Ged Carroll

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  • The Age of Spiritual Machines: When Computers Exceed Human Intelligence by Ray Kurzweil

    The Age of Spiritual Machines was written by Ray Kurzweil. Kurzweil is a technological rock star, responsible for great music synthesisers and much of the developments around optical character recognition and speech recognition. This is what makes him a good futurist. The fact that he has had his hands dirty.

    The Age of Spiritual Machines: When Computers Exceed Human Intelligence is a book of two parts. In the first part, Kurzweil outlines how technology has progressed since the dawn of computing with Charles Babbage’ difference engine. Kurzweil uses this trip down computer memory lane to demonstrated that computing power has been increasing exponentially since the dawn of time rather than just the dawn of Intel with Moore’s Law on the doubling of transistors. Even though silicon transistors may top out computing power will keep on trucking (though Kurzweil doesn’t necessarily have the answer of what is the next technology).

    The second part of the book is likely future scenarios; and this is where things get interesting. Kurzweil is setting himself up for a possible fail.

    Bill Gates and Nathan Myhrvold missed the internet in the first edition of The Road Ahead when it was first published in 1995 and Kurzweil sets himself up for a potentially bigger fall in the scope of his book. Even if Kurzweil has his timing a bit wrong or doesn’t get everything right his book is still a great thought experiment in how intelligent computers would impact humanity.  More book reviews here.

  • A Colossal Failure Of Common Sense by Lawrence G. McDonald with Patrick Robinson

    Every financial point of inflection be it a recession or a boom has its signature event. The internet boom was marked by the IPO of Netscape and the merger of AOL with media company Time Warner. The internet bust was marked by Worldcom and Enron’s collapse. The current subprime implosion in the US was marked by the collapse of Lehman Brothers which is what A Colossal Failure of Common Sense is about.

    Lawrence McDonald is a former vice president at Lehman Brothers got his story out in A Colossal Failure of Common Sense. Unlike similar books like Barbarians at the Gate, A Colossal Failure of Common Sense was written too close to the event as the author’s recollection is very emotionally charged, McDonald sets up the story with his own story front-and-centre.

    I found it interesting that McDonald discussed the kind of derivatives employed by Lehman Brothers as a radical new low.  To this relatively unsophisticated reader these seemed not that dissimilar to financial instruments involved in previous scandals. In his writings McDonald referenced Michael Lewis’ Liar’s Poker  which illustrated the dark side of bonds and derivatives some two decades previously as a book that he knew well. Liars Poker covers how derivatives were sold and then blew up, causing the US savings and loans scandal. Porter had a ringside seat as he talked about his experience as an employee of Salomon Smith Barney (now part of Citigroup). I found the parallels between McDonald and Lewis quite spookily similar in their observations, yet decades apart.

    McDonald talks about the efforts that his department made to try and balance out the carnage that collateralised mortgage debt caused at Lehman Brothers. Ultimately it reads like a litany of stupidity and missed opportunities. It’s like as if two decades after Liars Poker and F.I.A.S.C.O. that no one learned any lesson at all. More book reviews here.

  • Free – The Future of a Radical Price by Chris Anderson

    Free owes a debt to work done by some of the early team at Wired magazine. Encyclopedia of the New Economy by John Browning and Spencer Reiss was originally published as a three-part work in Wired magazine back in 1998. Step forward a decade or so and current Wired magazine editor Chris Anderson has been explaining some of the key concepts for his readers. The Long Tail was his first effort at this missonary work and Free – The Future of a Radical Price is his latest effort.

    I may be the wrong person to review Free because I am not the target audience. Alongside  generation-Y, I am 0ne of those people who think that its perfectly natural to have a colossal photo album on steroids in flickr, a digital memory in delicious and the world’s largest library in Google all for free (or near as damn it).

    Try explaining these economic concepts to my Mum and Dad however and you will find this tougher going: Free is aimed at people like my parents and Rupert Murdoch who don’t quite get what is going on and how best to harness it. With this audience in mind Anderson takes us on a journey of Free which is part light magazine content a la Alan Whicker and part-intellectual a la Bamber Gascoigne.

    Some of the book gave me a deja vu from Anderson’s early work The Long Tail, in particular the example about the Anderson household’s preference for DIY stop-motion animation versions of Star Wars scenes on YouTube over George Lucas’ works on DVD, (I am with them on that one, the dialogue Lucas came up should put him on trial for crimes against cinema).

    Anderson spins a good yarn, but chances are that if you read this blog on a regular basis, Free is way below your ‘web-literacy’ age.

  • Friendfeed & more news

    Friendfeed

    Revealed: why Facebook acquired FriendFeed – Brand Republic News – Brand Republic – Will McInnes talks about the Facebook | Friendfeed deal.

