Starting to catch up on the last month. I had a great time at Technology Review’s Emerging Technology conference at MIT. It was weird – mainly pure technology, with a bit of business (I enjoyed the talk with Michael Moritz, an old hand VC, even though there were occasional lapses into uber-capitalism). Lots of people trying to change the world – through $100 laptops, clean water for everyone, or investigating how we think. And, well, us on the Social Computing panel. Several of us felt a bit humbled by the rest of the lineup, but there seemed to be interest.
What I learnt:
Nanotubes are here and they fricking rock. Long a pipe dream (hah), it seems nanotube based technologies are ready for the mainstream, being commercialised and ready for purchase next year – I was particularly taken by the nanotube memory developed by Nantero, which has the best properties of S, D and Flash RAM. Out next year, and they should be able to get to a Terabit of memory per square cm soon.
There’s a difference between great principles and great ideas. It was an honour and a fanboy moment to meet, have lunch, and shake hands with Nolan Bushnell (Pong inventor and founder of Atari). His ideas about social play are sound, but I disagree that the home is not the place for them (Nintendo in particular encourage social play in many of their games). Combined with the general ‘staying in is the new going out’ trend, the idea for the uWink media bistros feels, well, dated, and they’d better have kickass games if they’re to get people playing. I was quite scared by his idea for a school – each kid with headphones on, to prevent distractions.
Dean Kamen says he has a machine that, for 500w of electricity, can produce enough fresh water for a village from any original dirty water. He’s a great storyteller, but afterwards there were some unanswered questions. Where does the waste go? Would all the international agencies really ignore this invention because it took away all their specialisms?
The future is scary, amazing, and not what any of us envision. From Kurzweil’s Singularity, to Negroponte’s laptop, we have no idea how this will actually play out. I was very impressed with Negroponte – for once it’s a Media Lab idea that is becoming real and tangible (like Gershenfeld’s fablab) – real order, technical difficulties sorted out, only social problems to manage. His idea to solve the grey markets problem (make stealing a laptop the same as stealing an ambulance or a firetruck) sounds more implausible than his other plan, to make a commercial version for double the price to subsidise the cheap laptops. I did like the idea of less is more – they’re looking to reduce the price further, with slower processors, less memory, as technology allows. The defining moment was when he related some of the trials they have done: Parents (after initial trepidation that the computer would break) started to love their kid’s laptop – mainly because it was the brightest light source at night.
Very little mention of design, user experience, or even research – ethnography was mentioned by Cisco and Intel, but that was it.
I’ve related quick notes from the sessions earlier (1, 2, 3, 4), but I made some notes to get my brain in gear on social computing. Note: as always, these are personal views, and I speak for me, not for them. It’s a pity we really didn’t get time to dig into the business models and implications.
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