Ben Hammersley on Wi-Fi serendipity: Ben runs an open access point and meets interesting folks at the nearby cafe where users drop in to log on. Who'd he meet the other day? Doc Searls, blogger, raconteur, keynote addresser. Doc's account of the meeting. The danger from Wi-Fi ubiquity is that these serendipswitchidous encounters will taper off.

5:26:54 PM    comment   

Doc Searls is having quite an adventure in London.  I was unimpressed when people started blogging from conferences, but this is cool.  Doc just wanders the streets until he finds a wireless hotspot, then sits on the sidewalk and does some work.  It's a great way to meet people, although I wouldn't recommend it in a place like Detroit.  I am also postulating that the best way for a busy traveller to get current information about active WiFi hotspots in places like Seattle, SoCal, and London, will be to ask the local panhandlers.  People who snarf free WiFi are likely to be both financially secure and have a social consience, so these places will be a lucrative territory for panhandlers.

On the other hand, I have to think that the forces aligned against the "Axis of Evil" will find this trend disturbing once they discover it.  Al Qaeda have used Internet cafes extensively to communicate with one another, and the recent captures in Morocco and the Daniel Pearl case both were helped by the fact that we were intercepting e-mail from these places.  Instead of using cybercafes, the terrorists will now have to walk around until they find a good citizen who has opened up his cable modem to anyone with WiFi.  And why not?  Any terrorists entering the U.S. through the southern deserts can now keep an eye open for refreshment stations put there by private citizens and concealed from police, so they no longer have to go through heavily-guarded check-points.  These days, it is a virtual certainty that cybercafes are as heavily monitored as the border crossings.

In fact, just yesterday, a cybercafe in Beijing caught fire, killing 24 college students.  It's the worst fire-related toll in Beijing since PRC inception.  The interesting thing, though, is that the cybercafe was operating without a license, as the bulk of such places in Beijing are.  But instead of going on a campaign to shut down the illegal cybercafes, the local government has announced that all cybercafes in Beijing will be shut down for a month or so, so that the government can inspect for compliance with fire codes, and then they will be permitted to continue operating.  From the sound of it, they will just wink at the illegal places.  I am sure there are many reasons for this strategy, but if I were in the government there, it would seem like a smart move to me.  I would rather know about an illegal cybercafe and have it wiretapped than encourage cybercafes to go deeper underground where I couldn't monitor them.  Inspection under the auspices of "fire safety" is a perfect opportunity to install bugs (and maybe even collect some bribes).

5:14:08 PM    comment   

A small change in the way we work could shave 45 minutes off of the average workday.  That small change is to use a news aggregator to get news instead of gathering it by hand.  Applied across a 200 person company, that 45 minutes of savings could be worth $1,650,000 a year.  The wild part is that the cost to implement this is only $8,000 and requires little if any support from the IT department. 

If we are going to really boost productivity, we are going to need to focus on those improvements that provide the most bang for the buck.   Small changes in work habits can have amazing results.  To get at these nuggets, companies need to spend time really watching what people do with their time.  If they did, they would find that much of the time they spend is wasted on simple tasks that could easily be automated. 

Other things to focus on:

1) Auto-categorization of e-mail.

2) Integrated search (desktop, LAN, K-Logs, Web) with all proprietary doc formats revealed as HTML.

3) Voice mail on the desktop PC. 

4) Accurate K-Logging of current activities:  status, thinking, plans, projects, etc.

5) Online presentations, to-do lists, project plans via outlines. 

6) K-Log personal portals that integrate all connection info (e-mail, IM, phone, address, bio, resume, picture).

Very simple stuff can yield big results. [John Robb's Radio Weblog]
4:39:43 PM    comment   

>>>True to form, Nakamura is debugging his next breakthrough: an ultraviolet laser that he hopes will make possible disks that hold twice as much as the upcoming generation. That could give rise to a whole new species of couch potato.<<<  60 Gb ! [John Robb's Radio Weblog]
4:37:59 PM    comment   

Business Week:  >>>Good news is ahead, however: Unlike the relatively mature internal combustion technologies, fuel cells are improving in efficiency by about 30% a year, according to McNeil. "It's moving so fast," says Joseph Cargnelli, the vice-president for technology at Toronto fuel-cell concern Hydrogenics. "that a fuel-cell engine that we developed a year ago is outdated today due to new materials, more power density, and more robust construction."<<<  Note that fuels cells represent a jump in substrate for personal power generation.  As a result, the price performance improvements may accumulate quickly.  Right now, it is on a 2.5 year doubling rate.  Further, by decentralizing power production (fuel cells that run in the basement for $2 k a pop), transmission loss is eliminated. [John Robb's Radio Weblog]
4:17:23 PM    comment   

Hmmm, I think this area needs a strategy level research company (I've looked, there aren't any).  Why?  These new biotech advancements are going to slam comapanies with radically less expensive and more effective replacements of products from physical goods (see "Got Silk") to technology (see "Bio Computers" and "Neural Interfaces").  The reason for a strategy level research company?  Decision makers in the impacted industries can't read the literature on the technologies that are going to slam them.  They need research they can read (and use as a basis of decision making), produced by people that understand the implications of combining biology and technology (unfortunately, those people are rare). 

Of course, the best way to build a research company now would be to start a weblog on the topic and sell research direct, without a sales team.  Control of keywords on Google and analyst quotes in the press would provide traffic.  Analysts would produce reports and maintain a weblog on their area of focus within a password protected site.  They would be paid based on a percentage of sales (I wish I had gotten a percentage of sales on research I wrote in 95-96 -- it generated $5 m in the first year).  Consulting would be phone based and charged via a site like Keen.com on a per minute basis.  Everyone would work from home.  All you need is someone with strong research and weblogging DNA (that combo is fairly rare), and $40 in technology to get started.

The vendors in this world are those companies working on the enabling technologies (PCRs etc.).  The buyers are those companies that need to rework their processes or buy companies to defend their markets.

>>>In a room-size freezer in the basement of Decode's Reykjavik headquarters, a robot named Goliath is swaddled with insulating clothing. Designed for life in an auto assembly plant, Goliath sits surrounded by racks of blood samples from some 65,000 Icelandic residents, about a third of the adult population. The robot can pull out requested samples and send them upstairs to a fleet of 56 DNA sequencing machines, part of what Decode says is the largest genotyping facility in the world.

This is also interesting (what a ratio):  The founders (of Iceland) were some 10,000 to 15,000 men, mostly Vikings from Norway, and about five times as many women as men, mostly from Ireland.<<< [John Robb's Radio Weblog]
3:59:33 PM    comment