So, in ze’s analogy, who are the people bobbing up and down in the surf wearing yellow or red swim trunks? My bet is on the department that all large companies have. Their roll is to take every great idea you have and erode away the coolness that you put in by adding their expert opinions. After that they tack on crap that makes it take 10-fold longer to deliver because they change the color scheme every week or so. Yes folks, I give you the marketing departments of the world. (Douglas Adams had them as the first against the wall when the revolution came for a reason.)
I may be ranting out of my arse here. I may not know what I’m talking about - okay, that’s a given - but when was the last time a marketing department really made a significant contribution to a tech product?
Think of all the cool sites out there, new and old: youTube, MySpace, IMDB, Google, wikipedia, Yahoo in the early days, I could go on and on but you get the idea. These sites were created by surfers. People playing with ideas. Immersed in the idea. Did they know from the beginning that they had caught a big wave? Probably not. It’s hard to tell how big the wave is when until it catches you.
One thing’s for sure, the people standing on the beach - the marketers - certainly can’t give you any useful advice. They can only see a wave once it gets big. By that time it’s too late to get on. Nope, you simply have to pick your wave and ride it for what it’s worth. Good or bad, it’s still fun.
My philosophy about projects: if it takes more than four wickedly talented people to get it on it’s feet then it’s probably crap.
Deborah Gordon, from the University of Arizona, presented her research on ant colonies. She wasn’t the most profound, or polished of the speakers that I’ve seen at TED. Not to say that she wasn’t bad. Just not the best.
What I think she missed in her presentation is relating her work to other fields as many presenters do.
Her research focuses on how an ant colony is organized and how it evolves over time. Given that ants are incredibly successful creatures one would expect to learn something from their principles of organization and apply that to human endeavors.
But there is one key difference between most human organizations and ant colony organization: ant colonies seek, in her words, a state of homeostasis. Human organizations - such as businesses, countries, religions, even individuals - are attracted to unlimited growth.
That might be the primary takeaway from her presentation. If you want to mimic the wild success of ants don’t try to grow your business, or whatever, with unlimited success in mind. Instead determine a state that will allow you to maintain stability - homeostasis - and then coast.
Ant colonies do however grow more ant colonies. In that light you would spin off similar independent organizations and let them in turn spin off yet others. That is the way of the ant.
I’d like to know what a place like a large downtown area would like like after a billion years. What sort of geological formations would it create? Imagine a coastal setting that is the exposed remnants of Manhattan after being folded under the Earth’s crust and then lifted back to sea level. Or what would the engine block of a car, or even a big diesel, look like after undergoing stress and erosion for a billion years. I think they would make some odd looking metallic boulders.
Nike’s new website for their Nike Air shoes show us how to it’s done. This is a paragon of how video work can be done in Flash. Try doing this with any other video player - not possible.
According to Google/Analytics stats on the visitors to polyGeek.com 54% are using a version of Firefox vs 34% using IE. No surprise there considering that I write about Adobe Flash. I’m not making a judgment call. I’m only saying that technical people are more likely to use Firefox than grandma’s. Or should I say non-technical grandma’s?
Worldwide Firefox market share hovers around 14-16%. Internet Explorer gets around 78% market share. I’m extrapolating from an article published in February ‘07: Internet Explorer loses ground to Firefox, Safari in US; holds its ground worldwide.
Here is the surprising thing I find about the browser stats here at polyGeek: about 81% of them are using Firefox 2.0 verses about 12% using Firefox 1.5. That’s a pretty good upgrade percentage. On the other hand IE users are much more evenly split between 52% still using the old 6.0 version and 47% using the latest 7.0 version.
If you’re in any field that requires technology and human interaction then this is a great video to watch. Jan has some great insights that he shares but better yet he shares his questions about technology and human interaction. It’s the questions that are the most interesting and helpful.
I watched this video right after watching the video by Hod Lipson about Robots that are self-aware. The synthesis of the two central ideas of these two videos is thinking about the world distribution of cell phones as a primordial soup.
The network of cell phones represents an ecosystem where novel solutions pop up to local problems. And as well there is a global organization that permeates through the ecosystem to greater or lesser degrees.
One question that is interesting to me is: what is the nature of the global organization? Because once you start getting a handle on that you can start to see patterns better. As a for instance think about the Internet. There are lots of things that the Internet
P2P became pervasive. Who would have guessed that?
How do cell phone companies make money? Can they continue to do so?
What happens when there are more cellphones than people? That’s when we start to embed cellphones in various devices that we want to be able to communicate. Like earthquake sensors, weather stations, power transformers.
Burt Rutan speaks at TED: Legendary spacecraft designer Burt Rutan won the $10M Ansari X-Prize for SpaceShipOne. He’s now collaborating with Virgin Galactic to build the first rocket-ship for space tourism (Recorded February 2006 in Monterey, CA. Duration: 20:16)
This guy really knows his stuff and speaks passionately about where the future of commercial space travel is headed.
Ross Lovegrove on TED talks. Lovegrove is pretty wacky in a creative genius sort of way. (Note: I have to respect anyone who says, “fuck’em if they can’s see the brilliance.” Especially if they’re saying that to Sony.)
