evoluzination

Three Productivity Tips

2012-01-01T22:27:00.000-08:00

Some time ago I shared three productivity tips I use on my daily Project Management job:

Dealing with the small, with the big and the important

Where did all the money go? From Physics to Economics.

2011-12-24T09:50:00.000-08:00

Living in California, the Real State Bubble was hard to miss from way before it actually had popped. When I arrived back to Temecula in 2005 the house prices were not real and you could tell. But, it didn't stop there it kept going up and up until the inevitable end.

When the bubble finally burst, as I saw friends and neighbors lose their homes, there was one huge question in my mind:
Where did the money go? Did it just disappear?

Having a strong physics background I started to believe that the answer was "money can be transformed but cannot be created or destroyed". Of course, this was a clear translation from the First Law of Thermodynamics:
"energy can be transformed but cannot be created or destroyed".

Time went by and data started to come out on selected news sources. We could see how the wealth gap grew in a disproportional way:

The concentration of wealth completely redistributed and as my hunch was telling me the money didn't just disappear but it experienced a deep transformation in which it changed hands.

I'm not really making a law of economics. I'm more like posing a question and wondering about the advantage of adding a cross-disciplinary perspective to the subject.

The obvious next step would be to consider the Second Law of Thermodynamics would apply to worldwide economy as well:
"A tendency that over time, differences in temperature, pressure, and chemical potential equilibrate in an isolated physical system".

Would it be possible that the globalization process we're seeing and the crisis in the first world paired up with important development in countries such as Brazil, India, China and others is a result of an equivalent law to the Second Law of Thermodynamics?

If that were true, we could predict that the world will end up being more balanced and inequality gaps would tend to be reduced over time.

NFC: One more step towards Money Virtualization

2011-09-27T07:29:00.000-07:00

Today we're witnessing one of the last steps in the virtualization of money.

Starting millenniums BC with the Egyptians and the Babylonians money was originally very physical as in commodities, such as barley, salt, and precious metals.
Continuing with the first stamped weighted coins dating back to 700BC, followed by multiple attempts to representative money (token or certificate made of paper) in the 1800s and early 1900s.
And, in an exponentially accelerated fashion converting recently to electronic or digital money with the advent of credit and debit cards, virtual payments and transfers among other ways of electronic interchange of money.

So, what is new today about money virtualization?

The answer is NFC, Near Field Communication: allows for simplified transactions, data exchange, and wireless connections between two devices in close proximity to each other, usually by no more than a few centimeters.
NFC coming soon to a cellphone near you will be a key technology to enable electronic money, electronic business cards, file sharing, mobile gaming, electronic people and things tracking and friend to friend communication.

I received today in the mail my first NFC payment tag promising "simplicity starts now" (by Citi Bank).
The little tag is designed to be adhered to the back of your phone, so no need to wait for the new NFC phones to start living this NFC era.As stated in the brochure that came with the tag, a renown network of stores is already accepting "PayPass" including: 7Eleven, Sports Authority, CVS Pharmacy, Best Buy, Hess, bp, Home Depot and Mc Donalds. I am sure the list is growing fast.

Obviously they offer the same $0 liability they offer with the rest of their cards, which is probably going to take care of some of the unnatural fears that always accompany any new technology like this.

For me this is a historic moment I've been waiting for the longest time, one more step towards liberating myself from the purse and in this case of the wallet and being lighter by carrying just a cellphone. Oops, what about Id? When will we have a digital version of it? I love those credit cards that have your pic in the back and you don't need to have an id to use them ...

May years ago I wrote about technology becoming ubiquitous using the example of the clock/watch. Today we can certainly add money to this technology trend.

Simple is better, less is more, and with this motto I leave you with all the excitement of enjoying soon from one of the last steps in money virtualization, just before the implanted chip ;)

The modern blackout

2011-09-11T10:02:00.000-07:00

If you were to compare a quick movie from the blackout when I was growing up and the blackout nowadays, I bet you could easily spot the ten differences.

Last Thursday, a work day like any other, around four in the afternoon, the unthinkable happened: electricity went off!!

The good news is that this almost never happens anymore. The bad news is that when it happens it can be a big caos.

In my mind, the power outage had to be some small fluke and something that would get resolved immediately, so my only worry was to rescue an email I was writing on my desktop computer (yes, I do work with both a notebook and a desktop computer at the same time). Luckily, I have a small power unit so my machine didn't go down, I just plugged the monitor into the power unit and saved my email, only to later find out that the email at Rackspace's website was already being saved as a draft automatically for me (used to have Google do it, but Rackspace I had no idea). While I attempted to rescue the email I realized there was no internet and no intranet.

The obvious next step was to take a small break while electricity would quickly come back up. I decided to use it as a restroom break but of course no light! That was the first thing I noticed that started to point out the big differences with the past. In the past no light would have mean candles, basically fire! Today, everybody was using their cellphones as light sources. Big change, electricity is the new fire and cellphones are the new candles! and the new computers when there's no electricity! Of course, Twitter was going strong with cellphones only.

As part of my break I went to the receptionist area where my co-workers where gathering and that's when I learned that it was a huge blackout and it probably would not have an easy fix, they still had no idea what caused it. Being on the wake of September 11th, everybody had this thoughts on the back of their minds, could this be a terrorist attack? And with reason in a way, because of how key the electricity system became on our lives ... Anyway, people were starting to freak out, let's go home now, traffic will be bad, as we looked out of the windows to increasing movement of cars. We decided to leave.

I have a one hour ride home so I thought I'd pour some water on my bottle and then take off. Guess what?? The filtering water machine is digital and it was dark, no water would come out of the thing without electricity, it was dead!

The next step was leaving the building and reaching the highway. That on a normal day is a quick 3 to 5 minutes breeze, but not that Thursday. Cars were leaving buildings like rats would leave a sinking boat, but with the stop lights not working the usual 5 minutes turned out into a claustrophobic experience of 25-30 minutes to get to the highway. I was sitting on each of the lights behind a long line of cars while cars orderly but slowly attempted to advance one by one. Right there it was a little shocking to realize our dependency on the stop lights. It is a real mess and 10 times slower without them. I kept thinking we should have an alternative not lights procedure ...

Let's recognize that with no electricity and the mess in the streets, right there, it already was feeling a little apocalyptic.

Once I reached the highway it went pretty well and 40 minutes later I was in shinny Temecula, where electricity had not been disrupted. I was still in emergency mode, ok, what do I need to do? Get gas? get some cash? water?

By the time I reached home, I had dinner and I left for a Starbucks appointment I had, it was all gone for me. But Temecula was still freaking out and gas stations were having one hour lines. Later, I heard from my neighbors that were stuck in Escondido area, that they ran out of gas, gas stations were not working, restaurants were closed, it was a big disruption.

The blackout lasted all night and was fixed first time in the morning. Spending the night without electricity is a major challenge for most of us nowadays. Of course we all survived, but to face our dependency straight on was scary for most people.

These are the times to think of solar. I imagine San Diego at night, specially on the suburbs, with people gathered around the garden solar lamps, that loyally would stand up and work regardless anything else.

Our human body depends completely on the heart pumping oxygen around all the time. Our brain can only survive 3-5 minutes without it. In the same way as our body evolved to depend on the lungs and heart function, we are collectively evolving to have a huge dependency on electricity. We humans are living proof that it's possible to survive with this kind of dependency, but we need to acknowledge it and have backup plans.

I wrote on the past about the evolutionary path towards outsourcing energy here.

The Arrow of Technology Adoption

2011-06-22T01:08:00.000-07:00

I consider myself a very techie, adaptable, flexible person, and for the most part I think I am, with one big exception: Many times in the past I noticed that I cannot adapt to go back to older suboptimal technologies.

One of the earliest signs of this condition happened to me with the digital versus analog watch.
When I was 11 years old I had my first digital watch, which was actually my very first watch. I rejoiced in the beauty of 11:11 (nicer yet on the old watches than it is on the computer nowadays as the image to the left can testify). Years went by and it become stylish to use one of the old analog watches digital watches for ladies become a rare thing. I could not, use one of those analog watches for nothing in the world. I rather use the very non-fashionable at that time digital watch than deal with the inexactitude and guessing of the analog counterparts.

At that time it just remained one more rarity of my own, and only later on I started seeing a trend.

My second very strong experience of trying to go back in time with technology was a few years ago traveling to Uruguay, South America. Usually as soon as I arrived to the airport, my mother in law would bring me one of this very useful nokia 12-keys cellphones so I could remain connected with my family up here in the US. It all worked out well until text messages started to pick up in Uruguay. That's when I became crippled. My friends would send me quick long texts and I was supposed to answer back as quickly and as lengthly as they would. I would expect to have a keyboard if I was going to type a text message. My level of frustration would become very high as I tried to handle the texts with the little 12 keys keyboard. At that point, I had to admit that I could not go back into older, less optimal technologies.

Years later, I want to write my emails and blog posts on my laptop, read my tweets on the iPad, view my youtubes on Google TV and use the cellphone for all of the above when I have no other option. I realized we're surrounding ourselves with more and more technology. As everything resides in the cloud, we can choose the best device to deliver the experience we're looking for at each particular moment.

If we keep exploring the subject, we all can find multiple areas in which these incapacity to go back in Technology without major pain is very present. We all know the feeling of being almost physically sick and impaired when some of our essential technology stops working. Try to think of the last time that you had no electricity, or internet: that is the feeling I'm talking about! I believe this is one of the symptoms of experiencing what I'll call the "Arrow of Technology".

The "Arrow of Technology Adoption" (paraphrasing the "Arrow of Time": wikipedia, or more technically), describes the "one-way direction" or "asymmetry" of technology adoption.
Please note that the "Arrow of Time" might exist merely in the human perceptual level in the same way that the "Arrow of Technology" might exist merely in the human adoption of Technology, not necessarily in the sense of Technological evolution itself.

The "Arrow of Technology Adoption" does not imply that technology always arrives to stay for good. A perfect example is the arouse of Windows Tablet PCs in the 2000s. In year 2004, I got myself a touch screen Windows Tablet PC. Once the super coolness factor, of riding the Chicago train and having all the eyes on my super toy, got old, it started being a real pain to have to carry my crippled tablet with a stand and a keyboard at all times because I would feel completely crippled without a keyboard. Years later the iPad, and later on other tablets, as well as smart phones, made the concept of keyboard-less a reality. In this particular case, technology didn't get enough adoption on the first attempt, and it faded away, but later on it came back to be a winner.

Understanding the Adoption Curve of Technology together with the rules of the "Arrow of Technology" and its implications, will allow us to optimize our own technology adoption process in the family, company or personal levels. Also, there lays great opportunity in the understanding of these two principles as we could plan accordingly, stay ahead of the curve and ultimately innovate and compete in a technologically complex world.

I wouldn't be surprised if one day we can link the "Arrow of Technology Adoption" at the entropy level, after all, as much as many of us fight the concept, technology is part of the natural/physical world.

Twitter is closer to emulate a Neural Network than Facebook

2011-05-28T07:33:00.001-07:00

When we think of Twitter and the innovation behind it, the first thing we all think is 140.
140 characters is without a doubt an amazing innovation that Twitter introduced which makes communication flow faster, forces twitters to summarize a piece of news or information, or an idea or an opinion and allows followers to get information or an idea faster as well.

Also, after the introduction of url shorteners (tinyurl,com originally and many others later on such as bit.ly) an emergent property of Twitter came to life: the linked web. Any blog post or news article out there could be potentially linked multiple times in Twitter with quick summaries and opinions.

Other emerging properties or elements in Twitter are:
. Tags, early on twitters started using tags as a way to group events or themes together and follow them separately.
. Curated content appeared more recently in an attempt to organize tweets in channels like mode.

There is one more original Twitter property we don't hear much about and I believe it's a key element to the Twitter success.

In the world of two way communications, Twitter is one of the first Social Networks that works asymmetrically versus working symmetrically like Facebook.
In Facebook, you are my friend at the same time I am your friend (with the exceptions of some of the user types). We could call that a Symmetric Social Network. Other previous successful examples of Symmetric Networks are Skype and Instant Messengers.
In Twitter, there's no implied/automatic relationship between those that I follow and those that follow me. We could call that an Asymmetric Social Network. Other previous successful examples of Asymmetric Networks are phones, cellphones and emails, the linked web.

When you look at a Neural Network, you'll find that it is also an Asymmetric Network. Neurons have their axons that allow them to connect to other neurons, at the same time, other neurons have the freedom to connect their own axons back to the neurons connecting to them or choose other not connected neurons to hook up with.

It seems like Twitter is imitating nature's success in implementing this type of social network architecture.
The most common neurons in the brain (called multipolar neurons) process their in-coming and out-coming connections separately. On a neuron, dendrites are receptors for in-coming connections and the axon branches out-coming connections.

On a simile between the Twitter and the Neural Network model we would see the following:
. The Twitter accounts that follow me would be like the Axon connections on a neuron.
. The Twitter accounts a person follows would be like the Dendrites connections on a neuron.

Thinking of the advantages of connecting Asymmetrically you could find a few:
. More flexibility and plasticity on the resulting graph.
. Easier to detect Hubs and greater influence of Hubs on the Network.
. More independence (freedom of choice regarding incoming communications) in the level of the individual cell or network node.
. Loose (light weight) connections.

Advantages of a Symmetric Network:
. Greater Trust in the Network Connections.
. More back and forth, one to one Communications.
. Tighter connections.
. More room for reciprocity to occur.

Different Networks do have different purposes. Like this article states, Facebook is more of an Identity Platform while Twitter is more of a communication platform.

As a conclusion, Bio-mimicry is big nowadays as a source of innovation and ideas for the technological world we're creating to learn and be inspired on the biological world leveraging its millions of years of evolution.

I'm sure there are more implications in the end graph that either Network type generate that would be interesting to research.
I wonder if we would see different levels of complexity on the resulting graphs.
I also wonder what other properties we could mimic or learn from the Neural Networks to apply into our Social Networks.

TEDx American Finest City: Get your fix!

2011-05-10T10:12:00.000-07:00

This TEDx event is being broadcasted live at: http://tedxamericasfinestcity.com/webcast/

The event harvested social networking from the beginning. They opened with an image saying: turn your cellphone volume off but leave the phone on because we want you to tweet!

Wonderful ideas delivered! Some notes on the talks:

Howard Blackson
Building Community Character

His idea is to add neighborhood nodes: find those centers and build paseos, plazas, combining the informal eclectic model with the formal. The juxtaposition adds value to the surrounding.
Building for city of vilages with 10 minutes distance among each other.
Build for social and cultural value which brings tremendous economic value.

James Brown
Design for intent

Buildings have intentions (Tells the story of a house to die).
A house is a sign, gives a description of the inhabitants.
Houses that tell stories.
Design: pushing for awkwardness, looking for discomfort.
Example the longest kitchen on the world.
Project, Friendship Park: San Diego - Tijuana.
Double fence at the border, US border built a second fence and broke this space of encounter.
Friends of Friendship park made a proposal to build a park between the two fences: send a message of unity instead of division

Scott Silverman from Second Chance
Compelling personal story:
Speaking about his miss-fortunes at school.
Was advised to be the best failure he could be.
Scott Silverman moving story from Second Chance: recycling human beings. http://bit.ly/k7bjr9
He believes in building human capital.
Never accept no for an answer. Tell me no, I dare you!?

Serge Dedina
Used different strategies to keep the oceans clean conveying the message through:
Sex it up!
"My man doesn't need to eat Sea Turtle eggs"
Figure out how people are communicating and infuse the social campaigns with feelings.
Punk it up!
Clean water now campaign example.

Transcendance
The orginal beat joins all beats and becomes whole.
Amazing trance dance performance.
Dance is a Universal language
The bodies have wisdom.
Since the beginning of time, we have danced to heal our community.
By expressing our individuality with movement, we know our story, we show our story.
There's a dance that lives inside of all of us.
Dance is healing, magic, communion.

