tweet archive. But there’s no guarantee.

To twitter’s fault/credit these problems relate to twitter being a little too good at what they do. It only becomes a problem once everyone (well at least all the cool people) pervasively filter a big part of our daily lives, our ideas, world events, our businesses through this single channel.

Does it make a lot of sense to route the western world’s realtime social backchannel through a single point of failure?

Historically, what is the life expectancy of any hottest new social platform? friendster, icq, geocities, hotmail^* all had a good run while they lasted?

reminds one of an old haiku, the zen of 404 messages:

You step in the stream,
But the water has moved on.
This page is not here.

my advice? go out and invent the world’s next open-standards, distributed realtime social presence application. Or if you don’t have time for that, at least think about archiving your tweets. You never know when you might want them back.

more: Twitter’s platform shortcomings

more: tools for backing up your tweets. I haven’t tried them yet (I should probably get on that). tips?

^{*cough myspace, *cough* yahoo inc., AOL, compuserve, gopher the list could go on /for another deadmedia post}

Nonetheless here’s the list of tracks and bands that have been piling up in my OMG great track, I gotta podcast this folder in iTunes. Consider this my autobiographical best-of music mix for 2009 so far:

enjoy:

Here’s the download link: In one big-ass 76MB zip file

If I’m organized enough I’ll also post the mixed-together streaming/podcast version for any of you still out there who subscribe to my podcast rss.