The Playful World was written by Mark Pesce. Pesce was an early pioneer of the web. He was instrumental in bringing a 3d interface to the web through a standard called VRML. This was an early attempt to provide the kind of immersive ‘matrix’ experience envisaged by the likes of William Gibson and Neal Stephenson in cyberpunk literature. Were a digital double of the real world (or more likely a more attenuated digital version) provides for interactions in the virtual realm.
Since then he has been applying his ingenuity and enterprise to academia and futurism for the past decade and a half.
The Playful World was written about a decade ago, yet was very prescient of today’s cutting-edge web and related technology trends:
Augmented web – the web provided a data overlay of the real world with applications like locative digital art and turn by turn directions for navigation. Putting this inside glasses rather than on a screen would mirror some of the human computer interaction work done since the 1960s for fighter pilots.
The web of things – items become intrinsically linked to the web with all the security risks that entails as well.
Custom manufacturing – smaller production runs, intellectual property becomes more important than manufacturing scale. Globalisation gets transformed. Waste could be reduced, though that would be affected by the kind of prototyping one goes through printing items in 3D printing from an existing file.
Gaming – lean forward entertainment becomes more immersive, though a lot of the growth in gaming has already happened
Pesce knits his experiences together into an engaging narrative that would brings all of it together for the reader. If you want to get where things are going I recommend you have a read of Pesce’s book. You can find more book reviews here. More related content here.
The recession has brought industrial action that we haven’t seen since the 1970s as union members blame foreign workers for taking British jobs. The flashpoint has been at Lindsey refinery operated by Total. Lindsey sits at the mouth of the Humber river. The inciting incident involved an Italian subcontractor doing maintenance on the refinery who brought in Italian and Portuguese workers, which there was high unemployment in the area. The underlying nationalism is the populist dark side of the globalisation boom.
My parents came to the UK when my Dad came over to work in the shipbuilding industry in the mid-1960s. Most of my friends have worked abroad: engineering in the Middle East, construction in Germany, web development and PR in North America and Asia Pacific.
First of all is the conflicted politics around the strike. Traditional left-wing allies of the strikers like the Socialist Workers Party are between a rock and a hard place as they can’t allign themselves with worker solidarity and a doctrine of protectionism that smacks of racism. Secondly this gives the far right yet another opportunity to get a hook into the angry disenfranchised white working-class. There is a large amount of government money already going into community engagement programmes to try and deal with this problem and other organisations have ongoing efforts to deal with the BNP head on, however the industrial action is like putting petrol on a fire. I could see this feeding into a broader anti-globalisation right wing populist fuelled reactionary politics focused on Euro-skepticism.
The second thing is the way worker politics has been extended and expanded via web 2.0 platforms. British Wildcats is a WordPress-based blog which seems to have far-right sympathies. It presents a professional looking face (even if the copy is hackneyed) to the movement using Google Maps integration, downloadable leaflets and blog posts to spread its message.
Over on Facebook I found 487 groups relating to British jobs for British workers. The top-ranked group: British Jobs for British Workers has 27,094 members. It used to be that the printing press and the xerox machine were tools of subversives. The CIA used to smuggle photocopiers into the Soviet Union for that very reason. Now it’s blogs and social networks.
James Earl Jones has one of the most distinctive voices in the entertainment industry as you can hear in this Sesame Street clip. You might recognise from his appearance in Conan the Barbarian film, but James Earl Jones has a surprising variety in his career across film, television and stage performance. James Earl Jones has done voiceover work for everything from Disney’s The Lion King to CNN station idents.
Hollow Spy Coins – talk about niche businesses, this is definitely on the long tail. You have to admire their dedication to engineering this.
Economics
Boomtown of Dubai feels effects of global crisis – International Herald Tribune – Until recently, credit in Dubai was growing by 49 percent a year, according to the Emirates’ Central Bank — a rate almost double that of bank deposits’ growth. That unnerved some bankers here, who felt it could lead to a collapse. “In the U.S., the challenge is about keeping the banks going,” said Marios Maratheftis, chief economist for Standard Chartered Bank. “Here, the economy has been overheated, a correction is needed, and it’s about making sure the slowdown happens in a smooth, orderly manner.”
Klein Verzet: Freaking doomed – the premise is that the demand for shipping of raw materials like coal, bauxite and iron ore have ground to a stand still and soon even the factories of China will be a lot quieter – so the economic outlook is nothing short of ammegeddon
P&G to launch washing gel that cleans at 15 degrees – Brand Republic News – Brand Republic – “According to P&G, Ariel’s Cool Clean campaign encouraged more than five times as many customers than normal to switch to low-energy washing programmes, with Ariel customers twice as likely as the average consumer to wash at a lower 30 degrees temperature (28% of Ariel customers in 2007 versus 13% of those using other brands). P&G has a partnership with the Energy Saving Trust, which encourages people to use energy efficiently and reduce their carbon footprints.”