David Lecours
"The Power of Story"

Be the change you with to see in the world.
If you pull from one source you;re copying, but if you're pulling from multiple sources you call that research.
Stories connect with the subconscious mind, the emotional mind.
You must connect in an emotional level, not only intellectual level.
We are drowning in a sea of facts, facts became a commodity and are not as valuable as they used to be.
If you torture numbers long enough they'll confess to anything you want them to.
When you weed stories on those numbers that changes all.
I am moved, therefore I am! Descartes, take that!
Story model behavior:
. provides simulation. how to act
. provides inspiration, motivation to act
. story encourages participation, call to action
Neuro-science is showing that when you're hearing a story you fire the same neurons as living story.
Stories are like mental software.
To tell your story, tap into that personal thing that can move somebody else.
On telling a company's story, three elements:
. foundation story, how organization came to be
. customer story, how it made a difference for somebody that can tell the story for you
. future story, where is it going

Larry Rosenstock
High Tech High

There's a therapeutic value to paradox, we need to integrate dualities.
Integrate head and hand.
Make students perplex.
Integrating school and community: interns, kids called into community to see what they make.
Higher for disposition, train for change
Model and Example, duality
Thomas jefferson: the purpose of public education is to create the public.
By larry's mom: there's two kind of people on this world, those who think there are two kinds of people and those who don't.
http://www.hightechhigh.org/

The New Education

2011-05-08T21:38:00.001-07:00

We all know something is broken with our Education System.

Do you want proof?
“In any field but education, if you fell asleep 50 years ago and woke up today, you’d have no clue what was going on. Things have changed, but in education we seem stuck.”
Joel Klein, Former Chancellor, NYC Dept. of Education
From Waiting for Superman.

Victor Hugo said: "There is nothing more powerful than an idea whose time has come."

I'm starting to think this is the case with "The New Education". Even if yet controversial the subject is out there, people are talking about it, and some visionaries can imagine how it might look.

Mark Randall is clearly such a visionary, as proved by his "humble suggestion" as he called it, or more truthfully a call to action to the Web Entrepreneur Community on his keynote at the Next Web Conference, Amsterdam 2011.

(if interested specifically on The New Education portion of this talk tune into minute 19:00)

Some thoughts in relation to "The New Education":

We desperately need a technology that allows "The New Education" to revolutionize the way we teach our kids: an education about ideas and thinkers, artists and creators.

When kids are following their curiosity and they have a question is when they're ready to be matched with a teacher and learn. The matching could be based on a Pandora Style DNA of both teachers and lessons. If a kid has certain interest and likes certain teacher or lesson, that will mean they're likely to learn from these other teachers and lessons. Also, a system such as Netflix "because you enjoyed ... we suggest you'd like ..." would be very beneficial in this kind of environment.

When kids play freely they have the concentration, focus, passion, perseverance that makes learning and creativity flourish. There's no replacement for motivation and there's no way that a kid can link to information if they don't have the questions already in place on their own minds or the open links waiting for a connection.

I imagined the education system of the future to be like a game, where kids get points/badges/stickers/privileges according to the activities they perform (foursquare or getglue style).
Students teaching other students with a system of rating and rewards should be a key part as when we teach, we learn and there's great satisfaction when you can help your peers.
It's be hard to imagine the education system of the future not being embedded in a social networking environment, with friends, follows, walls, status shares, and the whole enchilada.

There's the Khan Academy project, by Salman Khan and Bill Gates, that could interlock or be an antecedent in many different ways to a project like this.

Recently, I've been looking at the Sudbury Model also called Democratic Schooling and the Unschooling movements, and I think there's great lessons that can be included in this mix coming from their decades of experience with an alternative education. They also have succumbed to the pace of time and technology seems to be the glue that they're missing, which would tie everything together.

I'm sure there's a long but exciting road ahead!

A Summary on Mark's talk:

In the name of Education, a battle we're losing according to Mark Randall, in the next month Earth will spend $2 Trillion on Education and it's still a battle we're currently failing.

He does a little history:
. 18th Century, we prepared students for an agrarian/rural society.
. 19th Century, we prepared students for an industrial economy, a model we're still using today.
. 20th Century, education to produce good citizens, outstanding, productive contributors to society.
. 21st Century? the rate of change is accelerated, reaching the knee of an exponential growth curve, we need to prepare generations for an unknown future. This is scary!

Questions he asks himself and to the entrepreneur crowd:
How can we teach kids when the important questions are changing?
How can we teach kids when you can reach all of man-kind assembled knowledge on the palm of your hand?
Thinking becomes far more important than knowing. It's not about pouring facts into kids' heads.
It's about teaching:
. Reasoning (Logic)
. Creativity (Flow, play, free time)
. Curiosity (Innate)

And then, the humble invitation:
"There's a million dollar opportunity!" A hundred million reasons! And, by the way, a hundred million Euros!

Regarding the specific mechanics that Mark imagines for "The New Education" he proposes we match levels and learning styles/speed. We need to match students trajectories, in the same way we match dates and relationships on the web today.

This is not a hard problem when you look at it from a web technology perspective. We already know how to take millions of gamers and match their levels on real time from around the world.
Why can't we use students and their learning styles and match them together? We don't necessarily need more teachers but we need better ways of matching them together.

An implementation question: "How could we deliver video of the best teachers on Earth, giving their finest performances of their lives, at the right moment, at the right time, when that student is exactly ready for this lesson?"

Of course, video technology will not replace the need for caring teachers. Mark proposes we use voice over IP, and we make scarse teachers resources accesible as Live Help using the same model as Online Customer Support.

I couldn't agree more with the fact that, leaving the controversy aside, games are basically simulations. Your mind does not differentiate between you doing something on a game or in real life. Mark says "Simulations are experience in a bottle." So, games/simulations would be a big part of the plan.

On the prominent role of games in "The New Education":
"We've become very good in building addicting games, users are playing 3 billions hours a week of collective game playing online.
Imagine if we were to turn those coordinated multi-player experiences into something a little more productive. Imagine users being able to now shape their educational experience and staying with them in that constant state of flow as they get better and better, it gets harder and harder.
We can take the same technology and apply it to get meaning!"

Mark goes as far as providing a business model that would sustain profitability by catering the North American, European and Australian markets while contributing for free to the rest of the world.
He suggests we go straight to the end-user and cut out the middle man, a clear tendency of the whole market: newspapers, music, services, products, used goods.

He points to her daughter and says: "This is your end user." Then, he points to his wife and says: "However, this is your customer. And this customer is obviously one of the highest motivated customers that there are."

More on the implementation, he boldly states: "I believe there are 10 million potential customers that will gladly pay 10 Euros a month for a solution that is radically better and shows proven results, gives constant feedback, where's the child, how are they growing, what skills do they need. A text message: a kid plays a game, encounters new challenges, conquers them and has new skills they need to learn. Diiiing! parent gets a text message. You really should talk to Johnny today about judgement, he did some poor judgement calls."

Brilliant!!

Could Video Games be better than soccer developing team player skills?

2011-02-10T05:16:00.001-08:00

We all have heard the phrase "Kids need to play a team player kind of sport".
Oh well, to the risk of being a "bad mom" I'll admit that for some reason that never worried me much.
My daughters tried a myriad of different things from gymnastics to swimming, ballet, dance, soccer and even ice skating, but in the end the only thing that has sticked so far is Tae kwon do.
As one of my friends has a boy that has a similar pattern with sports it let me thinking on this deficiency that apparently some kids today would have regarding developing team player skills.

That is until, a couple of days ago, I sat with my daughter on my lap to watch her play RoBlox.com.
She was playing a war tycoon kind of game. Probably, not my favorite thing if you'd ask me, but my parenting style goes along the lines of letting them experiment and discover their own truths. After all, if war is as bad as I think it is, she should discover that eventually on the virtual world (although not sure about that having sometime infinite lives). Anyway, that would be probably a whole different discussion.

Back to the team play thing.
She was vividly describing things to me as much as she could without getting killed in the meantime, while I was making all sorts of annoying questions.
Some of what was happening was that some robloxs she was killing because they were not part of her team, and some others she was cool because they were. I was looking at the screen and seeing on the top right of the screen a list of roblox names with the amount of points (money actually according to her), the times she knocked out someone and the times she was knocked out by someone else.

Anyway, the thing is that I could not see any team indication in the screen. So, one of my most recurrent questions was: How do you know who's on your team?
Eventually, it was time for me to get an answer, and the answer was:
- You see, he's on my team because he gave me a sword. And now, I'm going to give him a medicine bottle so he can restore himself.
- So, the game is not telling you what the teams are? The game doesn't even know that you guys are a team? But, you're teaming up just because it makes sense???

This was an aha moment for me. So, cooperation and team building is intrinsic to online gaming to a level that goes beyond the original game design? Wow!
Obviously, there are video games that are known to develop team playing and strategy planning, but it seems that this is a systemic property.

Now, the mom in me can rest assured that video games are better than soccer when it comes to developing team player skills.

Adventure on Kid's Social Networks Land

2010-12-30T06:52:00.000-08:00

Yesterday night my casual stop by my daughter's bedroom to steal a kiss turned out into a fascinating and then scary experience.

My daughters Nicole (10) and Angelina (7) have been into kid's social networks for around 3 years.
While my older daughter Nicole was obsessively pursuing Club Penguin's cheats, my younger daughter Angelina, 7, was all about having boyfriends and of course later breaking up with them.
Recently they switched to RoBlox.com, as Club Penguin is totally "boring", according to them. On the new site they continue with the same pursuits. Nicole is playing games, accumulating points and building her own games. In the meantime, Angelina is taking the dating scene to the next level.

Back to yesterday night! Apparently, Angelina, also known as "roGirlsRock" just broke up with "Amit...", her boyfriend from the last two months to be with "Xenergy...".
"Xenergy..." suggested Angelina would get an iPod app called Text Plus (not the first one that appears on the search, but the second one) which allows kids to text each other from any iOS device from ficticious numbers (as the phones and internet separation line gets blurry, a kind of cool concept, freemium, pay $2 a year if you want to chose your number). So, we did install the app. Then, we tried to send the fake text plus number to her "boyfriend", and roblox acted as if it was doing that, but indeed it was actually completely blocking it and never sending the whole line to the other players.

Letting the experiment continue ... we launched the Text Plus app.
First thing I realized launching the app is that text plus, as opposed to most kid's networks does allow you to publish your picture. So glad I was there! We take a pic of her roblox character and add it to her profile. Next thing I see on the incoming text is instructions on how to take her own pic. Then, the kid sees that Angelina uploaded her character's pic and asks "ro" as he calls her:
- Send me a pic of you.

Paranoia!
At this time I'm completely stressed out knowing that Angelina is having a super rush with her new boyfriend but this is potentially and absolutely wrong. All sort of scenarios appeared into my mind: could this be a kid's predator? would this be just a normal teenager doing their normal thing? after all texting and interchanging pics, is what teenagers do! Either way, this is way too much for Angelina, even with her social smarts she is only 7! Actually, she just turned 7 today!! I instruct her to tell the kid she can't post pics of herself, she's only 7. At that point, even she gets scared and writes:
- "I'm breaking up with you".
The kid goes:
- "Ow. why?".

Then, we both decide she could be friends but no pics, you've got to realize all of this is happening super fast.
So he's sending pics of some tiger in the snow and all seems back to pretty naive.
A second later there we go again, Angelina is sending pics of our office (not including herself) and that instant I remembered that some day I read that's the way they do it, they ask kids to send pics of anything and once they get into the habit and comfort they go back to the personal pics request. Paranoia! Paranoia!!

I really have no way to tell if this is a total pervert or a completely normal teenager and I keep thinking this is nuts! There should be a way to know who's who in the net, which brings me back to my previous post on Digital Identity through Social Networks Algorithms.

Anyway, we both knew we had to stop just around the same time my husband become aware of the situation and his common sense was luckily stronger that my curiosity to understand how things work ... so that's the end of "Xenergy...", I guess Angelina will have to go back to "Amit..." who didn't ask for a pic in two months :)

New rules:
1. No communications outside roBlox except with real world friends. At least inside roBlox most communications between kids are public.
2. No pics exchange until she's 10, to be continued ...

It seems amazing to me that a kid can save so much "real life" pain and learn many lessons online in "test mode". On the other hand I find myself and my daughter completely un-prepared to handle all the new situations that arise with this new culture.

Suggestions are welcomed!!!!

Are Social Networks the new Digital Identity?

2010-11-05T03:58:00.000-07:00

Digital Identity is one of the Holy Grails of out time. Back in 2007 I was wondering and blogging about it. It was a valid question, but the answer I found at that time is (at least in the short term) being prooved wrong. I thought that more traditional identification ways (such as institutional national and international digital ids) would be eventually needed for the net. Only in the comments area of that blog post there is a glimpse of vision: "Because the net is a new media new solutions might arise" ... and they certainly did!

We're witnessing an emergent property of social networks: the Social Identity is becoming the new Digital Identity.

Let's see how social networks play a determinant role on three key aspects of Digital Identity:

1. Login connection. Facebook/Google/Yahoo/Twitter connect is increasingly the "de facto" login for websites and mobile apps (Google and Facebook on the top of the chart).

2. Persona search. Google anybody's name and when it comes to personal information social networks such as Facebook/Twitter/LinkedIn will become one of the main sources (depending on privacy settings).

3. Personal connection. If you meet someone in real life or via the net, and you're attempting to connect with them in a personal or professional level chances are you will be looking for them in Facebook/Twitter/LinkedIn.

4. Contact Information. In the past if you wanted to give someone your contact information you probably would give them your phone number or your email. Nowadays, in a tendency that might over time be replacing personal cards, you just tell people friend me on Facebook, or follow me on twitter, or connect to me in LinkedIn.

One of the main issues with Digital Identity is Authenticity, and Social Networks have intrinsically built an authenticity mechanism: your social connections and social activity!

Of course Social Networks are also subject to identity fraud and false identities but it should be possible to detect and fix these within the Networks themselves.

I propose that Social Networks should provide an Authenticity Index (SNAI) to each person. The purpose of the SNAI is to determine the likability of a person to correspond with a real world physical person.

The SNAI of each person could be calculated based on the addition of the following factors:

1. The aggregated SNAI of their connections. This is the simplest one. For each connection I have my SNAI would increase proportionally (or on an scalated way) to the SNAI of the connection. If I have connections that have a higher SNAI that will increment my SNAI in turn.
2. The aggregated in-network level of activity weighted by their interacting connections' SNAIs. This factor is an attempt to measure and pound the person's interaction with their connections. Reciprocal Interactions between people are a factor to increase the person's SNAIs. In this case the weighted SNAI of the contacts the person interacts is a factor too in an attempt to prevent farmed activity that would provide fake rankings.
3. The aggregated out-of-network level of activity weighted by the organization's connections' combined SNAIs. This factor is included in an attempt to allow people to choose their preferred networks as far as activity and still reflect that activity across the networks. In this case the weight of the organization combined SNAI is a factor too in an attempt to prevent farmed organizations that would provide fake rankings.

I now, it is a very recursive algorithm that could easily get into a deadlock. I'd try starting with everybody's SNAI being 1, always taking the last iteration SNAIs in any calculation and build it up with multiple iterations and some people's SNAI's should be incrementing greatly while other's will remain pretty low. After a few iterations most people should reflect their authenthicity or their "fakeness". It obviously should be scoped and refined but as a start ...

Facebook seems to be the company that would be in the best position in the market today to implement something like this and that would place them at the core of the Digital Identity solution.

GeneXus Smart Devices Generation: GeneXus X Evolution 2 Beta

2010-10-30T11:07:00.000-07:00

ARTech released on Friday night the first bits of the GeneXus X Evolution 2 Beta which can be downloaded here.

As the GeneXus Community is very aware, GeneXus can and will be of extreme importance at moments like the present time, when there are software paradigm changes, as it can accelerate the adoption curve for any new computer software or platform.

Right now, GeneXus is riding the wave of Smart Devices full speed with multiple strategies and converting it on a turning point in its market development.

With the launch of the GeneXus X Evolution 2 Beta (find in twitter as #gxev2beta) GeneXus customers will have the opportunity to generate applications for Smart Devices starting with Android OS and continuing with iOS and BlackBerry OS, with the same easiness as always.

The process, as described in the GeneXus wiki to have an emulator demo up and running is super simple. Just create couple transactions, a Ruby model (for the moment the data services model is generated in Ruby, future versions will generate for .net, java), apply the "Work With Devices" pattern, change couple properties and voila!

We'll be expecting some level of automatic cloud deployment of Android applications on the next beta most likely. GeneXus already has a good grip of this technology as it's part of their SDX product (more information coming soon).

There are many more features we'll be expecting to see on the Smart Devices Generator, with the one on the top of the list being Multi-tenant applications, followed by including regular non-pattern generated web panels and some level of access to device sensors especially GPS which is at the core of mobile technology.

