onfocus

Had another great day at the conference. Here are a few things that jumped out at me today:

• Ecocities is the recurring buzzword. They are: people living at greater density, but humane and livable. With plants! (Sorry, more thoughts about the tension between density and sprawl to come. I live in a small town, and the speakers at this conference were very much focused on answering our current environmental problems with increased urbanism.)
• Recently I speculated about what an audio Mechanical Turk project might sound like: TurkSmith. Now I know! Aaron Koblin recently paid for several thousand people to emulate bits and pieces of the first digitized song, a version of Daisy Bell. You can hear the (slightly creepy) results at Bicycle Built for 2,000.
• The sensors are coming! You are probably being sensed right now! A company called Path Intelligence is using the unique radio frequencies emitted by the electronic devices people carry as a signature to find out where they go, and how much time they spend in their clients' locations. Similarly, Ben Cerveny talked about using sensors and location-tracking to make amusement parks more interactive—and eventually public spaces.
• Japenese culture seems weird to us in the West (think: cosplay, anime, scrolling text over video, ultra-ultra-cute), and after a talk about demystifying Japanese culture, it still seems weird to me. But the talk was a fun tour of cultural differences.
• We're beginning to track more and more information about ourselves and without some ethical guidelines, that data could be used against us. Gary Wolf is part of a Bay Area group called The Quantified Self where members share their own personal data-tracking methods. He's interested in how people are tracking and visualizing their own weight, mood, health care, productivity, biology, etc. Just as we try to keep the ideal that "all people are created equal" when designing people-related systems, he thinks "all numbers are created equal" is needed in relation to designing personal data systems.
• I've been shoulder surfing (sorry, everyone) to see what apps people are using. Guess which one is up most often? Yep, Twitter. But not just Twitter. People have massive full screen grids of tweets up in applications like TweetDeck or to a lesser degree TweetGrid. Holy Twitter overload. Seriously, as I scanned the room today everyone was running TweetDeck at full screen. WTF?
• Lots and lots and lots of food for thought. It's always simultaneously fascinating and terrifying to hear from people shaping the future.

Time to sleep and dream, the last frontier where I'm not yet sensed, tracked, measured, and visualized. AFAIK.

Here's a quick list of talks I saw yesterday at ETech and something I took away from the talk:

• Alex Steffen, the author of Worldchanging talked about how deeply unsustainable our western lifestyle is, how aggressively we're exporting it, and how the demographics of developing nations make this situation a train-wreck. One positive point that he mentioned is: that which is measured and shown is used differently. Of course, this reminded me of stuff we're doing with Fuelly.
• Sameer Padania of witness.org talked about the network they're building to document human rights violations. He mentioned offhand that the ability for anonymous communication needs to be built into our tools so people can report problems safely. That's tough to do and has been sticking with me.
• Mary Lou Jepen talked about innovating at the bottom of the financial pyramid and designing for developing nations can drive innovation here as well.
• Mike Kuniavsky talked about the new ability with GPS and RFID to track individual products, not just classes of products. He had a great term for metadata about a product: "data shadow". He talked about porting subscription models in the context of consumer goods like bicycles, cars, airplanes, handbags, etc.
• Lane Becker and Thor Muller shared some thought experiments about what a new post-consumer business environment might look like. Like Kuniavsky, they discussed how a "loanership society" might impact how we think about owning things.
• Nick Bilton talked about some things they're working on at The New York Times R&D lab. One idea was repurposing disposed cellphones into a network of sensors to collect data for measuring the city. He mentioned printed semicodes and SMS codes as a big part of their current strategy for attracting advertisers to print.
• Greg Elin explained how Washington DC works in terms that computer programmers would understand. He described government as a legacy system without the built-in logic of a compiled coding language. He works for the Sunlight Foundation trying to bring more transparency to government.
• The last session I saw had folks from BioBricks, a Creative Commons for synthetic biology. They're trying to speed up the legal hassles of sharing synthetic biological, umm, "inventions"? The talk was a bit over my head, but it was interesting to hear about some of their approaches to sharing "content".

Now it's back to the second half of Day 3 for me.

As you can probably tell from the recent slew of photos I'm in San Jose for the Emerging Technology Conference. It was snowing on the drive to the Portland airport this morning which makes sunny San Jose seem even sunnier. The conference started tonight with Tim O'Reilly's radar talk about trends and topics he's interested in. My favorite slide was about scenario planning and featured a graph with potential futures including: "The Singularity" on one end and "Economic and Environmental Collapse" on the other. So you can tell his talk was generally upbeat. No, it's tough to have an upbeat talk in this climate. He touched on the themes from his post a few months ago about working on stuff that matters, finding a robust "middle strategy" between extreme futures, and striving to create more value than you capture. His examples of reacting to the present and planning for the future pulled from a few science fiction books including Young Rissa and Doomsday Book (if you're keeping book-score at home). He just spent a week in Washington DC and seemed excited about potential changes in government openness, transparency, and connectivity. He also read a great passage from Rilke about working on small vs. big problems that I'll have to track down.

After Tim's talk there was an Ignite event where the talks seemed surprisingly focused on the past instead of the future. Molly Steenson had a fantastic talk about the history of pneumatic tubes and Victorian messaging. Then there was akrasia, knitting history, photography history, and famous leaders blowing things up as kids.

Leonard has been working on a networked photo booth called Lensley, and it was fun to see that in action. The box takes pictures automatically like a photo booth and sends the results to Flickr and/or Twitter. And combined with the conference RFID tags, knows who is in the photos. I ended up in these photos. Great start, the conference sessions start tomorrow morning.