I, Cringely . The Pulpit . Data Debasement | PBS – cloud computing versus DBMS, interesting reading, I need to go back and look at it a few more times to understand it fully. But initial take is that parallel computing as well as parallel processing changes how computing works and databases have to be adapted (like Oracle’s Grid database concept from the tail end of the dot com era and cloud computing. It’s the failings of Moore’s law rather than progress that is driving this change
Cloud computing is a trap, warns GNU founder Richard Stallman – while I have sympathy for some of what Mr Stallman says, his argument misses the point about the benefits of social software. Open formats and APIs allow you to move from one service to another as needs must.
I, Cringely . The Pulpit . Collateral Damage | PBS – interesting take on the mobile market, not one that I necessarily agree with, but interesting none the less. Cringely expect that Microsoft Windows Mobile software will fail and has some interesting ideas around the why. I think Microsoft has everything to play for with enterprise users and can leverage items like security authentication and Outlook email access – they might not be dominant but they could still be in with a shout
Beginning of end of megapixel marathon – Pixel count gives phones and cameras the ‘Dixons Factor’ – being able to be sold easily by some pimple-faced oik; but doesn’t mean you will have better quality pictures. I have a digital SLR which takes pictures at 5.1 megapixels and a phone camera that will do the same – no prize for which one takes the better pictures.
Talking heads spar over Carrefour boycott – internal debate on China’s self confidence and identity and how it should be expressed. I think that Wang Xiaodong was one of the authors of China Can Say Now – a groundbreaking collection of essays on Chinese nationalism published in 1996
EastSouthWestNorth: Why Is CNN Patriotic? – interesting piece on the western media from a Chinese perspective – it tells us a lot about Chinese national identity, confidence and rising Chinese nationalism
When China learned to say no – interesting interview with Chinese authors about ‘China can say no’ and the Chinese national identity. It does beg the question of when does Chinese national identity stop and Chinese nationalism start
Trace Me Luggage Tracker Purchase – interesting that this has been developed by a UK company – the home of the disastrous baggage handlers at LHR have won world-wide acclaim for their unique approach to their work. Definite must have though
Web 2.0: Obsolete within three years? – this isn’t as bad as it sounds, most technological progress is littered with failures. I think the bigger issue is the yuppification / tech bro culture starting to rear its ugly head in Silicon Valley. Web 2.0 is the last gasp of the ‘hippy’ influence on Silicon Valley culture – something that the article doesn’t address
Innovation
Upgrading processors for speed is doomed to failure – the need of paralellism in software – PS3 coders who have had a lot experience on programming for paralellism could be in demand doing business software
Paper is passe for tech-savvy South Koreans – SEOUL (Reuters Life!) – Young, tech-savvy South Koreans are making coupon clipping a thing of the past and turning to their mobile phones instead. Some of the fastest-growing mobile phone services in the country let retailers send discount coupons…
Powerset’s Dilemma: Go For It, Or Sell – I hope that they go for it, Powerset is built on some interesting ideas, the big challenge is finding an advertising model to monetise it and prevent them running out of cash and selling their intellectual property for pennies
Skype for your mobile – VoIP java application for some 50 low and mid-priced feature phones, it will be interesting to see how the networks (with the exception of 3/Hutchison Telecom) handle this
Bill and Dave were better known now by their surnames: Hewlett-Packard. It is familiar to consumers as a brand of printer, laptops and digital cameras sold in supermarkets up and down the country. Some may remember that they had a Watergate-type moment recently and a woman CEO who made a dogs dinner of things.
I visited Boeblingen (near Stuttgart) – the European headquarters of Hewlett-Packard in the late 90s and left deeply unimpressed by a large but seemingly directionless technology behemoth. We were on the cusp of the internet, while they were talking about printing brochures on demand. While this was happening the best internet search engine at the time, Alta Vista, had been built by their long time rival Digital Equipment Corporation.
Malone in his book Bill and Dave gave me a better appreciation of Hewlett-Packard. He brings into perspective how important Bill Hewlett and David Packard were to the technology sector and modern business practices.
From a PR perspective, I found facinating the way Bill and David self-consciously built their own personal legends which helped support and extend the HP Way. The company’s culture was built, extended and modified in a deliberate, planned manner unparalleled in any other company. Their culture was what PR people would now call thought leadership – which feels very now given the start of interest around brand purpose.
Bill and Dave wrote the book on corporate reputation without the help of big name agencies and invented the elements as they went along, combined with a wisdom worthy of Solomon. More book reviews here.
gave me a better appreciation of Hewlett-Packard. He brings into perspective how important Bill Hewlett and David Packard were to the technology sector and modern business practices.