I can't help but thinking that when you have a well designed extensible platform with a state of the art architecture like GeneXus X does, changes can stack up with great speed. We are witnessing an exponential growth of the GeneXus Platform in regards of the Smart Devices Market. The company is indeed taking all opportunities to make the implicit advantages of their unique platform count and make a difference to their customers.

Android App Inventor Hello Purr

2010-09-05T10:35:00.000-07:00

My first application with App Inventor is the Hello Purr.
Download it using this barcode:

This tool is just awesome!

It's a mix of Scratch (programming language for kids) and lego mindstorms programming environment. It packages the app for you and produces a codebar code so you can publish it for download from any android.

Only one thing was a little annoying in the operation, the integration on Chrome between the designer and the blocks editor is a little sketchy.

I can see the Genexus community building extensions for App Inventor so that with a few clicks we're building amazing android apps connected to our favorite mission critical databases.

According to this Techcrunch post it will be possible to extend the App Inventor.
As far as Google documentation so far I only found this, talking about extensions in three levels: create components, add to the library and interoperate with webservices.

Priority Inbox as a Software Pattern

2010-09-04T07:29:00.000-07:00

Once in a while an idea emerges that changes the way we do things profoundly.
I believe Priority Inbox, by Google (view note below) is one of these little things, beyond email, it will change the way we program and the way users interact with the systems we develop.

Particularly in the software world, this kind of reminds me of the emergence of the auto-suggest feature.
It started with Google search if I'm not mistaken and continued with all of us adopting it as a best practice, including smart tools like Genexus generator, making it standard properties into their objects and simple click programming.

The future of priority handling might be the same. We might see in the near future that when we're looking at our customer or product list, there are some customers and products that have a whole different level of relevance than others, and I as a user might want to star some customers, products, cases, transactions, invoices, etc that I'm working with at the moment and visualize them with higher priority.

Google Email deserves to be called a mass product by now. Therefore, regular users will incorporate priority email as a natural thing that software does for them and sooner or later we'll have to implement it for them. I say, let's be ahead of the curve, let's make the priority standard behavior for grids now! This might be a job for a Genexus component or maybe more so for the Genexus Pattern Generator Tool ...

Note:
It appears that there are patents filled by Microsoft for similar priority emails sent to mobile devices as far back as '99 ... read more here.

Mobile: sliding pages expand the house

2010-09-04T06:57:00.000-07:00

A week ago I found myself day dreaming about increasing the visual real state in my iPad and my Droid. Once you use the iPad desktop, where you can discover new magical rooms by sliding right or left, there's no way back. You have to have the same thing in applications and it finally is starting to arrive.

It reminds me of the time when my grandparents decided to downsize, sell the big house with backyard and move to the 2 bedroom apartment. I totally remember that I even had dreams where new rooms would attach magically to the apartment for my amusement and amazement.

The difference is that when it comes to mobile, we're in a virual world, and new rooms can magically appear and dissapear!!

Some of the pioneers out there:
1. Facebook app for iPad, allows you to to select your main options from the main menu and you can slide right or left to add new options [via @mcanziani]
This app seems to have copied the concept of sliding pages just for the exact same use that the iPad has for it, desktop management. They didn't seem to connect the dots and go one more step, using sliding screens for apps.
2. TweetDeck for Android, allows you to have one column per page, it has a great denotation for pages with a title on top and the now standard dots.
3. Twitter for iPad, this one not only got the sliding screens idea but it also innovated as far as how to handle those screens. I don't think the innovation replaces 100% the simple full screen slide, but it's a great, creative innovative way of handling screens and it will ripple.

I'm sold on Android 2.2

2010-05-20T22:19:00.000-07:00

Hard as it is to admit, I was about to give in to Apple and the iPhone/iPad after years of maintaining myself on the other side of the fence.
After watching the Google Developer's Conference tonight, I'm completely in awe, sold on the Android 2.2

. faster browser
. cloud to device API
. voice recognition/translation
. sharing your wi-fi from one android device
. automatic application platform
. HDMI output

But what is more fundamental open platform, open device, open source, which means that we might finally get to have a platform across the board for all devices.

It looks like finally there's a good shot at Platform Convergence.
Innovation is around the corner, I can imagine the applications and uses that the intent to device will inspire.

Also, looking forward to the non-proprietary platform for the impending TV Box:

Can't wait for the first device implementing Google/Tv.

The hidden pleasure of Zero-Sum Games

2009-10-16T03:43:00.000-07:00

As Soccer World Cup finals are rounding up, it's this great time of the year when Uruguayans get together to suffer one more time on the hope of being able to re-enact those glorious years of 1930's and 1950's Soccer World Cup.

Living outside the country gave me the opportunity to look at the spectacle of the last Uruguay-Argentina qualifier round from a different perspective. My sister on skype described for me a country where every person was glued to the TV, nobody in the streets, no exceptions! At that time it hit me! Argentina being very similar to Uruguay, was for sure doing the same exact thing at the same exact time. I could picture the two countries following this one event that would define the country that would have an opportunity at the World Cup. It downed to me how sad it was that no matter what, that night, one of those two nations would be massively happy and the other would be massively sad. There was no way around it. Of course there was not! Soccer is a Zero-Sum Game and as the name proclaims the outcome for the total system will inevitably be Zero.

Oh well, as Argentina has approximately 11 times more population than Uruguay, I guess more people were happy than sad in the end that day ... Thinking deeper, if you tried to take away this game from either Uruguayans or Argentinians might as well kill them ... so I started realizing that even in a game where the score is definitely a Zero-Sum Game, the experience must be positive in some ways that are hard for me to understand, both because I'm ADD and can't follow the ball in a TV screen and because I'm hopelessly geek (if your definition of geek doesn't include nerd, please add nerd here).

Anyway, I really hoped that someone had explained to me this Zero-Sum Game concept when I was 4 (even when I wouldn't understand negative numbers by that time, the concept is graspable I think). It did have a great impact in my life understanding this.

Also, wanted to share some Non-Zero-Sum Games that I enjoyed lately:

[via Diana in FB]

[via Enrique in FB]

[via Andres in real life]

In addition, I found this TED video by Robert Wright (author of Non-Zero, The Logic of Human Destiny). Very interesting acid humored video with a great recount of evolution and makes a point regarding cultural evolution and the arrowed evolution of morality which I totally agree too. Even more, he states that technology has a positive role and effect in the direction of morality's evolution, a question I asked myself before and couldn't quite dig.

Conversations we have

2009-10-04T05:54:00.000-07:00

Some time ago, I started paying attention to the conversations that I have with other people. Sort of a pattern started arising at some point. Eventually I realized there are three types of conversations people have:

1. Casual conversations. These are the conversations about the weather, local or global headline news, about things that are happening around us now, about things we've done, are doing in the present or we want to do in the future. It's a very healthy level of conversation to have with people that we don't know: street, elevator, bus, train, market. The main subject of these type of conversations are things.

2. Personal conversations. These are conversations about what is happening on my life and my close ones. It's more appropriate to have these type of conversations with people that know each other. The main subject of these type of conversations are people and things that are happening to people. There are different levels of personal conversations. There's the lower side of it where people are talking mostly about facts of what's going on their lives and going up in the pyramid there's the ones in which people are talking about how they feel about things that are happening to them and their closest ones, to finally the upper level in which people are analyzing the reasons behind things and trying to draw conclusions, mirror the other person's situation or identify patterns and relationships among those personal experiences.

3. Conceptual conversations. Conceptual conversations are about ideas, concepts. They're abstract representations or interpretations of reality or fantasy, inventions or any other type of creations. These type of conversations are more scarce and they are the basis/responsible for human advances in different areas. Some examples of this type of conversation would be when you're talking about religion, politics, science, social issues, projects, inventions, theories, laws, principles, etc.

There's not a right or wrong way to have your conversations, although there's probably a trend. There seem to be a strong correlation between these conversations pyramid and Maslow's pyramid of human needs. I believe as people go up in Maslow's pyramid they also go up on the conversations they have.

It's a great experiment to start observing what type of conversations we have and how we feel about them. I think part of what actually got me thinking on all of this was that I was starting to feel very frustrated when people I know would spend all of our encounter's time on casual conversations or barely brushing on personal ones.

I personally love casual conversations as they allow me to interact with unknown people around the world which is a very basic need for me as well as for the other party. I choose to spend most of my time with people I know talking personal or conceptual conversations. Usually when I meet a friend I like to move fairly quickly from casual to personal, cover all the basis, and if everything is pretty clear on the personal side for both me and my friend I often love to indulge myself as well into conceptual conversations.

It's probably arguable that there is more meaning going up on the pyramid, and it's also probably not really showing proportions very accurately as maybe the pyramid we should be drawing would be more like the creators, synthesizers and consumers pyramid than the one pictured here.

Don't forget health care

2009-08-23T07:55:00.001-07:00

It's hard to believe but this was the long due and forgotten third bullet point back in 1992 during Clinton's campaign:

1. Change vs. more of the same. It looks like we got that one!
2. The economy, stupid. You've got to be really stupid not to notice this one by now ...
3. Don’t forget health care. This one doesn't seem so obvious. This is part of the right to live or how is it not part of the right to live?

I'd add a forth one: Don't forget education!! Coming from a country were the educational principles of education being free (all the way including universities), mandatory and religious-free, it looks like there's a lot to accomplish there too. Especially when the world is changing and education is big time stagnated.

It is time for Health care for all. Don't forget health care!

Twitter: "It's the search, stupid"

2009-08-23T07:45:00.000-07:00

For all of you that are wondering, why do I need this Twitter thing? and what is the big deal about knowing what other people had for breakfast? or thinking, I'll never come back to this Twitter in a zillion years... think again!

Here's a little different perspective of why Twitter is indeed so relevant and it will just become more and more relevant overtime.

Did you think that Twitter was a life streaming service? Well ... it is! but what it is really becoming is a huge index for web content organized by time, social closeness and geographical data. So, what do you get in the end? A search engine, even when we don't see it like that for now. That's where it's going and that's what it will become for the majority of users that are not necessarily content generators but content consumers.

We have to remember that users will follow the 1:10:100 rule as far as content creation, a trend that might be changing with younger generations but is still very true as of today. This rule would basically tell us that every 100 "content consumer" users that will be out there just reading tweets, following others and searching there will be 10 that are "synthesizers" mostly doing re-tweets and hollow posts (no links to new web content or no relevant content on their own) and only 1 will be actually "creators" generating tweets that index relevant pages created on the web or have original text content of their own. Right now, twitter users are mostly in the synthesizers and creators groups (1:10) and the big consumers group (100) is usually not enticed enough to stay. Those consumers are the people that signed up, checked it out, thought useless/boring/time waste and forgot about it ... But, things will change.

Search will be refined, like it just was by adding location, and it'll become more evident and user friendly. Content will have more metadata attached, which in the end is search engine material, so search results can be more relevant. Content will continue to grow and expand. And, sooner or later, the consumers group, the 100 group, which is the mainstream group as well, will start finding utility in searching, discovering and using twitter information. The index will work for them, and they'll be the new twitter fans.

Here are the reasons why, twitter it's all about search:

1. Tweets are 140-char link indexes.
Tweets do link the web. Most everything that is being produced on the net right now such as blog posts, web site pages, other tweets, facebook updates (soon to come) are linked by tweets. Tweets are pointing to everything that is happening on the web as it happens. That's where the 140 characters limitation worked a miracle by generating new habits of synthesizing an idea and linking to the expanded content which creates the super web index that twitter is becoming.

2. Relevance by freshness, social closeness and geo-location.
The user in the present moment is or could be at the center of the search experience in twitter. I could search by freshness or time relevance and I assume with time they could be allowing me to actually search for tweets in the future or past in addition to the precious now. Also, I could search within the global twitterverse as well as I could be searching within my own network of who I decide to follow. Recently enabled was the search by physical location which brings into the picture incredible extra ways in which searchs can be profiled.

3. Social built-in.
Twitter started as a social network, a flexible one, much more open than others like Facebook, but the social component of being able to say these are the people I care for is there and that might be key in the future of how they cater search. This is a key component of the viral behavior twitter generates. Once data portability is implemented, as it most likely will be, you could post in twitter for only your group of friends or for all your followers and be much on control of how you share/stream your data.

Update: found this great article about this same subject back in Feb 09.

Twitter enables geo-location for tweets

2009-08-22T06:26:00.000-07:00

Twitter announced couple days ago one of the smartest moves that they could have possibly done. They will be adding latitude and longitude to their tweets. The first step will be through their API so that all the applications in the twitterverse can post tweets with location. In the future they'll also allow it from their own channels.

Why is this so powerful?
This addition totally deepens the gap between traditional web search and real time geo search. There is an ongoing battle in the search world and Twitter is already beating the traditional search when it comes to real time events. If you wanted to know information about Michael Jackson, a political movement in Iran or an earthquake happening right now somewhere in the world you definitely would benefit much more from searching in twitter than doing so in Google or bing.
The geographical search will bring one more layer to our virtual world. Now, not only can you ask twitter what's happening right now around some tag words, but you could also limit the scope to some particular geographical area.

Our syncing between the real and digital world will have location connection in addition to time connection once this technology is widely adopted as it will.
I believe it actually will bring closer our digital and real worlds ...
It's like if our virtual worlds were hanging out there in a time mesh and in the short future the mesh will be attached by infinity of points to the face of Earth. Maybe I'm being to matrixy here, but that's what I think will happen ;)

As GPS enabled devices are becoming more mainstream this kind of search will become very important. This is the connection in real time and in situ. This is revolutionary! We'll open many other ways of doing things because of this new geo-layer and it makes total sense that Twitter will be at the heart of it all.

Other than navigation tools, GPS has been pretty secluded for niche applications seldom used massively. With twitter geo-location addition plus the ubiquity of mobile devices with integrated GPS we'll see an explosion of new uses for location based applications. I can see it being used for sharing during events such as concerts, congresses, conventions, exploring new friends/hangouts/dates, getting discounts/coupons/sales information as you are at stores or malls, emergency uses of all sorts, etc.

There's obviously a great business model behind this new Twitter feature, as once you have location targeted ads become a must. Foursquare actually already uses them in some capacity.

Note: This was one of the first times that I learned about this by twitter before than blogs ...

Two shooting stars

2009-08-12T08:51:00.000-07:00

My last night's insomnia turned for the good when Google reminded me that the Perseids were peeking today around 4:00am. As a side note, I never saw the Google logo sooo nice. Too bad it was already 4:38 when I found out, plus the moon was out, Temecula was pretty bright and the sun raising orange light was starting to show up.

Still, I managed to see two pretty good shooting starts close to Orion constellation. (I didn't expect to see them there, not enough time to research though).

Orion, Hiades and Pleyades (my very favorite constellation) were aligned almost with the Moon, it was a nice night out there. Of course mosquitoes started to bother me too and it was time to say: Mission accomplished!

If you didn't catch this one, you still can give it a shot tonight and a few more nights ...

Note: stargazers, my fav website for star related matters, seems to be down, apparently they couldn't escalate after some online newspapers mentioned them.

Touchable Holography

2009-08-10T06:30:00.000-07:00

Very cool, from University of Tokyo, Holographic image that you can feel:

Video: Airborne Ultrasound Tactile Display - fühlbare Hologramme (2:37)

Beware: Nintendo Dsi creates zombies!

2009-08-09T21:45:00.000-07:00

As happy as I was when Santa got us the Nintendo Wii as much as I regret the moment I got the Nintendo DSi for my girls. They're just hooked. They never are ready to turn them off. They have to take them everywhere. You talk to them and they don't respond. It's crazy. They wake up and the first thing they think of is their DSi. They have been turned into zombies! I want my daughters back!!

Don't buy your kids DSis. Don't say you weren't warned ...

Very funny Supernews video about twitter

2009-08-02T21:56:00.000-07:00

Earth's mood

2009-08-01T06:51:00.000-07:00

As most of us are twitting (or equivalent) as one day we will, it'd be really cool to have a web page that shows Earth's mood through analyzing twitter's posts.

I can imagine an application that would be graphically live, constantly moving to reflect the happiness/sadness of twitter posts in general or for a particular tag. Like a screen saver kind of thing where we can see the top and bottom fronts of the screen advancing into the white neutral area as posts are classified as: happy/hopeful, neutral or sad/angry/fearful.