    Business

    Delicious Founder: I Wish I Had Not Sold to Yahoo

    Consumer behaviour

    Kids want to own, not stream, their music says survey – The Next Web

    Design

    Little Art Book – Limited Edition Prints – Art Gallery – I love the prints here mix of great illustration and Banksy like image subversion of cultural icons

    Gadgets

    Nokia outsmarted on smartphones

    How to

    boxee: the open, connected, social media center for mac os x and linux – I need to check this out

    Ideas

    Some Serious Freeconomics – interesting points from Fred Wilson

    Luxury

    brandchannel.com | Vuarnet – interesting brand history of the storied sunglasses brand

    Marketing

    NY Mag Commenters Get Hired for HSBC’s SoapboxCampaign – PSFK

    PR Communications: A PR Strategy Not Social Media Tactics Won The Presidential Election 2008 – cutting through the hoopla and looking at the substance. At the end of the day social media is just a channel

    Media

    Revisionist History: Bartz Claims Yahoo Was Never A Search Engine – Danny Sullivan shows the holes in Yahoo!’s spin around the search deal with Microsoft. When I was Yahoo! search was responsible for about 50 percent of revenue.

    Highfield joins Microsoft after just four months at Project Kangaroo • The Register – Ashley Highfield jumped from the BBC’s digital transformation to Microsoft in a manner that raised a few eyebrows

    Online

    UK PR people on Twitter | PRBLOGGER.COM – PR blog – Stephen Davies has done the hard work so you don’t have to in his list of UK PR people on Twitter

    Google’s new search update “Caffeine” changes both look and feel | VentureBeat

    WebWorkerDaily » Archive How Twitter is a Communications Game Changer «

    Software

    Yahoo’s Hadoop Genius Leaves For Startup (YHOO) – spiraling the drain

    Yahoo’s BrowserPlus continues to dismantle wall between browser and desktop » VentureBeat – Interesting features including drag and drop into browser

    Worst. Bug. Ever. – this is the best: the T-Mobile G1 Android handset sounds like a complete dog

    Digital Evangelist: 72Hours in what have I learnt about my Nokia? – interesting learning experience on Symbian and Ovi web services

    Wireless

    Total Telecom – Low-cost handsets to account for half of all mobile phones by 2014

    On its second try, Sandbridge promises a revolution with the Holy Grail of wireless chips » VentureBeat – software defined radio gets new silicon

  • Cocooning 2.0

    A mix of technology and economics occurred in the 1980s which saw consumers spending much more time in a world of their own at home. This was driven by the video recorder and cable television in the US, it sank traditional cinemas and encouraged the film industry to fight back with the multiplex. We became more depraved as porn moved from grubby cinemas to your living room. Sociologists and marketers called this phenomena cocooning. In reality cocooning never went away, it evolved. For cocooning 2.0, instead of NICAM, VHS and Betamax you have DVD, DSL, social networks and BitTorrent.

    I think that technology has moved the unreality bubble that cocooning creates, allowing consumers to screen themselves from society interacting through the screen rather than face-to-face from the home to also on the move. What got me thinking about this was a conversation with my Dad.

    Conoco Texas map

    My Dad has been driving since the early 1960s. In his first (and only) new car, (as having a family screws your disposable income) he used to have an assortment of petrol company maps and an Esso tiger soft toy which he hacked so that its eyes flashed in time with the indicator lights. My childhood and young adult experience in a car was with jagged mosaics of petrol company maps that I tried to fold neatly and organise in his cars, until I got tired of the whole process and introduced him to the AA’s series of atlas. Its harder to make a mess with a well-bound book.

    Rave machine

    My Dad is finally selling the ‘rave machine’ (a Volkswagen LT35 turbo diesel camper van which served me well as a comfortable base for diving and going to raves / free festivals). I  was clearing out a mass of petrol company maps that he no longer used and putting them all in the recycle bin. He didn’t want to move the maps over to his present car since he is the proud owner of a GPS navigation unit that my Mam had picked him up from discount supermarket Aldi. I realised that the amount of interaction that service station staff and local populace would have with my Dad now he had gone digital would be hugely reduced as he paid for his diesel at the pump with a built-in card reader and never now ventured into the office unless he wanted to feed his Fisherman’s Friend addiction. There was no longer going to be that kitchen sink drama played out as him and my Mam would argue about asking for directions from a local person any more.

    My Dad’s move to a GPS device made me realise that we cocoon ourselves from society around us on the move as well as in our home:

    • How many people use their mobile phone or check their email whilst waiting for a friend in the pub?
    • How many people use an iPod or play a game on their mobile phone when on public transport? It is interesting that the first Walkmans came with two earphone sockets for shared listening, whereas the design of Apple’s earbuds would make you think twice about sharing your listening experience with someone unless they were really close to you
    • How many people have used Google Maps on their phone rather than asking someone for directions?
    • Iceland and other supermarkets have been delivering groceries for a while, meaning that you don’t have to interact with your local community in the shop any more

    Apart from having an online supermarket shop, I have done all the activities listed above. And that’s mainly because my fridge freezer is a bit small rather than any great desire to chat with my neighbours over the tops of our wire supermarket trolleys. My smartphone goes beyond location-based services to provide me with a location-based reality bubble.

    Cocooning 2.0 is about shutting out society in the real-world even as we interact more closely with our trusted communities through online means. Thinking about some of the utopian ideas that I heard from Castells speaking the other week, I am curious to know what does this mean for the civil society in the longer term as we become disconnected and can’t relate?

    I am sure that entrepreneurs will already be thinking about the future market full of potential for ‘authentic’ experiences even as we willfully ignore them on our front door. When you think about your local independent coffee shop, Starbucks or private members clubs like The Hospital isn’t part of their attraction about providing an ‘authentic’ community experience?