metarand

How to download and build the latest mobile phone and other gadgets

Further to my post about Makers and 3d-printing machines…I can see a day coming where we believe it to be pure arrogance that a company could design a product, have it manufactured and distributed to retail stores in the belief that consumers will buy their latest gadget.

In this next now, imagine getting a news alert (ok, a tweet) late one evening from an influential source (anachronistically, a friend) telling you about the latest 3d design released by company X. You love this new gadget so you pay for and immediately download the specs straight into your 3-d printer. You click print and then go to bed.

The next morning you eagerly head down to your studio and sitting in your printer’s out tray is your new shiny phone.  It’s been printed out for you and what’s more, it contains your personalized brand, the same as all your gadgets.

No major punt by Company X, they’ve simply uploaded a design spec. No supply chain. No negative impact on the environment by shipping goods all over the place. And for you – no hassle, instant gratification and a device for far cheaper than any gadget delivered to your store or doorstep today…

A final assumption: your 3-d printer has a port for recycling any device it has made as well.

Tags: 3-d printing

Grassroots, open source, replicable 3-d printing: RepRap

I’ve been enjoying reading Cory Doctorow’s latest novel, Makers, which tracks the growth of a grassroots 3-d printing revolution in a post-GFC-like world. You can follow the novel in parts here.

A real life example is the RepRap movement. A group of people have come together to develop an open source 3-d printer that can replicate itself. Check out the video below:

RepRap from Adrian Bowyer on Vimeo.

Tags: 3-d printing, Cory Doctorow, Makers, RepRap

5 ways influence is rapidly changing the media and advertisting landscapes

On Tuesday I’ll be co-chairing the Future of Influence Summit together with Ross Dawson. It’s an extremely topical area as we are rapidly seeing a complete shift in the media arena as a result of innovations in influence. I personally predict that the whole concept of an advertising industry is about to be turned on its head and that this is already more well advanced than many industry players are aware of.

Ross has pointed to five key trends that are the leading edge of this transformation:

1. The democratization of influence

It used to be that influence was a direct result of a person’s placement on some form of elevated platform – the CEO of a multinational, politician or a journalist with a media empire backing them.

These folks are still heard, but more and more voices of influence are emerging from completely left of field. Tools such as Twitter have liberated the great unwashed masses. Anyone can start a movement and many are.

2. Quantifying influence

How well a brand campaign runs has always been one of the advertising industries great smoke and mirror acts. No more. Influence is becoming far more measurable. In fact, as Ross points out, there will be more metrics for individual influence as well and these will be used as for more accurate guide to who we hire and do business with.

3. Individual reputation trumps corporate influence

We are more likely to trust a company based on the reputation of the individuals running it than ever before. Steve Jobs drives Apple’s influence. Jeremiah Oywang’s move from Forrester to The Altimeter Group was more about him as a key influencer than about Forrester.

4. Influence is the new media

We listen to those who we trust, we listen to those who deliver us value. If a newspaper continuously delivers news items well after you’ve digested them from your personal newsfeed, the newspaper’s influence over you will decrease significantly. Ross sums this up well – publishing itself won’t get an audience – only influencers will create views.

5. The influence economy is born

Again, Ross has this covered: the $550 billion advertising industry may be transformed.

I’m really looking forward to the conversation next week.

Tags: #foi09, Influence, Media

Cluetrain Manifesto, A Decade Later

Ten years ago the Cluetrain Manifesto emerged as the voice of the Internet, coalescing the pioneers who were forging the links into this brave new world of connectivity.

Ten years ago I was one of the signatories to the manifesto. Here’s what I had to say at the time:

The language of humanity, our collective consciousness, is what is driving the Internet forward to beyond the hype – may your train continue to lay down the tracks.”

It’s quite a wonderful feeling to take a moment and pause in my/our journey. We’ve come a hell of a long way. I remember the first time I dialled into this thing called the World Wide Web – from a terminal at the University of Cape Town, on the slopes of Table Mountain. I remember buying my first book from Amazon and being enthralled when it arrived. I remember hacking together my first webzine and the feeling of endless possibility when I started getting comments from people all around the world. I remember the joys of investing into what seemed like crazy ideas to many of my colleagues and watching those turn into thriving businesses and I remember watching a few flame out brilliantly too!