Marvin Minksy's speculates in his "The emotion machine" book that out of every millions of thoughts we make up one emotion that stands out as our conscious feeling of choice for the moment. So, in the same way, the net every millions of posts would come up with a feeling of choice and it would be wonderful to have an image reflect that instantaneously with its subtle variations every second as new posts pop in.

There are many attempts already of figuring out the mood of either one twitter account or one keyword:

. Twitter mood reader graphics the mood of a given twitter account based on words associated with good or bad mood, anything else would be neutral.
. Smiley Twitter tracks the happy and sad sentiments around a given keyword based on emoticons :( :)
. Twitter Sentiment seems to have more an statistical approach kind of trends. Their algorithm seems pretty intelligent and it accepts feedback from users which might indicate it has some capability to learn.
. There's even a "make your own twitter mood tracker with Ruby" guide (emoticon based).

Hypnotized by fire? Just imagine this: add some music and relax in front of a screen to watch Earth's mood ... that would be pretty cool!!

The Holy Grail of the Net: The OS

2009-07-28T06:37:00.000-07:00

Digg and Bit.ly almost got it right. The web is a fast growing mass of information as we all become broadcasters instead of mere receivers. How can we make sense of this humongous mass of data/information? Until we build an intelligence larger than our own, we'll harness our existing intelligence. Like Kevin Kelly said, we are a hive mind. And what's most precious in a hive mind? The swarms. Detecting the swarms is the holy grail.

Google did it for a while, as long as many people are linking to something, that something becomes relevant. That worked for a while, when things were slower on the net and less people were broadcasters. But, this is not enough for today's world. Twitter made that clear. As Michael Welsh magnifiscently expressed in his "Web 2.0 - The machine is us/ing us" video we are teaching the machine. Not only with links but with twitter re-directions, re-twits, social network buzz, and many other new ways to come.

How can we harness our own intelligence to detect the hive's top swarms? Well, so far we tried many ways. Digg.com was very successful for a while using crowdsourcing and having people to digg news they considered relevant. Bit.ly is going one step further by analyzing the statistics on the shared links and trying to make sense of the most "organically" digged news. These partial ways of measuring instant web activity can have limited success.

Who is always there witnessing all of our web activity? 99.9999% of our web activity is witnessed by The Browser.

Google knows this better than anybody else. They know their current system of detecting relevance by the links is not keeping up with the future of the web. The main reason for that being that they need to poll (crawl) the web in order to find new activity, new data. This is a highly inefficient method, no matter how powerful you are, you will always be one step behind. It needs to reverse the direction of where data is coming. It needs data to push into their databases -not to be pulled.

Google had a first attempt at getting to this data when they launched "your slice of the web", web history, back in April 07. But that was not nearly enough and people's adoption of the little toolbar (which was one of the great things to do before having your own browser) just didn't happen. At that time I was wondering why hasn't a browser itself done this: "I used to wonder about why a browser itself wouldn't have done this before. If someone knew all the sites someone was visiting, that was naturally the browser." (a little ego rush for me, gosh, that was almost vision ;).

So, what's next? It's very obvious, the next thing is The Browser. And sure enough, Google did it! In September 2008, Google launched Chrome. If you thought Chrome was about competing with Internet Explorer and competing against Microsoft, you got that one wrong. Chrome is about competing with twitter and all the next things that might capture the swarms which in the end is the holy grail of the web. It's search becoming instanstaneous, something Google can't miss on. TechCrunch has a glimpse of this problem on their post "The Real Time Search Dilemma: Consciousness versus Memory".

But, with the spreading of the Netbook Google had an incredible double opportunity, and of course they took it! Not only would they be able to make their browser user's base expand but also by becoming a platform they would be able to go beyond the web, capture the net itself. So, sure enough again, in July 2009, Google promises to deliver the Google Chrome OS by the second half of 2010. It you thought Chrome OS was about competing against Microsoft, think again. In my opinion, that is only a side effect, a by-product. The holy grail of The Net is the OS as the holy grail of the Web is The Browser.

The mobile market being one of the fastest and ubiquitous markets out there was not left out of the plan, Android will deliver the stats for the mobile world.

This is the future of search. No bing, twitter or no other little application will hardly be able to overcome and/or acquire this advantage. Anybody else is behind, because Google has a brilliant master plan, and it's executing the plan in an accurate way with extreme expedite targeted deliveries without missing one opportunity.

Social Transparency

2009-07-26T04:58:00.000-07:00

One of the most striking characteristics of the web, which I think was almost one of the most important ones in it's adoption as well as fast evolution is: transparency that leads to hackability. I actually wrote something about it in the past that had some nice little idea inside regarding sharing chunks of server side code.

I still remember the feeling when after years of programming in the dark, times changed and the web opened the curtains and we could see from the back door. It was great! You could go to a web site, see something you liked, hack it, re-mix it and make it your own so that others could hack it as well. That level of exposition, of transparency was later on less important as people starting to openly share their code and their tricks in the web itself, but it all started with parts of the code being open for everybody to see.

Hackability is becoming an extending concept growing to other areas such as product design with demands of hackability.

Right now, I'm getting kind of the same feeling from the social networking side of the web. It is very special to have access to the social dimension of people that sometimes we knew in another capacity, or were not even that close to start with, or people that we had completely lost touch with.

This open window into other person's lives is impacting us in profound ways. I guess most of us have a normal tendency to show the best of ourselves out to the public. Some people think of this as faking it. The way I see it, people are not faking, they're just exercising being the best they can be. Potentially this habit of "being nice" will involve most of our time as most of our activities will start involving this social networking dimension.

As habit becomes being ... eventually, technology -through transparency- will make us better.

In relation with this subject,
Blown to bits seems to be a promising book on the future of privacy, identity and personal control in this new era where social networking is around (haven't gotten it yet). [via Dusan@scrumdesk]

Disintermediation

2009-07-21T06:12:00.000-07:00

After reading "Is Amazon Taking Over the Book Business?" by Time Magazine I was left thinking a lot about how the economy is changing and where it might be going.

Historically, the book industry would be a long supply chain. In order for a book to be published there used to be a myriad of roles involved: agent, editor, publisher, printer and bookstore.

Now, we're seeing Amazon, the clear market leader in their sector, starting to absorb more and more of those roles. In Time's article words: "Amazon could become the LiveNation of the book world, a literary ecosystem unto itself: agent, editor, publisher, printer and bookstore. It probably will."

My first reaction usually is to try to extrapolate, and so I did. And my next question was: Are we witnessing the disintermediation of the economy as we become digital? Disintermediation defined by wikipedia as "the removal of intermediaries in a supply chain: 'cutting out the middleman'".

I believe this is a trend that will continue. For the music industry this Harvard article around Michael Jackson's story does bring up the point of how the music industry is broken. It actually refers you to a video on the Zombieconomy which is pretty cool and describes how capitalism itself is broken. An the reason it's basically broken is that capitalism is based on intermediaries under-counting (and minimizing) costs and over-counting (maximizing) benefits.

From this perspective, disintermediation seems good. Now, can things begin looking better as the industry is shaping towards giant almost monopolistic software companies aggregating markets? I believe they do. How? The way I see it, there are two advantages to how in the long term disintermediation (even if monopolistic) induces a new economy:

1. It's easier that it becomes more obvious to people the fact that one unique company is holding the holly grail for a hole vertical market.
2. It's easier to reproduce this model by the people itself by launching open source software cooperatively operated counterparts.

The way I see the future going is that disintermediation is the natural evolution of capitalism in the digital era and it paves the road for "massintermediation" (would that be the right name?) which would be the people for the people cutting off the intermediaries up to their last chain's link.

It's specially interesting to see what will happen when you threw in other digital era properties such as the net's transaparency that would allow for cooperation in a clear fair way.

There are already out there organizations such as Free Software Foundation founded by MIT professors working their way into open source software with new ethics.

I'm probably projecting too far away and I'm not saying this will happen tomorrow. Just thoughts in the collective mind ...

Programming for Kids

2009-07-18T07:59:00.000-07:00

This summer we enrolled Nicole in a Programming for Kids 4 day camp for 9 to 13 years old.
It was really cool, I loved the way teachers framed it.
What they did is give them tons of different tools in a way that each kid could find what was more appealing to them.

They started with the old logo turtle, a classic. It's great, it gives the kid the clear concept of commanding the computer to do something and right away seeing the results. UC Berkley Logo. Download at: http://www.eecs.berkeley.edu/~bh/

Next they went through Just Basic, I guess just so kids know how yucky programming can get ;) Download at: http://justbasic.com/

Then, they explored Cow Maze, a german web based game that teaches kids to think like a computer. In Nicole's words "addictive".

The Second day they got to the star of the course: scratch! This MIT created software and web community is the coolest tool for kids to do real programming that feels like a game. The hackability of the community makes it very powerful as they can download projects from other kids, remix them and upload them. Inspiring!!

Later on the class they explored Alice which didn't totally do it for Nicole ... The teachers were so cool as to mention Randy Paulsch's Last Lecture (to parents) as he was a part of the Alice's team.

Last day of class they showed the kids StarLogo TNG and Greenfoot, I guess those were a little on top of my daughter's head at this time. This tool is best suited for kids in the 13 to 16 age range.

Also, they explored linerider.com and fantasticcontraption.com.

All in all, a great experience and a great introduction to programming!!

A twitter's user impression

2009-05-17T07:55:00.000-07:00

As I still find myself intrigued by the whole twitter concept I found a twit by Kevin Marks that might be summarizing it a bit:

"Google is a signal of intent answered by a machine; Twitter is a signal of emotion answered by a person."

I've got to admit I still don't get it 100%, after years of attempts to use twitter, but I have a glimpse of what it could be doing for people. The way I see it, it's the closest we are getting to being a hyper connected neural net of human brains broadcasting our every minute of existence for others to tune in.

The other thing that it's clearly confirming is that technology adoption gets hugely accelerated by two means:
1. fan's viral spread - social networks have this property intrinsically built-in
2. accessibility- open platforms/standards allowing the industry to build applications/devices around one technology, which automatically gets you business partners. Can you believe the incredible amount of applications built on top of twitter?

Sports and evolution

2009-03-24T07:00:00.000-07:00

Evolution made humans' nature to reward movement. Recent studies show that our brains and bodies are built to reward physical activity and motion. It makes sense, as everything else in biologic evolution, that physical activity is rewarded as it was a great means for survival. Our whole body is wired for that kind of survival abilities.

In today's world though, it's a total annoyance for most people and it becomes just something we know we HAVE to artificially DO. You need to exercise, you need all this physical activity, to be both in good body and mind shape. We try to convince ourselves that we need it, and that it's good for us, and even our brain produces pleasure chemicals as you do it, but deep inside your body knows it's a huge waste of energy and you have to drag yourself to your next gym trip. The same way your body knows it's a great waste of energy to eat a salad compared with the calories you get in return, we can try and lie to ourselves but deep inside our bodies know better.

The only solution I see to this increasing dilemma is genetic engineering. The gap between the thousands of years of evolution going in one direction, and the accelerated world-changing pace of our current technology evolution only can be closed by genetic manipulation.

Of course, genetic manipulation is the answer to many other much more important questions -health issues being probably the most outstanding ones- but for right now, I'm just trying to make up an excuse so I don't have to buy into the exercise thing so much ;)

Cellphone charger standard

2009-03-11T01:58:00.001-07:00

Like Time magazine would say "shockinly predictable" and we could add "forever expected" there was a major agreement (not including Apple so far) to use the Micro-USB as the cellphone charger standard.

I applaud this measure and also I am a big fan of standards in general. The big winner is the user!!

So many standards to follow ... notebook chargers come to mind ...

My life without caffeine (2nd part)

2009-03-11T01:23:00.000-07:00

Back in August I started the little experiment My life without caffeine - 21 day caffeine free.

It kind of is time for an update on that after a few more months ...

I basically never went back to diet coke or coke. I did nevertheless went to Monster, RedBull and Mountain Dew a few times over the last months. Usually I noticed a correlation between that inoffensive occasional drink and being super dragged and tired in the next few days, of course really needing caffeine badly, although I usually wouldn't go back to it right away and the feeling would go away soon.

At my last PGA show in January, things got a little out of control. The preceding days to the show energy drinks followed sleepless nights in preparation for the show. After the show energy drinks followed sleepless nights in celebration of the show. The result? I was trashed for couple weeks after all was done and finished. Blame it just on the sleepless nights themselves or in the energy drinks caffeine withdraw process. Even for myself it sounds like too much talking about caffeine withdraw, but that surely is what it felt like.

In the end I decided no more caffeine in my life period. I've been sticking to that for the last month or so with no regrets and feeling just great! Wake up in the morning, full of energy, no need for caffeine again whatsoever.

I don't need more caffeine so that I can need more caffeine! The self-perpetuated circle was broken and I'm one happy decaf soul :)

Experimenting with consciousness/awareness

2009-03-05T04:47:00.000-08:00

This little experiment was triggered by hearing an audio book by Eckhart Tolle, I guess the name of it is A New Earth. I'm not totally sure on the name as my friend Sandra gave it to me and I just threw it on my car CD reader.

Eckhart was talking about two components to the mind:
1. The awareness or consciousness, also could be called the true being, some would think connected to the whole.
2. The ego, the I, me, myself on each of us separated from everything else out there.

The experiment consists of perceiving the being inside ourselves and attempting to observe the ego from a separate higher level of consciousness. I have to admit that even when the concept of ego was familiar to me, I thought it was overrated and I was very dubious of the usefulness of this definition.

The way the experiment is conducted is by closing your eyes if possible (of course it was possible to me! It's 4:00am and I'm lying in bed when I started!!), and starting to feel the liveness of one of your hands, the other hand, feet, etc. While you attempt to have your mind perform this simple task, you monitor the thoughts that arise in your mind. You're trying to be just a higher level consciousness watching these thoughts as a person would be watching a tv show, without merging with them, without getting totally engaged with them, knowing that they're a separate thing from you, the observer. I guess it's the old buddhist and zen thing of observer and object of observation.

So, I got started and I have to tell you it was interesting -to say the least, for moments it was actually hilarious.

What I discovered with this little experiment is that I could really create a space of awareness monitoring my thoughts. I also got to discover very clearly the ego behind almost all of the thoughts that I could see arise on my mind. Most of the thoughts revolved around going into future or past scenarios with very clear needs of my ego. The question I would ask myself in every case would be: What kind of thought is this? How does this thought serve my ego? The answers I found revolved around these:

1. It will give myself pleasure or avoid suffering.
2. It would give some sort of explanation to something and get the logic part of my mind entertained.
3. It would justify what I've done or what I'll do and make me right in some way and others wrong as well.
4. It would compete with others and make me better in some way.
5. It would save me energy by repeating some old habit.
6. It will avoid something I fear. If I do that or don't do that fear of what would or wouldn't happen.
7. It would make my ego feel bigger. It would increase my rating/connections inside some social network.

Any of these thoughts would clearly take me out of my simple task, something I desperately wanted to do most of the time. Very exhausting little experiment.

The way it would go would be something like this. I'd try to feel the liveness in my hand, seconds if not fractions after I was questioning the experiment. Then, as the awareness was monitoring, I would see the thought of questioning, sensing that it's a thought of fear to the unknown following my habit of labeling everything. Then, I'd go back to the liveness of my hand and the next thought would pop out. Next I would have some totally unrelated thought about something I'd like to do in the future, or something that just happened and I needed to label in some way. It was incredibly difficult to steer my mind to one simple task, all sorts of thoughts kept arising. Eventually my mind arrived to some thoughts that seemed temptingly interesting such as conclusions on the experiment itself or something else. At that point I would have a thought to blog about it, which was hilarious to me as I could clearly discover the reason for blogging was a very egotistic one as well. Then, I was laughing and going back to the hand and so forth.

It was interesting also to see those thoughts pop out like bubbles faster and faster as I would ask myself what is the purpose of this thought? and how does it serve my ego? Those thoughts would quickly dissolve in the light of my consciousness.

How does it continue? I think I'll keep playing with this and see if this new way of thinking might lead me to new experiences or to a more connected and aware being of some sort.

Most people in their daily lives don't care about awareness or ego, so if you make it this far in this post I would tend to believe you're either a thinker or a spiritual person of some sort ;)

PS: I witnessed a little fight between my awareness and my ego regarding writing this post and I ended up deciding write this post in the end to share it and document my learning process (as my memory fades too fast).

