Cyber War - The Next Threat To National Security And What To Do About It, by Richard Clarke.


Clear, concise, and, as the events of 2011 unfolded, increasingly prescient.

This rant on the future of interaction was excellent.  Lamented the sense that most “future visions” being touted in concept videos today are neither very futuristic nor visionary. Instead, they just expand on the current ‘pictures under glass’ metaphor for interaction.  

Senseq offers a new technology to bring tactile feel front and center, and by doing so breaks through the dominant pictures under glass concept. Check it out.  Fascinating with tons of applications.   

Creates another dimension of interaction and experience. 

A ‘Cambrian Explosion’ needs more than just sheer numbers - it needs tremendous diversity and variety.  While there are certainly signs of diversification,  the more remarkable aspect of today’s environment seems to have more to do with how many startups there are and not how many different startups there are.  

From The Cambrian Explosion of Startups: 

The sheer number of new startups forming and getting funded these days is dizzying. It’s never been easier to start a company to harness new technologies and turn them into products. Traditional venture capital may not even be able to keep up with it. We are at the beginnings of what may very well become a Cambrian Explosion of startups, which will have implications well beyond the technology industry to the entire economy.

Tuned into a cyber security discussion today with Richard Clarke who shared insights into what he calls the CHEW (Crime Hacktivisim Espionage and War) of cyber security. The talk was hosted by Veracode where Mr. Clarke is a recent addition to their Board. Some highlights below:

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Someone needs to declare war on latency.  Latency of all kinds, not just network delays but app switching, page rendering, UI element activation, etc. Both Fire and iPad2 have 1GHz dual-core processors and ample RAM.  They should be able to achieve a much higher level of responsiveness.  I had high hopes for Silk and thought a browser with optimized server-side elements could lead to a lightening fast user experience.  Such a shame to match advanced network-side tech with crummy device/software performance.  Defeats the purpose. 

bijan:

“Most problematic, though, the Fire does not have anything like the polish or speed of an iPad. You feel that $200 price tag with every swipe of your finger. Animations are sluggish and jerky — even the page turns that you’d think would be the pride of the Kindle team. Taps sometimes don’t register. There are no progress or “wait” indicators, so you frequently don’t know if the machine has even registered your touch commands. The momentum of the animations hasn’t been calculated right, so the whole thing feels ornery”

—

The Fire Aside, Amazon’s Lower-Priced Kindles Also Shine - NYTimes.com

fuck. bummer. 

futuresagency:

Click image to display full graph. (via Jonathan MacDonald)

The fanciest tools and biggest datasets don’t mean much without smart people and a data-driven culture. Wise reminder from @infoarbitrage

informationarbitrage:

As usual, the Defrag Conference has brought together a disparate group of amazing people to discuss innovation, technology, community - and data. I was flattered to ask to deliver a keynote this year, and the topic I chose was near and dear to my heart: using data to create competitive advantage. As I lay out in my slides, building a successful - and sustainable - data-driven enterprise is so much more than simply having better algorithms or a more performant box: It takes great people with data DNA and a model that creates competitive moats around the business. It is so seductive to focus on “the algorithms” as being the “there there” in creating competitive advantage. In my experience, they are a necessary but insufficient criterion for success.

In any event, take a read and share your thoughts. This is merely the beginning of a conversation that we’ll be having for a long, long time.

Creating Competitive Advantage Through Data (IA Ventures) View more presentations from Ben Siscovick

“The most important thing to realize about the future is that it’s a choice. People choose which visions to pursue, people choose which research gets funded, people choose how they will spend their careers.

Despite how it appears to the culture at large, technology doesn’t just happen. It doesn’t emerge spontaneously, like mold on cheese. Revolutionary technology comes out of long research, and research is performed and funded by inspired people.

And this is my plea — be inspired by the untapped potential of human capabilities. Don’t just extrapolate yesterday’s technology and then cram people into it.”

—From an excellent post on the future of interaction (and the limitations of the current ‘Picture Under Glass’ visions) by Bret Victor.  The future is tactile.  The future is hands…