Ten years on where are we? The first rickety tracks are well and truly laid – I still order books through Amazon, buy and sell through eBay and talk to friends and colleagues via Internet telephony, but I do these as second nature now.

We are now also beginning to not only grasp, but utilise our collective consciousness through real time tools such as Twitter.

But there is still so much more. For example, I am currently assessing the educational sector and see so much opportunity for improving how we teach, how we learn. More on that in another post.

That’s about as much time as I currently have for a pause, now to get on with the future…

Tags: Cluetrain Manifesto

The Future of Media is Salient

I went along to Ross Dawson’s Future of Media Summit yesterday. Kudos to Ross for pulling off what appeared to be a seamless transcontinental event.

My only piece of event-management related feedback is that in keeping with the culture of participation theme running through the media these days it would have been good to have had a roving camera and/or pans so that the audience in Sydney could see and engage with the audience in Mountain View.

To some degree this was achieved in true guerilla-style by the uber presence of Phil Morle’s conference chaser. His chaser approach is to hook up ustream to tangler to create a livestream of an event together with a rich seam of commentary. He did this to great effect at the Sydney MySpace Developer Platform launch a few months back and again yesterday.

Yesterday however, the chaser took a cool twist. Phil was located near the back of the room in Sydney and wasn’t getting good video. So he tapped into the video feed from Stilgherrian, who was seated near the front and mixed this with his audio on ustream.

My biggest take away from the time I spent at the event was captured in a comment by Mark Pesce – “Content requires Salience”. I’ll let you ruminate on that for a while.

Stephen Collins has a great wrap up of the event.

Tags: fom08, Future of Media, Mark Pesce, Phil Morle, Stephen Collins, Stilgherrian

Metarand Unplugged: Ross Dawson, Future Exploration Network On Media’s Future

In this session of Metarand Unplugged we talk with Ross Dawson, Chairman of the Future Exploration Network. Ross is a bestselling author, global futurist and the convenor of the cross continental Future of Media Summit.

We talk with Ross about the future of media, the upcoming Summit and its place as a crystal ball for the media industry. We also talk about the futurist business as a whole and where the iPhone fits on his roadmap for the future.

The biggest takeout: he uses frameworks to synthesize his pattern recognition and as a communication tool for exploring trends and the potential paths we will follow in the future.

I hope to see you at the Summit.

Stream the Session in Quicktime:

here

Stream the Session as an mp3:

here

UPDATE: Ross has released two frameworks in the lead up to the Future of Media Summit:

• Future of the Media Lifecycle
• Seven Driving Forces Shaping Media

Check them out and let me know your thoughts.

Tags: Future Exploration Network, Future of Media Summit, Ross Dawson

The Big Picture: A Vision For Social Media

Imagine a world in which:

every single human being is posting their thoughts and experiences in any number of ways to the Internet.

This is the world that New York-based VC, Fred Wilson, sees within his ‘grand vision‘ for social media.

I applaud Fred’s simplicity. All too often the bigger picture can become obscured by over complication. If we take a look through his firm’s portfolio, we quickly see that he is pulling together a mosaic that will progress us towards achieving his vision:

Twitter – microblogging

Disqus – distributed comments

Oddcast – conversational chararacters

Tumblr – microblogging

Zynga – social gaming

There are a bunch of other companies in the Union Square Ventures portfolio, but these are the stand out ventures that speak to Fred’s simple vision.

Turning this vision into reality will take a lot more determined effort by all of us. Besides supporting the right technology pieces, achieving standards (think what Gears is doing for HTML5), and gaining wide user traction there are regulatory and plumbing issues that will need to be solved.

Currently we see a lot of infighting and an almost continuous bitchmeme, at present this seems to be over whether Friendfeed is better than Twitter. And this within the context of a world in which millions are unable to express themselves, a world in which millions are dying because of oppressive regimes.

It is high time the social media industry rallied together. By focusing on this simple end goal, by setting a target we can come together around, we can achieve so much more.

[Picture courtesy of hellomartin]

Tags: disqus, Fred Wilson, oddcast, tumblr, Twitter, Union Square Ventures, Zynga

Churchill Club: Dialling In The Top Tech Trends

The mobile phone dominated the panel’s predictions for the annual Churchill Club’s poke at the Top 10 Tech Trends.