Happy People Dancing on Planet Earth

2008-12-24T01:13:00.000-08:00

To wish you all hapy holidays and especially a great 2009 I'm sharing this video:

Where the Hell is Matt? (2008) from Matthew Harding on Vimeo.
[Thanks to Cynthia]

I also feel like sharing one of my favorite anonymous phrases:
"No es feliz quien tiene todo lo que quiere,
sino quien quiere todo lo que tiene"

An attempt at translating it:
"Happiness is not to have everything you love,
but to love everything you have."

Happy Holidays and make it a great year!

CeciTV

2008-12-19T04:19:00.000-08:00

World TV allows you to set up your own TV channel in seconds. Good luck finding content ... specially with the quality of you tube videos in general. I collected a series of diverse drumming videos: http://worldtv.com/cecitv/. Fun! Loved doing it!

Interesting to note, they are hosted by YouTube, so not so much of an investment as far as streaming.

I think we needed a product like this to see you tube and other user content on the web/TV. The simplicity of WorldTV is impressive, although until I read the email directing me to worldtv.com/mychannel/editor, I went nuts trying to find a way to login to their site. It's one of those things, very simple, but maybe too simple ...

I'm sure great things to come with it in the near future. It'd be really cool to be able to edit the videos online even if at a very basic level. Also, I'd love to see my own comments and my buddies comments along the movies.

Flutist Robot

2008-12-11T22:05:00.000-08:00

Pretty cool flutist robot:
[via DesignFlute]

Spread the happiness

2008-12-10T03:13:00.001-08:00

A new study by Harvard and San Diego Universities published that happiness seems to be contagious. This discovery came along after previous studies of tendencies for obesity patterns and smoking quitting in social networks. All of the studies seem to agree in the viral potential of social networks to be contagious regarding happiness among other things.

Over the weekend I conducted my own little experiment about happiness contagiedness (did I made up a word here?). For every casual encounter I would have with people that looked happy, I stopped for a second to be mindful of wether it affected me positively in my own feeling of happiness. The surprising result was that it did seem to make me happier to just pass by people that looked happy. So, now I am smiling to people much more in the hope I'm giving them a little bit of my own happiness. All this works pretty well in California, where people like to smile to most everybody most of the time anyway. Not sure how it would work somewhere else ...

My daughter is high

2008-12-10T02:50:00.000-08:00

Genetics just work, and it's really interesting when you see it in action through your little ones.

My daughter Nicole (8) looks different than me and thankfully has a different personality as well, but there's one thing she got from me in a high percentage (close to 100% I'd say ;) and that is her brain's hardware. There's many ways in which this fact is true, but the one I want to write about today is her tendency to have natural highs.

There are some days in which my husband and I look at each other and just smile while we almost simultaneously say: OMG, she's high again!

Yesterday was one of those days. She came to me asking me how to write allowance, then later how to write business ... then I had to go check on her. She was sending ClubPenguin suggestions for their website.

The ideas:
1. To allow parents to give weekly coin allowances to their kid's penguins as a way to incentive home chores or school performance. Her ultimate goal: as she's the parent of one of her penguins (not sure how that happened, I think Edu was distracted and she took advantage), she wants to give coins to herself without the work of actually earning them.
2. To allow penguins to start stores in their igloos, so that they can have their own products and sell to other penguins for virtual currency.

There is a common denominator on her thoughts this week, she's evidently obsessed with getting more coins without the work. Of course she already explored all the hacks and cheats on the net she could find, with what she calls her "testing penguins" with almost irrational fear of getting "banned". She's hilarious!

Maybe her day was the logical outcome now that I remember she actually started the day telling me about a dream she had. She dreamed that there was a person, and the person had a diamond inside, and she had some kind of device hooked to the net which would allow her to set goals such as remove the diamond from the person's body ... weird! I offered her an interpretation: that she thinks people have great value inside and she could by using some kind of technology extract it (not clear if it would be for her own benefit or what, sometimes you don't want to ask that much).

Now we probably will have some more high days until it melts down. It'd be nice to be able to figure out the curve of ups and downs, something I always wanted to do with myself but never quite did.

Geminids Meteor Shower starting tonight

2008-12-07T08:24:00.000-08:00

I was so lucky that August summer night back in 1994 as to find myself unexpectedly in the middle of the desert, in what seemed almost a lunar surface, when we started to notice something magically unusual was going on. Shooting stars were all over the sky, not one or two, but tens of them, non-stop showering all around. Later I found out it might have been the Perseids, peaking around Aug 12th.

Since then I have had this fascination for meteor showers although I did not have many more chances to experience them.

This next weekend we're heading to the desert for a camp out night to hopefully see the Geminids peak Dec 13th, although the moon will be interfering quite a bit with the experience. Also, more to come soon in Jan 3rd/4th: the Quadrantis.

In case anybody wonders, the best hours to observe meteor showers is from midnight til pre-down (regardless your time zone). For more info I recommend MeteorShowers blog.

Skype to Go ... great skype feature

2008-12-07T08:15:00.000-08:00

This week I tried Skype to Go, a feature that allows you to dial out international calls through skype from your cellphone. It seems like it was available before in Europe but recently launched in the US. I've been waiting for this feature for a long time. With call forwarding I was able to get international calls in my cell but I could not initiate the calls. The setup was very simple and in no time I was being able to make my calls out (bye-bye to msn logging in to say a quick "call me" while driving). Now I feel like I can fully rely on Skype for my phone communications at a fairly good price.

Is this the begining of the end?

2008-12-06T23:21:00.001-08:00

The world as we knew it is changing. The idealistic conservative capitalism, "the free market will work everything out" (as Steve Borsch would call it), is falling apart. Maybe Negroponte was right when in "The Dance of Shiva" he announced such a crazzy idea as a new era being about to emerge (the dialectic negation of the previous era, in terms being the dialectic negation of its previous era, ~(~p)=p. Maybe techonology's new ways of producing value such as cooperativism, open source, crowdsourcing, peer to peer, however you want to call it, will in the end produce a new global economy.

Viral videos like Annie Leonard's "The story of stuff" can surely help change the world:

Free the music: lala.com!

2008-10-25T08:32:00.000-07:00

Sorry if I tricked you, I meant free the music as in let the music flow freely on the net. And that's what lala.com is doing, no more attachement to a particular software or device, your music on the net 10 cents a piece. The music goes on as you browse their site. I guess it'll be even more fun as more of our devices/cars/appliances/homes get more and more wired.

Don't be surprised if you see an iTuny look to it ;)

Start now, 50 free songs to try it out.

Podcasts coming soon I hope!!

Innovative data visual presentations

2008-10-25T07:52:00.000-07:00

Some of the most innovative data visual presentations I've seen in a while are being created by labs.digg.com.

Although not having as much of a key functionality, these interfaces remind me of the first time I saw twittervision and other google maps mashups.

[Thanks to Mauro for the link]

The real question is: To regulate sooner or later?

2008-10-25T07:38:00.000-07:00

From the individual to the collective, we all learn the hard way: by tough lessons involving some degree of suffering.

There are probably many lessons to be learned from the now dissolved real estate bubble. One that came to my mind recently is that debt should be treated as a health hazard.

Last year I watched "Maxed Out", a documentary movie that shows very clearly how the financing industry grew its roots by advertising this concept of buying without money. Only then it occurred to me that this "get in debt" concept that comes so naturally to me (although my south american culture is not so much about that, especially when compared with the american one), had to be "sold" to the public originally.

I suspect I'm being controversial here (for a change), but, the way I see it, financial institutions should be taxed and regulated instead of being bailed out.

I won't get on the bail out thing much, it's a lost battle and I admit I might not know what I'm saying here ... my only comment is, I would have invested and propped the next bubble (most likely energy) instead of trying to save the anyway sinking boat.

On the taxing thing, I believe the financial industry should be treated pretty much as the tobacco industry. People should be teached how to use credit wisely, warnings should be issued, recovery should be supported by the same industry that created the problem and beneffited from it in the first place. Education! That's all I'm saying. I'm not saying credit is bad. But credit without education is a hazard for everybody as we can see.

The question is not "To regulate or not to regulate?" the real question is "To regulater sooner or later?" and later did us no good.

[Update: great British humor video via Fabi]

Amazon Windows Cloud is out!

2008-10-24T06:03:00.000-07:00

Hoping to try it out very soon ...

Beta Website Preview

2008-10-11T18:40:00.000-07:00

One day I was about to log to logmein.com (the greatest free tool for remote pc control) when I was presented with the option to preview their beta website instead of using the regular site. Last week, faithful to the hackability and remixability principles of the web, I used the same concept for the website I manage.

Statistics don't show for now a big jump in access to our labs site, we'll see how the week progresses.

About grids and clouds

2008-09-26T02:15:00.000-07:00

As anticipated by Nicholas Carr in the "Big Switch" cloud computing is becoming a reality and little by little companies will be switching from internal data centers to external ones as a paralelism to what happened with the passage from internally hosted electricity generators to the time in which everybody was connecting to the electricity grid.

GeneXus was up to speed with this concept and especifically Ignacio Roqueta's talk was very clarifying as far as the existing grids (Google apps and Amazon's grid) as well as future project ones (Microsoft's). Also, the talk unveiled that GeneXus will provide tools to automatically migrate to the main grids that are compatible with the main generators. Good news :)

An interesting trip

2008-09-26T01:09:00.000-07:00

As I was heading to the GeneXus Event down in Uruguay I decided to "make sure" my brother's iPod "was working correctly".
Then, I had to throw in a few podcasts that made me have the best trip ever. What was part of this trip saving repertoire?

1. TED Talks Videos.
I loved seeing ted videos on the iPod, even with the little iPod Nano, it was just perfect. Couple talks that left me thinking for quite some time:

Sugata Mitra on "Can kids teach themselves?". Super interesting experiment done across India on technology enabling kids and let them learn in a collective way.

Craig Venter on "On the verge of creating synthetic life". How close are we to creating synthetic life? It's happenign righ now. Craig is booting up new software (synthetic chromosomes) on one of the oldest biologic hardware (bacteria). They're among other things on a quest on creating bacteria that can produce fuel out of CO2. It looks like he's not the only one on this holy grail: Turning bacteria into plastic factories replacing fossil fuels.

2. Bill Maher. It cracked me up as always, especially considering it was a podcast of his 9/13 show, when the prospect of having Palin as a president was still funny ...

3. Tiesto's music
I usually also buy a magazine when I travel, most likely a Scientific American. This one time, the only reason I ended up opening it was that Tiesto's music was asking for something to read.

The only one article I read in the magazine was "Big bang or big bounce". Astonishing. My friend Italo already had mentioned this alternative approach at solving the mystery of the moment for physicists some time ago, but this full explanation made so much sense and seems to be such a revolution that I'm still impressed. On a nutshell, the fresh new theory discusses the existence of space-time particles that are to the space-time what the atom is to matter. One of the consequences of the existence of these particles is that the Universe did not start on a singular point of infinite density with the Big Bang as we all tended to believe. Instead, the Universe would have been in a most likely infinite cycle of expand and collapse being the "Big Bang" a "Big Bounce" in reality. I think reading this article was the closest I've been to the feeling of being there when the atom itself was first speculated about around the sixteen hundreds.

My life without caffeine

2008-08-16T07:09:00.000-07:00

It's always nice to experiment on theories. Some weeks ago I decided to put to the test the theory that "an action repeated for 21 days becomes a habit".

As my only source for caffeine was diet coke, I decided to be diet coke clean (therefore caffeine clean) for 21 days and then see the results for myself.

One memorable but horrible Sunday was my starting day. Hard not to remember that day ... I felt awful, I was almost self defined as officially depressed, I barely had any energy at all. I dragged myself through that Sunday until it passed by. Next couple days were ok, dealing with the firm decision not to take that first can. Following couple days, horrible again, every now and then finding myself day dreaming about the mouth watering possibility of drinking diet coke.

I survived my first week, trying to be aware and remember how hard this process was being. The only thing I could do was to stick with it for two more weeks. One more Sunday came by, my decision untouchable, I should be able to do this for two weeks, and three weeks as well.

By the middle of the third week I was feeling much better. Sooner than later, third week and "Prueba conseguida!!" (mission accomplished).

Now, it was time to re-evaluate my goal. Given how hard it was to quit diet coke, and how released and freed I was feeling after the three weeks broke the habit and I guess cleaned my system too. Dependency is gone! The next step was clear: never again let that thing trick me into getting just a sip! Diet coke and caffeine are history.
I feel fresh, energetic, nothing to envy from the caffeinated past.

Today I enjoy still water and more yet sparkling water. A friend found this sparkling making device that I ordered from a company in Israel. It even matches my kitchen appliances style! It took some time for the thing to arrive (interestingly enough, the fact that someone blogged about them blew their inventory) but it is great! I love it!!

Back to the beginning of this post, the 21 day break a habit theory was totally confirmed by my little experiment. It seems to be true!

Prophet, distributed database manager

2008-08-03T05:20:00.000-07:00

When I was teaching databases back in 1992, I remember while I was preparing my classes, stumbling upon a subject that sounded as interesting as it use was remote and complex at the time: distributed databases. At that time anyone on their sane mind would try to avoid syncing nightmares by all possible means.

After centuries going by without ever hearing about distributed databases again, a few days ago I read about Prophet, a distributed database manager which is defined by its own buzz:

"A grounded, semirelational, peer to peer replicated, disconnected, versioned, property database with self-healing conflict resolution."

One of the reasons I would be interested in something like this, is the need to optimize website accessibility from different parts of the world by adding local servers with syncable databases. Other reason would be more device related.

I guess the one other thing that seduces me about this idea is the holographic nature of a distributed database, although I'm not sure this is the only way to go about getting to imitate our own holographic memory.

Drug brain interactions

2008-08-03T04:58:00.000-07:00

This site has interesting animations explaining the effect of the most common drugs in the brain. It made a lot of sense to me when I learned ten years ago or more the effect of alcohol in the brain, letting neuron membranes all confused and allowing substances to travel back and forth without control.

I am very convinced that drugs do not have magically the ability to develop new programs on the brain. Their only possibility is to bring programs down and by doing so, they inhibit controls in place and people can show behaviors that they usually they don't exhibit. They might over a period of time develop new habits which are in a way new programs.

Looking at the biochemistry of the drug-neuron interaction only re-affirms this thought.

Particularly interesting was to see the effects of caffeine and long term use of nicotine.

Visionaries, John Lennon

2008-07-31T05:06:00.000-07:00

The world is full of examples of man (and woman? ... I hope!) that were ahead of their own time. Clear examples, to name a few, would be Albert Einstein, Tesla and Julio Verne (one of his novels written in 1864 was recently adapted and a 3D movie was produced).

I have to confess I never liked The Beatles, not a little bit, but there is one John Lennon's song which has one of the best lyrics ever:

"Imagine there's no heaven
It's easy if you try
No hell below us
Above us only sky
Imagine all the people
Living for today...

Imagine there's no countries
It isn't hard to do
Nothing to kill or die for
And no religion too
Imagine all the people
Living life in peace...

You may say I'm a dreamer
But I'm not the only one
I hope someday you'll join us
And the world will be as one

Imagine no possessions
I wonder if you can
No need for greed or hunger
A brotherhood of man
Imagine all the people
Sharing all the world...

You may say I'm a dreamer
But I'm not the only one
I hope someday you'll join us
And the world will live as one"

That to me is vision too ...
Found lots of Lennon's cool quotes here.

California went bluetooth

2008-07-17T06:30:00.000-07:00

Begining July 1st California passed the cellphone hands-free law.

The law was long expected but the effects in the roads are not so visible yet. I was expecting to see everybody everywhere shining their little blue extensions but I did not notice such a big change. Most likely it'll happen more and more over time.

My multiple attempts with bluetooth since 2004 are ranging from not matching devices, to bad hearing quality, to losing it all the time: where is the little damn thing?, to all sort of battery issues both on the mic and cellphone side of things because of the bluetooth. I love the concept but the technology itself didn't match my expectations so far.

Motorola seems to have a promising one (not just because Beckam is wearing it):
"Motorola has launched the new headset which supports Bluetooth 2.0 wireless technology, the 32g Bluetooth stereo headset S9, in Korea. With stable behind-the-head style, the S9 lets you switch from music to calls with the press of a button. It features an integrated and touch-sensitive controls, the S9 is water and sweat resistant, which is nice for wearing in any weather."

I never had ones that could switch from music to calls!

