We have transformed our world by automating our everyday tasks with computers. We replaced calculators, accounting ledgers, and typewriters. Computers help us consume, create and deliver information. Letters, memos and reference books are a thing of the past. Increasingly we have crawled into our computer screen to work, play and communicate.
Last year I wrote about wearing our computers and embedding computing in ourselves. I firmly believe the next big thing is computer augmented reality -- bringing us out of the screen and putting the screen on the world around us. A future where rather than doing things on the computer, the computer does things on us.
Pranav Mistry demonstrates this future. It is worth a few minutes to check it out.
Showing posts with label TED. Show all posts
Showing posts with label TED. Show all posts
Monday, November 30, 2009
Sunday, September 27, 2009
Changing the IC'y mind set
Last year we took our family to China for spring break. People asked, hell our kids asked, “why go to China for Spring Break? Hawaii is cheaper and warmer.”
My wife and I felt it was important that in this time unprecedented change, we prepare ourselves to understand what is happening. If we think of China as peasants in rice fields, or hordes of poor in the streets of urban centers, we are ill-equipped to adapt to the change that is sweeping over us. In ten days we only scratched the surface, but I think it helped each of us get a better feel for what is happening in China.
The trip gave us the opportunity to experience what Hans Rosling teaches – we need to change our mind set to match the current data set.
India promises to have a similar impact to China.
There has been lots of talk of the BRIC countries; although it doesn’t work well phonetically, I think we need to focus on the IC countries. Perhaps they are better thought of as CHI.
My wife and I felt it was important that in this time unprecedented change, we prepare ourselves to understand what is happening. If we think of China as peasants in rice fields, or hordes of poor in the streets of urban centers, we are ill-equipped to adapt to the change that is sweeping over us. In ten days we only scratched the surface, but I think it helped each of us get a better feel for what is happening in China.
The trip gave us the opportunity to experience what Hans Rosling teaches – we need to change our mind set to match the current data set.
TED Hans Rosling from Pedro Andrade on Vimeo.
India promises to have a similar impact to China.
There has been lots of talk of the BRIC countries; although it doesn’t work well phonetically, I think we need to focus on the IC countries. Perhaps they are better thought of as CHI.
Tuesday, April 15, 2008
The creative, innovative and brilliant
Occasionally you see things that are so good they stop you cold, render you dumb, and bring tears to your eyes. These rare things are accessible, incredibly innovative and elegant in their execution. They are in their very essence beautiful. Here are two such things.
The first is an experience in the virtual world. Jonathan Harris is an artist with information. He creates truly amazing explorations of the online world. His work is as mesmerizing and addicting as anything I have seen on the net. - http://wefeelfine.org/
The second is a physical experience: True innovation is making something great with very little. Jonny Lee is perhaps the most brilliant human factor engineer of our time. - http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~johnny/
Both Jonathan Harris and Johnny Lee were featured at TED, the annual confab that now posts its session online. You should check it out and go back often. TED gives voice to the creative, innovative and brilliant. We all should listen. http://www.ted.org/
The first is an experience in the virtual world. Jonathan Harris is an artist with information. He creates truly amazing explorations of the online world. His work is as mesmerizing and addicting as anything I have seen on the net. - http://wefeelfine.org/
The second is a physical experience: True innovation is making something great with very little. Jonny Lee is perhaps the most brilliant human factor engineer of our time. - http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~johnny/
Both Jonathan Harris and Johnny Lee were featured at TED, the annual confab that now posts its session online. You should check it out and go back often. TED gives voice to the creative, innovative and brilliant. We all should listen. http://www.ted.org/
Wednesday, March 12, 2008
Innovation
Innovation is not about making something different or even better. It is about fundamentally changing our behavior. It is about creating a future: envisioning ways of doing things that are so compelling they are pervasively adopted. It is easy to forget how much innovation we have experienced in the last 25 years. Yesterday TED released the pod cast of a talk by Nicholas Negroponte from 1984.
Despite Orwell’s prescient book, 1984 was a time of command lines and green screens. The IBM Selectric ruled the office and producing office communication generally involved a Dictaphone. Negroponte made convincing arguments for interacting with computers using touch screens and breaking from the linear information delivery of books and journals by adopting electronic hyperlinked information techniques.
I watched the lecture while exercising on a Stairmaster and appropriately used my touch screen IPhone to consume the talk. It is hard to imagine that the potential for an HTML information platform or an elegant multi-touch interface would be questioned as preposterous, improbable, or at best way too expensive to develop, produce, and deploy. But we must remember that the computing power required to drive the interface of an IPhone is many orders of magnitude greater than the entire compute capacity of the 68000 processors of that day.
It is impressive how well the I-touch technology from Apple implements the vision the Negroponte articulated so vividly 25 years earlier. And it’s surprising that it took 25 years for it to happen. The year after he delivered the TED lecture Negroponte opened the Media Lab to explore and commercialize these and other innovations.
Watching Negroponte talk provided some perspective on how dramatic the innovation we will likely experience in the coming years can be. Some innovations like the television or the i-touch interface are serendipitous, allowing us to casually adopt new behaviors based on desire and not imperatives. I am suspect the innovation that dominates the coming decades will be more akin to Jonas Salk’s discovery of the Polio vaccine.
The defining characteristic of human beings is adaptation and our times demand adaptation: the resources we use now are scarce and expensive; populations of the developed world are aging with declining birth rates while the exploding economic demands of the young burgeoning populations of the developing world are warping the global economy; the climate is changing rapidly irreversibly altering our ecosystem; and these are just a few of the challenges we face.
We now get to imagine the future that accommodates these realities and improves our lives at the same time. That’s innovation that maters. We get to do anything but stand still.
Despite Orwell’s prescient book, 1984 was a time of command lines and green screens. The IBM Selectric ruled the office and producing office communication generally involved a Dictaphone. Negroponte made convincing arguments for interacting with computers using touch screens and breaking from the linear information delivery of books and journals by adopting electronic hyperlinked information techniques.
I watched the lecture while exercising on a Stairmaster and appropriately used my touch screen IPhone to consume the talk. It is hard to imagine that the potential for an HTML information platform or an elegant multi-touch interface would be questioned as preposterous, improbable, or at best way too expensive to develop, produce, and deploy. But we must remember that the computing power required to drive the interface of an IPhone is many orders of magnitude greater than the entire compute capacity of the 68000 processors of that day.
It is impressive how well the I-touch technology from Apple implements the vision the Negroponte articulated so vividly 25 years earlier. And it’s surprising that it took 25 years for it to happen. The year after he delivered the TED lecture Negroponte opened the Media Lab to explore and commercialize these and other innovations.
Watching Negroponte talk provided some perspective on how dramatic the innovation we will likely experience in the coming years can be. Some innovations like the television or the i-touch interface are serendipitous, allowing us to casually adopt new behaviors based on desire and not imperatives. I am suspect the innovation that dominates the coming decades will be more akin to Jonas Salk’s discovery of the Polio vaccine.
The defining characteristic of human beings is adaptation and our times demand adaptation: the resources we use now are scarce and expensive; populations of the developed world are aging with declining birth rates while the exploding economic demands of the young burgeoning populations of the developing world are warping the global economy; the climate is changing rapidly irreversibly altering our ecosystem; and these are just a few of the challenges we face.
We now get to imagine the future that accommodates these realities and improves our lives at the same time. That’s innovation that maters. We get to do anything but stand still.
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