Vinod Khosla sees the cell phone becoming a mainstream personal computer. This trend is already heavily under way towards becoming a reality in the more advanced Asian countries.

In similar vein, Roger McNamee sees mobiles moving from being feature phones to smart phones at an accelerating pace due to the rise of real software environments layered on the network and separate from the physical devices.

Josh Kopelman believes we are headed towards an implicit Internet. Eric Savitz summarizes this discussion:

Today your permanent record exists; you create a trail of data exhaust, digital bread crumbs. Implicit data that exists in silence. Movie rentals, restaurant reservations, books purchased, Web sites visited, etc. All of this data existed in silence. No easy way until now to benefit from the data; but the silos are coming down. Google, Yahoo, Facebook, Mozilla collecting data. Trend is that big wave will come to companies that are able to novel and new ways to deliver information by crossing these silos, with implicit data on the Internet. Use social networking data to improve search. Conversion of data exhaust will create value in new and interesting ways. All of the panelists seem to agree that this is a key trend. McNamee says he hopes Kopelman is not right, given the privacy concerns that are involved. The issue is providing implied consent to follow the bread crumbs, McNamee says. Schoendorf says this is an under 25 issue. McNamee notes that the trouble is that not only does Facebook know what I’m doing, but the Chinese government also knows. Khosla says it is an opportunity, not a problem. “Privacy is a red herring,” Khosla says. “There are rules and laws and ways to address the privacy issue.” Data reduction is an important need, Khosla says. He has a secretary to do it. Khosla says it is a critical need and huge opportunity.

Let’s mash these views up a bit: the post Churchill Club, metarand top tech trend is that a rise of the implicit Internet will not be restricted from a device point of view.

We will see a tipping point in this respect both in terms of device access shifting to the mobile and also going beyond simple mobile browsing to embedded solutions.

Tags: Churchill Club, Josh Kopelman, Roger McNamee, Vinod Khosla

Web 2.i – It’s Time To Enter Beta

Elias Bizannes has written a post about the Web 2.0 era and what’s next. His post is titled It’s all still alpha in my eyes, and he’s issued a call out to get metarand’s views.

First up, I’d say it is high time we realized that Web 2.0 has entered beta – as Elias points out and as we saw at the recent Web 2.0 Expo, big business has entered the space – big time.

Secondly, I’d like to postulate that this beta version of the web should be called Web 2.i. Here’s why I’m adding the “i”:

* iPhone: I agree with Elias that the mobile web will be a big part of this next phase, that is, the mobile web as defined by the iPhone. This device has created a ripple that will radically alter the mobile pond;

* meshed data/presence: The “i” in dataportability will coalesce with the “i” in presence (go with me on this) to create a far more integrated individual web experience.

In short, I agree with the twitterquote from Dave Winer in Elias’s post: Web 2.0 is now over.

It’s time for Web 2.i…

[Pictures courtesy of bwr, saufnase]

Tags: Future, Mobile, Web 2.0, Web 2.i

Microsoft Provides Mesh for Apps/Data, But Fails On Interoperability

I’ve covered DataPortability. I’m experimenting with Friendfeed. I share apps across my Macbook Pro and iPhone.

However, I still feel there is a long way to go before we reach true seamless interoperability of data, connections, applications and devices.

And so I am very excited by Microsoft’s preview beta launch of Live Mesh, a feed-centric programming model.

The promise is that:

Live Mesh puts you at the center of your digital world, seamlessly connecting you to the people, devices, programs, and information you care about – available wherever you happen to be.

That is a very noble sentiment. I applaud Ray Ozzie’s vision.

But wait a minute – this only works on devices running Microsoft software. I fully understand that they are only at beta. I also hear their plaintive cry, but we are bringing out Mac and mobile versions later this year.

Fail. They should have built in true interoperability from the get go, across all devices – period. Doing so in stages can only lead to a Here, there, everywhere patchwork.

UPDATE: Former Microsoftie Robert Scoble has gushed his views out. Yes I also like the dialogic RSS capability, by Robert you sum up why its a fail before its even out of the blocks:

Mac support? Coming in the future. Nokia support? Unclear. iPhone support? Ask Steve Jobs (translation: will be very limited due to Apple’s complete control of that platform). Firefox support? Yes! Linux support? What’s that?

[Via TechCrunch]

Tags: DataPortability, iPhone, Live Mesh, Macbook, Microsoft