Here's a map on how other states are dealing with it:

It's nice that law helps us become more cyborgs, no complains on my side, of course it's safer too.

Moore Law for multi-cores

2008-07-17T05:58:00.000-07:00

The nicest thing of carpooling is that I get to mount my office on the back of the car. Today on my way back from work as I skimmed over google reader posts I found an interesting thought in GigaOM regarding the opportunities that the multi-core processors world will bring for the industry.

As I commented out loud, a friend who is an insider of the Sony Playstation gaming development team was reminding me of how playstation might have a definite development edge over Microsoft as they chose cheap multiple cores versus few powerful ones very early on. The advantage now seems to be that all their coding for years has been multi-core savy. If that is right, and Microsoft development did not go down that route, Sony's development edge and scalability possibilities are inmensly better.

On the words of Anant Agarwal: "I would like to call it a corollary of Moore's Law that the number of cores will double every 18 months," said Agarwal whose company currently ships a 64-core embedded processor.

One company that got my attention from GigaOm's list was Replay, by introducing what they call the computer-tivo. This is one of my favorite subjects, and although they're only focusing apparently on bug reply it's one of the first tools I see using this powerful concept.

I would bet on Moore Law being right one more time. And, I would also bet that developers will not be micro-managing core management. There will be software automatically taking care of this.

About Buddhism and Science

2008-07-08T01:17:00.000-07:00

For the last year or more I've been on and off studying Buddhist philosophy. I've been attending general practitioner meditation classes which are the very basic introduction to Buddhism.

In these classes I could enjoy a new way of meditating, which gave me new perspectives over Transcendental Meditation (basically mantra meditation that I have been using for the last 10 years or so. This meditation is centered on the heart chakra, which I loved. Also, it has two faces. First, it looks for an object of meditation and once you find the object you concentrate single-pointedly into it and abide into the feeling for as long as you can.

In addition to the meditation, there was the theory. Buddhist theory is so rich and extensive. Every Wednesday night I would get to listen, think and talk about diverse subjects such as: value of intention, patience as a spiritual value, compassion (meaning from Latin com-passion, to share other's passion), equality to all beings (loving everybody in the same way), delusions (such as mind of attachment, self-cherishing) versus wisdom, karma (as a law comparable to gravity), kindness and many others.

Last but not least, there were the people. In these meetings I could find the most exquisite people, in their quest to live a life of pure intentions, where the path to enlightenment is centered around the intention to help others.

The benefits from attending these classes I could feel incredibly during the whole week, being more relaxed, compassionate, understanding, loving, thankful and happy.

Eventually, I got to dig the central and hardest to grasp concept of the Buddhist philosophy: emptiness. I read about it, thought about it, asked questions about it and ended up tending to think that emptiness means in the end relativity of all things, in other words: ultimate relativity. A strong concept I grasped in the past when I was around 16 years old and I happen to call it relativity abysm (taken from Ortega y Gasset) as it felt like falling into an endless precipice by having reality de-materialize in front of my eyes in the light of relativity.

Problem for me was that even when the concepts seem so correct and the philosophy so interesting the explanations could not fulfill my logical thinking. From the beginning I had this feeling of how can this be so right but at the same time so outdated. How can it be using its own dictionary for English words having meanings that could be so off? How on the other hand could they grasp concepts such as conscious, subconscious and unconscious (which they call gross mind, subtle and very subtle mind respectively) thousands of years before Freud did?

My conclusion is that Buddhist meditation is an incredible tool, which allowed people to understand concepts way before they could be rationalized by science. When this same people tried to explain these concepts and rationalize about them the results are not so great. In other words, I loved the philosophical concepts in Buddhism but not so much the explanation and justification of why those things are the way they are.

In the end, I keep the meditation close to my heart and I go back to science to find rational explanations that are more according to my present culture and understanding of things.

Technology unconscious

2008-07-06T07:36:00.000-07:00

What can make a process go down from days to minutes?
Given that hardware and software remain the same, the answer is obvious: database indexes!

As an ex-project manager and consultant for NASBA (National Association of State Boards of Accountancy) I received a call when they were trying to process a big fat invoice from Prometric (leading provider of testing and assessment services) and instead of taking the usual few minutes it was getting stuck forever. Stuck forever after some monitoring ended up being amazingly slow processing due to non-existing indexes that were re-creating themselves temporarily again and again.

This situation made me think of the existence of a growing number of things that goes into the "technology unconscious", by definition: the mind operating well below the perception of the conscious mind. They're there, in the background, making things run smooth, we all use them, but most of the time we don't even remember that they're there or know the details of how they operate, and only realize about them when something fails. Other pieces of the technology unconscious are operative systems, the internet tcp/ip layer, even electricity itself (I get embarrassed when my daughter asks me questions about how things work all the time, thanks google for existing).

To string or not to string, 4D vs 11Dimensions

2008-07-06T06:43:00.000-07:00

String theory made the universe extremely fun for scientists, mathematicians and mystics alike.

I heard before about alternatives to the string theory in the quest for unifying the theory of all things (integrating the four forces: strong and weak interaction, electromagnetism and gravity, into one nice beautiful equation) that would shed a much more "normal" 4D universe. Apparently, the alternative has to do with a structurally different conception of space-time, which instead of being a continuum would consist of discrete tiny building blocks.

Only a few days ago, reading the article "Using Causality to Solve the Puzzle of Quantum Spacetime" I could understand more what this alternative is about:
"if we think of empty spacetime as some immaterial substance, consisting of a very large number of minute, structureless pieces, and if we then let these microscopic building blocks interact with one another according to simple rules dictated by gravity and quantum theory, they will spontaneously arrange themselves into a whole that in many ways looks like the observed universe. It is similar to the way that molecules assemble themselves into crystalline or amorphous solids."

Computer simulation software is essentially what they use to produce different universe creations starting from small building blocks. Usually they start out with blocks called simplex. What was introduced in this particular approach is an added rule of causality (or time direction):
"Instead of disregarding causality when assembling individual universes and hoping for it to reappear through the collective wisdom of the superposition, we decided to incorporate the causal structure at a much earlier stage. The technical term for our method is causal dynamical triangulations. In it, we first assign each simplex an arrow of time pointing from the past to the future. Then we enforce causal gluing rules: two simplices must be glued together to keep their arrows pointing in the same direction. The simplices must share a notion of time, which unfolds steadily in the direction of these arrows and never stands still or runs backward. Space keeps its overall form as time advances; it cannot break up into disconnected pieces or create wormholes."

It's interesting that if they impose this arrow of time when building their universe they end up with a universe like the one we can perceive: a 4 dimensional one with an arrow of time. Simple ... and makes sense ... although it makes me wonder, are we limiting this way our conception of the world to our human perception? If we were other type of less evolved organism with no sense of time, would we end up building a 3D world just to conform to what our senses would tell us?

Scientists continue to try to find experiments that can shed light over this incredible questions about the nature of the universe. In the words of Janet Conrad: “There’s this cycle in physics,” she says, “where experiment pushes theory and then theory pushes experiment, and I really like the moment in which experiment is pushing theory”—which is what is happening now in the area of neutrinos.
She's basically referring to the Mini-Boo Neutrino Experiment which is studying one of the most elusive particles ever the neutrino. These particles are ubiquitous, actually according to this article: 100 trillion of these tiny particles just passed through your body in the last second. They might be accountable for some amount of lost mass that physicist expect to find in the universe. One of the explanations for this weird neutrino behavior involves more dimensions.

This seems to be a century of questions, not so sure it is one of answers even considering science can only provide tentative relativistic answers.
Long live to the mystery!

What can make a 4yr old beg for a membership

2008-07-05T10:25:00.000-07:00

Since her sister is playing (or should I say living) day and night in her first virtual community ClubPenguin, Angelina (4) has been begging 'make me a number' which can be translated as 'make me a member'.

What hooks kids up in this kind of environment:
1. the social component of making friends, chatting, and hanging out, which usually evolves from I have hundreds of friends I don't even know, to a nice organized list of a few buddies I know (some personally from the outside world). We tried other games before, such as Jump start DVDs, and nick jr, etc, but the social thing really takes things to another level. MyePets, only adds to the social component apparently when kids know each other from the outside world, and being so much more on the safer side did not make the trick for Nicole. Combined with phone or skype with real friends I saw it be as addictive as can be imagined.
2. the freedom they feel by living the adult life of earning their money, buying their stuff, going to places on their own (coffee shop, night club, pizza place, etc).
3. Having this early experience of being "adults", in control, learning to spend their money, adopting pets (that would run away if not taken care of) balancing their time between the earning of the coins (games mostly), the spending and living their lives, seems like it could be so beneficial compared with generations that did not have this simulation chance and went all the way to the real thing.

Why is it so exciting to me?
1. I see it evolving into a virtual world where they will do most of the things we are doing outside, such as: watching tv/videos, listening to their music, syncing their ipods, sending emails, having school like activities, checking their cellphone voicemails, texting cellphones, uploading their pictures and videos, buying/selling real stuff.
2. Facebook would become so pale compared with a social network like the one they could build inside their virtual world including their virtual homes (in ClubPenguin their igloos).
3. Today being this a kids software there is all the usual paranoia about safety that we can all understand and be thankful for; but these kids that are playing in virtual worlds today, will not use "flat" software ever again. For them, Second Life type of communities would be just a natural thing. The open architecture of Second Life makes it the perfect virtual world for the future; the place where we all might be conducting most of our business in the next few years.
4. Summarizing, the excitement for me is the usual, having a little glimpse into the future. Imagining how "immersive" these virtual reality software will be in our lives. The kick I could not have using Second Life (I'll give it a second chance soon) I could find in these kids communities such as Club Penguin.

If only some explicitly educational features could be merged so every so many minutes they had to go through some reading/writing/math, it would be just heaven to us parents.

Interactivity Restoration

2008-06-24T07:29:00.000-07:00

In the introduction of the book "Design for the Social Web" Joshua Porter has a brilliant opening with a quote by Douglas Adams, talking about getting back to connectedness:

“During [the twentieth] century we have for the first time been dominated by non-interactive forms of entertainment: cinema, radio, recorded music and television. Before they came along all entertainment was interactive: theater, music, sport—the performers and audience were there together, and even a respectfully silent audience exerted a powerful shaping presence on the unfolding of whatever drama they were there for. We didn’t need a special word for interactivity in the same way that we don’t (yet) need a special word for people with only one head.

I expect that history will show “normal” mainstream twentieth century media to be the aberration in all this. ‘Please, miss, you mean they could only just sit there and watch? They couldn’t do anything? Didn’t everybody feel terribly isolated or alienated or ignored?’

“Yes, child, that’s why they all went mad. Before the Restoration.”

“What was the Restoration again, please, miss?”

“The end of the twentieth century, child. When we started to get interactivity back.”

Very interesting and striking thought. Something we see often in evolution, new technology coming into the picture, adding and extending to our possibilities, sometimes first in a crippled way until a new wave of technology catches up with the past, restores in an even enhanced form.

On a side note, the book is very good, a fresh school usability approach looking into and capitalizing from the most recent web 2.0 hits.

The next new bubble

2008-06-24T06:08:00.000-07:00

Back in 2000 when I heard for the first time of economic bubbles the dot com bubble was bursting out. At that time the theory remained in the informational side of things for me. Some years later after seeing the real state bubble boom and naturally later on burst things started clicking in more into the experience field of things.

Since I saw the housing bubble burst I started wondering what the next bubble would be. Now, if I had to bet, I'd have no doubt in my mind. The next bubble is about "alternative" energy sources. With gas prices going up insanely (which does not worry me as I started carpooling and my gas price reduced to one third of its original value) the bubble is already booming. Next thing we know, all those alternative sources will become sustainable, investment on those will grow, people and companies will bet on different ones, some will make it ... the old gold story, those who build infrastructure: products and services around alternative energy sources will hit the pot.
Now that I was googling for something related to this subject I found an article stating this same thing (in a much nicer way).

My next thought is that bubbles are a natural phenomenon that happens due to network characteristics and they sure have much more global properties beyond economy (as in social networks, neural networks, etc).

It was a very strong experience to watch the housing market offer and demand act in the local area of Temecula, California for the last year or so. The first thing you could observe was the obvious, houses with high prices were not selling as there is more offer than demand. But, later on, to my great surprise, we started seeing that houses that were priced under market would experience a process like a silent auction until they would reach very close to market price.

I used to have this illusion that bubbles were artificially created and controlled by a few people, but now I think of them as self-regulated networks presenting common emergent properties.

PenguinClub the kid's second life

2008-06-10T21:59:00.001-07:00

Since the very first moment my daughter Nicole (almost 8) started being a Penguin in Club Penguin we spiraled into the most addictive craziness I've ever seen in her short life. Being this her first experience of having virtual friends, virtual pets, virtual money that she has to earn and decide how to spend (mostly on her pets), a whole virtual world, she's totally hooked and enjoying it incredibly (even a lil'too much if you ask me :|).

In the words of her older brother Chris: "Welcome to the world of online gaming".

Scrum works with ScrumWorks

2008-06-07T09:13:00.000-07:00

We recently decided to adpot a new flavor of agile methodology called Scrum.

We choose scrum as we are a small team with rapidly changing requirements and in need of involving the product owner heavily in our decisions. The idea is that by using this methodology we will be running all the time (in the characteristic sprints) instead of being in the relaxed until we get to a deadline mode ;)

There were two tools that we evaluated: Scrumworks and scrumdesk. We liked scrumdesk a lot, graphically it is superior, although it ended up not being that easy to use. Support was superb (thanks Dusan!). The only thing that ended up using Scrumworks was that in Scrumdesk the tasks inside stories could not be assigned to each particular resource in the team, they needed to be checked out by the person that would take care of it. I guess the reason we couldn't use it is because we were not doing 100% scrum, and our minimum need for planning was already too much for the tool.

Scrumworks was easier to use, although not nicer. It provided a little more flexibility in assigning resources. If it would have been all my choice, I probably would have adjusted more to the original methodology idea and would have sticked with Scrumdesk.

I was very surprised that we could not find an ASP solution. Both solutions we checked were installable solutions. I guess if you're a small company it might be harder to provide ASP trials and trat might be a reason for this lack of web tools in the area.

Deposit checks is now a breeze

2008-06-07T08:52:00.000-07:00

I was nicely surprised last week when went to deposit couple checks in an Bank of America ATM. I was looking for the envelope and asking my husband if he had a calculator or something to do the addition of the checks values and he said: you don't need that! just insert the checks one by one and they'll be scanned. And so it was, I inserted the first check and got a very clean scan image in the ATM screen. It showed the amount in the check in the screen and it asked for confirmation. Same thing with the other two checks and boom! I was done!

It's one of these areas that didn't change much in a long time. Now, with a simple idea and a little more technology it is totally improved for all the parts. The client is surely happy with no envelope and no math involved. The bank and the client have all the security of their exact check being already in the system. Although I could not see the deposit scan online, I guess that will come soon.

I just learned in the web that other banks, such as Wells Fargo, are doing it too. While I was reading and I found out there's one company that allows to scan checks and "deposit" them through the internet ... That sounds interesting too, although I'm not sure security wise this is ready for prime time.

Talking about security, Bank of America also has an innovation in the area of website login securtity. They require the login id first. Then, they send you to a second screen that will bring a picture that is associated with the login account. If you recognize the picture you know you can login safely as there's no phishing involed. If you don't see your pic something is wrong, do not login. So, for a while until we get to a more personalized level of phishing this works great.

Painful: from SVN to Perforce

2008-05-30T07:15:00.000-07:00

We just moved our SCM from SVN to Perforce. By the way, I've been laughed at to death at my tortoise pronunciation, but hey, it's a french word after all, I can't do the english thing with tortoise.

It's going to be a process, the outlook was pretty painful. I guess once I found out that if you install P4Win you get some windows system integration, although I read it can cause some problems, we'll see.

Now I can only hope that we can use SVN for our GeneXus projects when we migrate to X, haven't done that yet ...

Anyway, just wanted to share the mixed feelings, as in a way the branching will be much better and we are already benefiting of the workspace specs but of course we're losing the light gracious non-invasive advantages of SVN.

The illusion of consciousness and self

2008-05-30T06:49:00.001-07:00

I've been kind of disconnected from this blog for some time (ok ... for a long time!) and I don't even feel bad about it (hey, that's freedom :). If I said that the main reason was that most of my reading in the past couple months was: paper books! it would be hard to believe by my previous posts, but it is true! (I sensed a connection between reading blogs and writing blogs in the past, but that's another subject)

By looking at one's blog in retrospective you can have a new glimpse into your own consciousness. Particularly you might find yourself surprised by how far away (even if not necessary contradictory) that mindset that you had in the past was. Most likely any state of mind you had in the past does not hold on and match your current state of mind. You might sometimes find yourself thinking: did I write that? Or you might find that the relevance or intensity of things totally changed in one or another direction. It might be that your attention was in totally different things or it might be that your curiosity was totally somewhere else.

This and other experiences in life lead me to grasp, in a more deeply way, that consciousness and self is only an illusion. We work hard every minute and specially when we sleep putting together the experiences of the previous day and creating the illusion of continuum. As a matter of fact even animals have this built-in illusion of time continuum; otherwise they would not be able to go for a pray or flight from a predator. But of course we humans brought this to a new level, we have this sense of self that is almost tangible, we firmly believe it exists: I am.

Then, my next thought was, that this feeling of self that we experience as our neural networks live in our brain, could be emulated in a greater scale. If a machine would have enough connected nodes of the nature of one mind being those biologic (as in humans) or not, and would have some mechanism of putting together all those experiences into one, a feeling of self would arise.

So now I have hope, that even if the experience is transcendental for us, there is some explanation for this sense of there has to be a greater purpose. It's not probably an ultimate purpose, but I think that sense of purpose that my daughter tells me she wonders about, as I did when I was her age, might after all exist in some level that transcends us.

Finally the OLPC laptops arrived home

2008-03-28T18:28:00.000-07:00

I've got to admit that it was a long wait from end of the year til the end of march for the program 'give one get one' from OLPC (I believe discontinued now). Luckily as fitted part of the consuming society if gratification is not instant might as well just forget about it, so it wasn't that bad.

The girls were super excited about their arrival. With 4 and 7 they could use them with no major coaching and they had fun with notepad, tamtam (jamm tools), paint, basic stuff. Internet connectivity was kind of hard to setup just because we had a secure net that it didn't like to connect and I ended up opening it up. We still are trying to install the latest flash player version as most of the sites they go need it. I guess I'll have to refresh my linux abilities that are really dusty ...

As we went on our little trip to Las Vegas couple days after getting the laptops we had a perfect opportunity to experiment the effects of this technology on the road. Nothing like videos I tell you, but pretty good entertainment nevertheless ;)

My first impression is that they are great machines, seem to be child proof (keyboard is water and dirt proof and they already proved to be shock resistant), pretty easy intuitive interface. They could use a little more color on the basic interfaces. I already miss windows file explorer deeply, there's probably something I don't know of out there. I haven't explored around much on the web, I hope there are cool educational applications that can be downloaded ...

All in all, such a cool thing to see their faces and imagine the faces of the two other little ones among thousands somewhere in the world getting those as well.

Some family interesting comments this week

2008-03-28T18:18:00.000-07:00

Nicole:
how did people come up with words for things they couldn't see, such as thought?
my boring answer about abstraction levels didn't do much ...

My sister:
dad doesn't stop sending and receiving text messages.
It was supposed to be the other way around, parents complaining from their kids on this regard ...

Ange:
for the aliens we're the aliens!
who told you this?
Nicole.

Flash as an API: the little runtime that could

2008-02-28T23:10:00.000-08:00

A few days ago playing with Yahoo live I was wondering about the possibility of using an API to integrate it with other applications.

The APIs they provide are a combination of three things:
1. Two flash players, a regular and a skinless one.
2. A set of Javascript APIs mostly to modify the Flash player's behavior.
3. REST Web Services to query broadcasts, channels and their viewers.

The Flash players being called as APIs was kind of a revelation for me. I never thought of Flash as an API, although it makes total sense. It seems like the increasing relevance of video and audio on the internet as these reach a broader application base, are bringing Flash into a whole new status.

What other cases are becoming standard Flash applications on the web?
. Promotions such as sweepstakes
. Quick forms
. Demos, tutorials
. Product presentations, navigation, 3D views.
. Complex interface GUIs.
Together with web services you can build pretty powerful applications.

According to Adobe the penetration of the Flash Player is 98.8% above any other competitor. [Thanks to Mauro]
Silverlight doesn't seem to be putting up a real fight, although it'd only take including it with the distribution of IE or Updates and that'd do it ...

I believe one of the most overlooked revolutions to come in the short future is the un-sequentiality of video as it becomes augmented (GPS, timed) and searchable (image, sound searches) and I think Flash will have an interesting role on that.

Learning: can Mindset change it all?

2008-02-21T21:46:00.000-08:00

Reading "MindSet" from Carol S. Dweck was an inspiring source of understanding how our minds work specially when it comes to learning.

It explained why I went through most of my school years just focused on grades instead of learning itself. I adopted the mainstream belief of my time that was that intelligence was a fixed ability that you either had or not and in whatever amount you had it that was it. Once I got to get the label of "intelligent" my only worry was to keep up with it. When a kid focus is on keeping a label, all that's really important is lost. On the other hand, as the book explains, when you give a kid the opposite belief, that intelligence as any other ability is trainable and is attainable and increasable, they flourish carelessly while they focus on learning and satisfying their own curiosity.

Basically, the bottom line of the book is, never tell a kid how smart they are, always praise the effort they made and the results they obtained. In other words, instead of saying: "you're so smart!", tell them: "look how great you're doing now, after practicing your math today". It's kind of hard to believe that just such a small change in mindset can make such a difference, but in reading the book I realized this is the case.

It's been longly known now, that kids love to be presented with challenges. For something to be perceived by kids as a challenge, it has to be leveled to their present skills and just one notch up. If something is too hard, it'll be frustrating. Too easy? boring. It looks like computers will in the long term be able to impart a much better learning experience to kids than a teacher can, as they'll be able to personalize the experience to the exact degree needed in each case.

I hope my daughter's teacher doesn't take offense when I give her the book ;)

Yahoo live!

2008-02-20T06:37:00.000-08:00

We were thinking at home on how to install a webcam and share it with some family and friends, thinking on buying an IP webcam, getting the fixed IP with our service provider, when I stumbled on this new service from Yahoo called Yahoo Live.

I loved this little product. It allows you to broadcast with any simple webcam. We tried on Sunday and it was fun. Then, yesterday I worked from home and I used with the intention to communicate better with co-workers being live. I'm not too convinced of the fact that they don't allow for now broadcasting for a closed private group. I'm sure this is just part of their early strategy with the product which is now on experimental release.

While exploring I got to see a webcam in an apartment in Saudi Arabia with great windows showing the streets, as well as a guy showing what he could see from the windshield of his car while driving through Philadelphia streets. Also, there was a group of artists in Stokoholm painting live for 3 hours, it was pretty cool. It's kind of interesting, although right now it's mostly people checking out the technology itself or the typical dating crowd ...

I wish they provide APIs to implement mashups on top of them, although it's a not too complicated flash application, just the broadcasting part of it might be a little more complicated to figure out.

Unfortunately, the guy that was at the front of this and other cool new products in yahoo, such as yahoo pipes, has resigned and is heading to Google right now ... I have a deja vu with the times years ago when Microsoft was the one stealing talent across the board ....

PMOG, a fun multiplayer online game

2008-02-18T11:01:00.000-08:00

According to Tim O'Reilly this is an example of Augmented Reality, which is the overlapping of layers of information on top of each other. In this case, the game is about completing missions that will involve navigating web pages avoiding mines and defending yourself with armors as you accumulate datapoints that allow you to purchase other digital arsenal.
I personally am not very affected to games but I wanted to get a taste of this one as beyond the game itself there's great innovation in the fact of having through a browser plug-in a layer of metainformation on top of the regular web browsing.
Don't wait for an invitation, just subscribe to the beta of the game and they'll send you an invite on your email.
One mission I found very cool was the Task and Project Management Online that guides you through a set of Project Management online tools. I'll have to come back to it as I'd like to start using one of these tools soon.

Yoga quickies

2008-02-18T10:39:00.000-08:00

This page has quick yoga meditations or practices that last less than 2 or 3 min each:

Yoga quickies

More of my thoughts on yoga: http://lifehighs.blogspot.com/2007/08/about-yoga-ans-stuff.html

Digital veins art

2008-02-18T10:14:00.000-08:00

[From szara's soup]

Maslow's pyramid

2008-02-11T07:29:00.000-08:00

Maslow's hierarchy of needs was IMHO the representation of one of those great thoughts of humanity and I come back to it from time to time. It was written in 1943 as part of Maslow's theory of human motivations. Today, I still can use it to auto-diagnose where I'm at. If I'm worrying too much for the little stuff, for sure I'm heading towards the bottom of the pyramid.
If I'm loving, inspired, thinking creatively, then I'm heading towards the top. It's a nice graphical reminder and also for me an intention declaration.

I like to think that the pyramid is inverted in my daily life as I like to think that technology allows us to grow up in the pyramid, but I'm not convinced that either of them is really true.

Linked. How everything is connected to everything else.

2008-02-10T08:07:00.000-08:00

This is the title of a great book by Albert-László Barabási.

The book narrates the history of networks from its origins around the eighteen century conceived as simple random graphs, growing to explain the complex networks we see today in every day's world from molecules to genes to neurons to the economy and the web.

As history progresses we start to understand that most networks in nature have common properties such as:

. Small worlds, there exist a small limited degree of separation between any two nodes. In other words, given any person in the planet, there are an average of six other people needed to reach any other person. The same is true for web pages in a number of 19. This property has become controversial lately (why can't be find Bin Laden if we live in a small world?) as a potential but not always a achievable property as it depends on the nodes cooperation and intentions.

. Hubs and connectors. Nodes are not randomly connected. There is a rule called the 80/20 rule (80% of the links are concentrated by 20% of the nodes), which establishes that some nodes concentrate links and act as connectors in the small worlds.

. Richer get reacher. These networks follow a power law distribution curve instead of a bell curve like a random network would. The reason for that is that new nodes attach to the network not in a randomic way but they follow the principle of preferential attachment. An example of this principle applied to the web would be that when choosing between two pages one with twice as nodes as the other, about twice as many people link to the more connected page.

. Survival of the fittest. Nodes always compete for connections because links represent survival in an interconnected world. Fit-get-rich is the rule, although some networks stop being scale free networks when winner takes all. This book written in 2003 mentions as an example the case of the Operating Systems area with a single hub and many tiny nodes. Interestingly enough, it mentions Google not being a winner takes all ... so far ... Anyway, fitness distribution might predict winner-takes-all behaviors.

. Achilles heel. Robustness is an emergent property of these networks, as the higher the interconnection and distribution the more guaranteed is their robustness. The Achilles heel are the hubs, a network could be bring to their feet just by damaging a few key nodes, its hubs. Anybody that has ever been stuck in Chicago airport knows what it means.

. Viruses and fads. Hubs, often referred to in marketing as "opinion leaders", "power users" are nodes with more connections than the average node. Usually, because of these same connections they are the first to know and experience the new cool stuff and they are responsible for "evangelizing" about them as well. If you want something to be viral in a certain net identify your hubs and preach to them

. Topology can be centralized (known as spider), decentralized (known as star, the internet for instance) or distributed (mesh like), the optimum and least vulnerable one, although not achievable for the internet or the web which took a live of their own.

. Fragmentation. Tendency to form communities shaping continents and islands. This explains why it's so hard to find some documents in the web with our current tools.

One of the last questions left open in the book is: as the planet seem to be evolving into one vast computer made of billions of interconnected processors and sensors, when will this computer become self-aware? Neuroscientists are kind of asking the same question in retrospective, how did we humans become aware as the result of our sensorial and neural networks? Without a doubt one of the deepest questions of this century.

Loved this little book, it has implications for all sorts of networks ranging from the genetic world to economics and the internet.

Gratitude and happiness

2008-02-04T06:47:00.000-08:00

Little by little we see scientific proof for different popular sayings and beliefs.

This time, I came across an article talking about the link between gratitude and happiness.

If you don't believe, do what science would do:

Experiment!

Try waking up in the morning and practicing gratitude for any little thing you are/have or can think of. After a few you'll notice your happiness level going up.

How do you know you've been away from your blog for too long?

2008-01-24T07:32:00.000-08:00

I'd say when not even your browser remembers your blog's url, you know it's been too long a stretch ;)

Anyway, between the end of the year, family visits, super crunch time at work and work traveling I feel like I do have enough excuses.

I thought I'd share a cool video from Shift Happens:

[thanks to Mauro]

Happy Holidays!

2007-12-22T01:37:00.000-08:00

Click in the image for our Happy Holidays Message!

from the creators of the best free toy ever the rubber band :)
This guys marketing rocks!

[Thanks to Adriana for the fun link]

Accelerated genetic human evolution

2007-12-17T23:07:00.000-08:00

This BBC article [Thanks to Ed for sending it to me] writes about a study that tries to demonstrate that the human evolution is accelerating in the genetic level. I find it very nice as a reality check for those who don't believe in evolution.

On the other hand it seems to me like we're past the point of natural genetic evolution. After watching a genetically modified mouse walk fearlessly towards a cat as a result of parts of it's olfactory bulb getting disabled, just to cite one of the recent wonders of genetic manipulations, you can see it coming fast ... Our pace with gene variations through genetic procedures will be so accelerated that we could say reproduction is losing its primordial goal in the human race (too movie like but not less true because of that).

How to monetize a website?

2007-12-13T07:35:00.000-08:00

These are the basic models of revenue I can think of analyzed from the perspective of a regular web site offering horizontal or mostly vertical content:

1. Subscription based services.
This is basically the membership approach. Members pay for a monthly or yearly membership. There are some options as far as the membership. There are sites that will provide free membership. Other option is the unique fixed membership fee. Another approach is escalated memberships with different benefits and fees (gold, platinum, make it simple ;). The fourth option, which I'm a big fan of, is a mix called freemium, which would offer a free membership providing basic services and a premium membership with a fee and exclusive services that only premium members can get. The freemium option usually gets nicely complemented by advertisement on the free areas of the service.

2. Pay per service. This is the model of the pay per view in the cable industry. Users pay as they consume a product or service. For instance, the member might have a free membership and pay to play one round of golf or one tournament, etc. As part of this model there's a new approach "it's up to you" started some time ago in the music industry by Radiohead. Also, an interesting approach to this model was eBays with commissions applied to services/product sold by others.

3. Advertisement based models. Users have great acceptance of non-intrusive publicity that finances their free services. It’s been a winner for multiple companies to make money where many others failed before (including Google).

4. Merchandise store. As you get traffic to a site, one revenue model usually used in addition to others is to have a merchandise store related to the site users' interests.

Then of course there are combinations of all of them, which I really think is the way to go.

Release software updates on Tuesdays, never Fridays

2007-12-11T23:03:00.000-08:00

My uncle went to surgery recently here at La Jolla. When we spoke on the phone before the surgery he commented to me that the surgeon liked to make important surgeries on Tuesdays, so people could come in and get ready on Mondays and they would have many weekdays ahead before the weekend in case there were complications.

I thought there's something to learn from this surgeons for us in the software industry. So, from now on, unless something is totally broken and we need an immediate fix, our software updates will go out on a Tuesday. Friday they usually be ready, Monday we'll do the last testing and Tuesday out they go!

In reality we're doing it on a Wed this time, couldn't get to the Tues in time ...

Anyway, it looks like it'll save lots of worries to both our clients and our tech support department :)

Chimps beat humans in memory tests

2007-12-10T22:34:00.000-08:00

Japanese researchers have revealed the results of a fascinating study in which chimps beat humans in memory tests:

If I had to find an explanation I'd think that humans added too many programs in a relatively short period of evolution which ended up screwing our memory in favor of other traits. I kind of was impressed with the memory my 2 years old had and it seemed to fade away as she "learned" more social and specific behaviors.

Communication evolution

2007-12-09T22:00:00.000-08:00

Human communication is evolving, and it is evolving in an accelerated way.

I came across a post that summarizes the milestones like this:

	Age in Years (2007 estimate)
Homo sapiens	~200,000
Language	>50,000
Writing	5,000
Telephone	131
Broadcasting	101
E-Mail	25
IRC	19
Texting	15
IM	11
Blogging	10
Twitter	1

Can you feel the acceleration? It really makes you wonder what is the next thing and when will we know about it? Also, it seems to be reaching some type of limit as no technology can be adopted in less than 1 year, or can it?

The article measures for each communication type three variables: immediacy, audience and lifespan and analyzes the holes trying to predict/invent the future new communication channels.

Once a paradigm is reaching a limit like this a new paradigm is born. We might soon see the beginning of a new paradigm: brain to brain communication through BCI (brain computer interfaces), something that is already out there ...

One laptop per child

2007-12-08T17:33:00.000-08:00

I just signed-up on the Give One Get One program of the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) program.

Sometime in early 2008 my daughters will get one laptop each and what's more exciting two little ones in Afghanistan, Cambodia, Haiti, Mongolia or Rwanda will get one as well in the same early 2008 timeframe.

Unfortunately they will not make it by Xmas, but any day can be Xmas with a laptop :)

What we eat in one week around the globe

2007-12-08T00:34:00.000-08:00

Interesting pictures showing what families around the world eat in one week ...

The source is the book Hungry Planet: What the World Eats, you can see multiple pictures online on this forum.

If the web was a democracy standards would rule

2007-12-07T04:05:00.000-08:00

If the web was a democracy (I don't want to say the world) we'd have standards for everything: openID, open social networks, open handset alliance, open source movement.

Standards always benefit users, I believe they do benefit all of us across the board as they allow technology to progress and become pervasive.

Take an example of a world without standards like the cell phone industry and you will only see stagnment and user restrictions and limitations. CDMA, GSM, TDMA restricting which phones you can use with which wireless companies or which country. Palm, Windows Mobile, OS X, limiting software mobile software development. Web browsers are not appropiate enough or strong enough in this platforms to fill in the standard gap for the industry.

On the other hand, there's tons of great examples as far as where standards can take us. What made the web what it is today? The web become a platform in itself and if you wonder what's the web after all? It's just a bunch of standards TCP/IP, HTTP, HTML, XML, etc.

What user on their right mind would deny the advantage of having unique identification (like OpenID)? In the wild world today the adoption of standards depends on some many factors. Mostly, what big players are doing according to their own interests. I know this might be controversial, there's many interpretations as far as what raises to the top, such as the hive mind. I don't want to get political with the W3C, but maybe some day we can have some type of organization that optimizes the way we think, create and why not? vote for our standards. Then, the industry would follow what is best for the users which again, in the end is the best for all of us.

We don't know what a machine is anymore

2007-12-06T06:45:00.000-08:00

I was reading a great post on important differences between brains and computers. It is very interesting as it summarizes the current understanding of what a computer is and what it can and can't do. As I was reading it, it reminded me of a wonderful story by Edgar Allan Poe. In the Maelzel's Chess-Player story (1836) Edgar Allan Poe gives all the arguments to detract a supposedly automaton chess player Maelzel was exposing. The really interesting part is that trhough couple of his arguments you can see how limited their current understanding of what a machine could and could not do was at that time. Specially the two things that were apparently true then, but not some ~150 years later were:

"1. The moves of the Turk are not made at regular intervals of time, but accommodate themselves to the moves of the antagonist ... The fact then of irregularity, when regularity might have been so easily attained, goes to prove that regularity is unimportant to the action of the Automaton--in other words, that the Automaton is not a pure machine."

"3. The Automaton does not invariably win the game. Were the machine a pure machine this would not be the case--it would always win. The principle being discovered by which a machine can be made to play a game of chess, an extension of the same principle would enable it to win a game--a farther extension would enable it to win all games--that is, to beat any possible game of an antagonist. ..."

Some years later we could all see a machine that would play chess and for some time we could see it both take different intervals answering and win as well as loose a game. Today that the chess game computers are more sofisticated we might not even see a chess computer loose a game anymore, and the answer eventually might become so instantly that might be perceived as coming at regular intervals, but, still, by the time I read this story for the first time, I could see clearly that the "current" notion of what a computer can or can't do might and most likely will be wrong.

That's why I loved also this post with the differences between the brain and computers as we understand them today. Apart from being a very good detailed article, I loved it because I think it might be the kind of story we (and note I'm not saying our grandchildren) can look at in the future (near future I'd think because of the law of acceleration returns or exponential growth of technology) and realize how technology is changing and our notion of what technology is needs to change accordingly.

On the differences themselves, I believe brains and computers are different, they will continue to be. Computers will have some abilities (specifically regarding memory capacity and possibilities) that brains will only acquire by merging with technology, that's why it's important to think on how we will merge and how we design intelligent technology sooner than later (although it might be out of our control some day).

Will Genexus bet on android?

2007-12-01T20:26:00.000-08:00

I'm just assuming and hoping that we do find in Android the standard mobile platform that was so long awaited in order to make mobile evolve into what it will become. That's just a bet so far, I wonder if Genexus will bet on that ...

I guess it shouldn't be too hard considering that it's only adding the Android SDK flavor to the existing java generator.

Imagining the 10th dimension video

2007-12-01T17:20:00.000-08:00

I found this video that explains and builds up the dimensions starting from a dot to the 10th dimension in a pretty accessible way.
In the end it ties up with string theory, which confuses me a little as I thought they needed 11 dimensions to close up the string theory, although reviewing it now that seems incorrect, 10 seems to be the case.
Anyway, if you ever wondered how to imagine any dimension above the 3rd and 4th this video, based on the book "Imagining the tenth dimension" by Rob Bryanton (the book doesn't seem as promising as the simple video explanation), will help you close the loop.

What does yoga and project management have in common?

2007-12-01T16:30:00.000-08:00

Yoga is a non-competitive sport. One of my teachers gives us for every pose three alternatives: the pose itself, modifications for beginners and the advanced pose. When I was thinking on what's the best way to give requirements to my developers I had this image of my yoga teacher's three levels and I thought it makes a lot of sense to apply this same concept when I give specs (specifications) to resources.

For any one feature we want to implement, there is the functionality itself we want to implement, things we might like to have but are just nice to haves and things that would make the feature implementation just outstanding. When I give specs to my developers I like to give them options. This way, if something is getting them stuck and it was not a total must to implement the feature I won't be waiting a long time for something that was not essential to the goal in question. On the other hand, if all goes super well, they are aware of what the cherry in the cake would be and they will tend to implement the optimal solution if it's not totally out of they way.

The giant global graph, where Semantic Web and Web 2.0 meet

2007-11-24T13:00:00.000-08:00

For the first time we're seeing major agreement between what were two completely separated philosophies on the web (except for the occasional comments on each side crossing to the other).

Last week Tim Berners-Lee blogged about the giant global graph (ggg), a new layer of abstraction on top of the net (internet, linking computers) and the web (linking documents).
"Now, people are making another mental move. There is realization now, "It's not the documents, it is the things they are about which are important". Obvious, really." says Tim Berners-Lee.

In the end, the so long awaited convergence between Semantic Web and Web 2.0 are graphs like FOAF (friend of a friend).
This was the first graph to became increasingly important recently covering a user need to own their social networks instead of having one particular social website own it for them. Now, for the first time both web 2.0 community and Tim B-L are mentioning each other on their blogs in agreement on graphs and web evolution. It seems like the first step for the re-converted Semantic Web is out there, not too surprisingly pushed by the social net needs, even if it will expand to many other areas.

One more extract from Tim's blog that shows the vision for the future (so we don't get too caught up on the social network thing):
"In the long term vision, thinking in terms of the graph rather than the web is critical to us making best use of the mobile web, the zoo of wildy differing devices which will give us access to the system. Then, when I book a flight it is the flight that interests me. Not the flight page on the travel site, or the flight page on the airline site, but the URI (issued by the airlines) of the flight itself. That's what I will bookmark. And whichever device I use to look up the bookmark, phone or office wall, it will access a situation-appropriate view of an integration of everything I know about that flight from different sources. The task of booking and taking the flight will involve many interactions. And all throughout them, that task and the flight will be primary things in my awareness, the websites involved will be secondary things, and the network and the devices tertiary."

Thinking space has an interesting point when analyzing the appearance of the ggg. The new graph abstraction might be an early indicator of a switch in the path of web evolution. Yihong Ding, envisions a future web that is viewer oriented instead of publisher oriented. I like this idea of users getting to their own personalized view of the web on this new layer of abstraction. Each user's cyberworld would be the intersection between their own graphs and the graphs out there.

This is getting exciting!
I wonder what would be next? The big bionic brain (bbb, not to say big brave brain) maybe? ;)

More neuro-feedback and neuro-implants experiments

2007-11-20T21:52:00.000-08:00

Via Neurophilosophy I came across three great examples of neuro-implants and neuro-implants that show how fast we're getting there:

1. Neuro-feedback: Brainloop, a brain-computer interface for Google Earth

2.
Speech neural implant which could soon enable a paralyzed man to talk again through recognizing brain-waves associated with sounds and ran by a text to speech computer program.

3. Attempt to produce collective music from brainwaves and heartbeats. Probably the idea was better than the results in this experiment ...

Digital art:: Flash Oz infinite world

2007-11-17T17:45:00.000-08:00

Spend some minutes (3.5 depending on the speed) traveling through this imaginary recursive flash scenario: Oz infinite world
[via connecting the dots]

Cheating on sleep

2007-11-17T17:27:00.000-08:00

I read this article on Wired about the possibility of cheating on sleep. It basically says that when we sleep at night it's not so important how many hours total we sleep but the number of complete sleep cycles we go through. Apparently as we sleep at night our brain goes through cycles with 5 different phases for a total of 90 min, three of them are relevant: 65 min of normal non-REM (rapid eye movement) sleep, 20 min of REM sleep plus final 5 min non-REM sleep. The REM phases will become longer during later sleep. This studies show that if we were to wake up naturally with no alarms or external intervention we'd sleep multiples of 90 min such as 4.5 hs, 6hs, 7.5 hs, 9hs, etc. The idea is that if we sleep complete cycles you'll have a better rest. A person who sleeps only 6hs (4 cycles) will feel more rested than someone who slept 8 or 10hs. Wait a min ... that sounds familiar!

I've been experiencing with this information for some nights and it seems to be true! For now I am only looking at the time every time I wake up in the middle of the night to see if I indeed slept through 90 min cycles, and it's been happening pretty consistently, no matter what time I go to sleep I'm waking up after 3hs and 6hs ...

Next step is to try and actually get up from bed at the end of the cycle closest to my target time (the time around which I intend to be up). We'll see if I can cheat sleep even a bit ;)

As I was reading this article I was remembering of "The new everyday: views on ambient intelligence" book from Philips Research. In this book they analyze very open mindly future technologies. They particularly talk about ways of replacing the traditional sound of an alarm clock with a diffused light system capable of creating an atmosphere in the bedroom that would wake you up in a nice natural way.

How cool would it be to have sensors detecting your brain waves and waking you up naturally and nicely when the cycle closest (and before) to your target time comes up? I'd love it!!

This reminds me of the phrase: "Imagine the possibility. Create the reality".

Why users matter more than ever before?

2007-11-16T08:04:00.000-08:00

Users always have been a big part of the software development process but recently I've been thinking that the role of users today is more important than it ever was.

In which phases and how should we care involving users?

1. Requirements. This is the most obvious one. Users are a key part of the requirements definition. This was true in the old times too, but today users know what they want in a very precise way. In the old times we were building systems for users that never used a computer system before. Users were 100% computer-naive (as opposed to today's computer-aware users).
When I studied systems in the late 80s users would provide the field knowledge, the "what", and engineers, analysts and developers would provide the "how to" part of the implementation. Today, the users are expert windows and web users, they know what to expect from a system, an interface and much more. I think users today know what they want and without losing our objectivity and obviously adding our own "know how" we should listen very carefully our users requirements.

2. User's ownership towards a successful system implantation. A system that was conceived and developed with user's ownership and commitment will be successfully implemented and installed. On the other hand, a system that fails to implant successfully will in most cases unveil that the users that should be committed to it were not identified and integrated properly. What users are we talking about in this particular step? for an internal or intranet system it would be: end users, marketing team, support team, sales team. For an internet system it is more complex and is explained better in specific literature such as "crossing the chasm", but basically it would be: alpha geek users, beta users, core users, vertical/extended users, mass users.
I had my own aha moment regarding this subjects in my early years when at the moment of rolling out a system, that from my perspective was just perfect, there were all kinds of obstacles and we could not get a successful implantation, and of course the users did not own the product, they didn't feel any commitment to it, they even felt menaced and challenged by the system and it just didn't work out.

3. Testing and system evolution. A system that is not used by users will never improve. What makes a system evolve is just one thing: USERS. You can plan to improve a system as much as you want, but what will really improve a system will be real people with real problems or real experiences on the system. That's why it's so important for systems to achieve a critical mass of beta-testers and core users that will push the product to its limits and make it evolve and grow. This is more true than ever also for web applications. Most of the users are educated in what they would expect from a system and they will ask for that, anonymously, with their names. No matter how, if you have a critical number of users you will get the feedback that your site needs to evolve.

So, more than ever before, users are a key part of the software development process and how much they're considered might make the difference between system's success and failure.

It might not be too far away that users can build their own systems, plus some people are already talking of self-improving systems, so things will keep changing ...

DVR obsession

2007-11-09T22:53:00.000-08:00

It's known that we get too easily used to the nice stuff. Technology such as Digital Video Recording just spoils us. After a while of having this feature on my cable box it seems so natural that I just can't believe I lived without it before. Not only this takes care of the kids interruptions when you're watching a show, allows you to skip through publicity and compresses show time by 40%, it allows you to re-play something you can't understand or need more details about and frees you from having to remember shows days and times. This is just the beginning ...

What's funny about using DVR technology is that I developed such a dependency on this technology that now I find myself trying to rewind a radio program I'm listening in the car radio or event worst, trying to rewind some phone conversation or some real life conversation or situation. It just makes so much sense that my brain can't tell the difference between the different media, it just loves this feature and wants to have it all over the place.

Most likely it's my bad memory that's really driving my DVR obsession, but I can see a near future where both this automatic and explicit recording capabilities become pervasive. Can you imagine the possibilities as video technology itself evolves into digital search by image, sound, GPS positioning, date-time? Show me the video at the moment when I was at the entrance of the Zoo or, show me the part when Nicole showed up in the house or, show me the part when he said 'bla bla bla'. Can't wait ...

I believe there is also a value in having a DVR kind of thing for the computer usage having the latest sequences saved automatically as well as being able to purposely save computer usage images and commands and have them replay at a later time with a similar functionality as the DVR for TV. This could have a great value in many applications specifically for computer learning or knowledge management applications.

Digital footprint

2007-11-09T21:39:00.000-08:00

I guess it was mostly because of the fires that I started thinking strongly about the importance of digitalizing our life, specially our past (as our present and future are luckily pretty digital anyway).

When faced with the possibility of evacuation couple weeks ago I kind of had to go on my mind and even physically over the things that I must have taken for sure with me. Among those, there were in my case documents (such as immigration paperwork, degrees, insurance paperwork) and old photo albums that could easily be scanned into a digital format. Then, of course there's the things like family treasures or trip's souvenirs that you just can't compress into a DVD (a video recording of them would be with our current technology the most you could get in this case).

Anyway, even if I probably won't find the time to digitize my past I still think it'd be a great idea to have everything converted to digital format. Then, moved to a server with some redundancy and that's it, you're free to pretty much go through life without the heavy baggage or at least without worrying or risking losing stuff that could be irreplaceable.

It's amazing to see how much smaller our digital footprint is compared with our physical one ...

The best analysis of technology and evolution ever written

2007-11-04T11:06:00.000-08:00

I finished reading "The singularity is near" by Ray Kurzweil (yes, I did! ;). I don't think there's another book out there with such a fine analysis of technology's evolution and evolution of humankind, or for that matter another person that has thought as deeply and thoroughly on this subject.

The book really pours information all the way from beginning to end regarding technology in general, computing, nano technology, robotics, genetics, physics and more. Obviously there's a lot of speculation (as it ought to be in the field being) it makes a lot of sense and it asks the right questions. I have to admit this is my first Kurzweil book, so I don't know how it'd feel for someone that already read previous ones.

We needed a new Carl Sagan. Kurzweil not only knows and thinks incredibly about the matter of evolution, in addition he seems to have the decision and the capacity to communicate his ideas even risking to be seen as mad or naive.

It seems like the movie is coming ... this is very interesting as it might have the capability to make massive information that otherwise might be hard to consume.

It couldn't fail for me, my favorite subject in life combined with a great thinker :)