The same blog but a new host ( this blog has moved)

I have moved this blog to a new server in my own domain (fendrich.se).
My new blog Carokann’s Periscope is a complete copy of this blog including history.

I have stopped to post here and will not update this site anymore.
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The next big thing?

I read about the next “big” thing, namely 3D TV: The future 3D TV – we look at some of the best angles
Yes it is cool, really coo but is it the next “big” thing?
Sorry but it will not change anything, I mean it will not change our behavior patterns not even slightly.
It is similar to when the color TV came. Color, yes! The same TV programs, the same people producing and the same people watching. The TV shops got something new to earn money on. That’s all.
Did I say that I want black and white TV back? No not at all, I just said that color-TV didn’t introduce any changes to our society. New cool feature and some new business, nothing more.

3D TV is a new cool feature and I will be the first (almost) to buy. However, it will not make any changes to our society.
That is why I regard, ePaper and eReader as a more “big” thing than 3D TV. The introduction of good quality ePaper and eReaders will definitely change our behaviour and definitely have an impact on our society.
Look in my article Will e-Readers save the world? why I think so.

Why doesn’t smartphones have a voice interface?

I mean the command interface. What devices are the most natural to start having a voice interface? Mobiles of course!

We talk in them already. A voice interface to the PC isn’t at all as natural. I can imaging people sitting at the office talking to the computer. Annoying, to say the least!

Yes, yes some of the mobiles have something that they call voice input but what is that really?

I have only used Sony-Ericsson and Nokia mobiles and in the my old Sony-Ericsson P900  I could say the name of someone in the contact list. It work sometimes and if I said “Donald Duck” or something that P900 didn’t understand I called someone randomly. Nokia never made any big effort to have the same voice input but my Nokia N95 and now Nokia E71 read up the callers name with a voice from an old robot-movie from the 70:s…

C’mon Nokia and Sony-Ericsson you can better than this! Can’t you?

The Nokia E71 can even read up my e-mails and other stuff. Well not that bad but I have no use for it really.

So what am I talking about here?

I would like to have a voice input for every command you can do, such as “open calender”, “book meeting”, “start music player”, “start radio”  etc etc

It can be made more or less sophisticated but a basic level would be great. I wouldn’t even need to put on my reading glasses! I have done many stupid things while driving my car, that I will not tell you about but a voice interface would spare me some tricky situations.

Can this be so hard? I know that the software for voice input is out there that can do these things so why not in the mobile?

Nokia, why didn’t you go for this instead of 5800, the so called “iPhone killer”. I tested it for one day. Really, I have to say this, it is pathetic Nokia! Your 5800 is like a modern version of my old Ericsson P900 when it comes to user interface. Yes you have many nifty functions but an “iPhone killer”? You can’t be serious! I haven’t seen Sony-Ericsson’s new “iPhone-killer” but something tells me that iPhone will remain the king of user interface for a while. So, Sony-Ericsson why didn’t you go for something new? A real voice interface?

What do you say, wouldn’t a real voice interface be a useful function to have in your mobile?

Maybe it is out already, did I miss something?

Cyborg – human or machine?

When Manfred Clynes and Nathan Kline coined the term “cyborg” 50 years ago they were talking about people living in the outer space. Today we can define a cyborg as a human (or other organism) that get increased capabilities with the help of technology. With a passive definition like this most of us are cyborgs already. I think that the term is not interesting until it is technology that substantially improves our abilities. We have many examples, such as pacemakers, prostheses and even wheel chairs. They make things much better for the individual in question but maybe not with much better functionality than a healthy body. Transhumanism is a term that is very related to cyborgs. Transhumanism is a philosophy (or maybe philosophies) that not only believe in a very bright posthuman future but also strive for it. The typical transhumanist have great hopes on the The Singularity.

New technology, new materials and new knowledge about how our body works will give us human spare parts with even better performance than the original. We will see this in sports where the current problems with steroids, blood doping and other kind of doping is just the beginning. In the Olympics in Beijing 2008, we had examples of contestants who ran with a prosthesis. The Olympic Committee approved it.  Next time, 2012, the prosthesis are so good that they will win if they still are approved to attend.

Will disabled be the first superhumans?

This may sound strange but it is probably close to the truth. Let’s make a little test:

The man who run 100 meter in the shortest time is regarded as the fastest man on earth. Today, the fastest human ever is Usain Bolt from Jamaica. He run 100 meter in 9.69 seconds at the Olympic games in Beijing, August 2008. This is an amzing speed.

If I offered you legs that would make you run faster than Usain Bolt, would you receive them? You must of course cut off your own legs and replace them with the new legs. My guess is that you would say no! Well, maybe not. If you are one of the disabled people who have no legs, I guess that you would say yes!

So when these legs are here, we will see disabled people with supernatural powers. Jumping and running like no one ever done before.

Of course this can be true for any human organ. We will probably be reluctant to replace fully functioning organs with mechanical stuff but if the organ is missing or dysfunctional we will say yes.

In the future we will also see mechanical components that can be mixed with our organs and implanted in our bodies. Not replacing organs is a little more easy to accept, I think.

The limits will then still be our bones, flesh and nerves and not the mechanical parts. The one who can get a complete mechanical set will probably have even better features.

I am not a medical expert but I think that the future for many kinds of disabilities looks rather bright!

Some ethical and hard questions

If you know that you will live x years extra if you replace your functioning liver with a mechanical one, will you do it? How about your heart? Your brain?

Before we answer we must also think about how it will be done. We are talking about a future where the surgical methods are different from today. Maybe nanorobots injected in our system, can do all or part of the job, maybe micro surgery done more or less by robots or maybe some other method not yet invented. Mistakes are very rare and repairable. Painless and shorter period of recovery compared with current methods. It is maybe easier to say yes under these conditions?

The ethical questions are numerous however. What kind of ethics and culture will be present at that time? I think that we will gradually get used to the idea. Just take a look at how the perception of plastic surgery has changed over the years.

So far we have been talking about replacing one or another organ with artificial artifacts. Let us go one step further. Imaging a situation where most or all of our organs can be replaced by artificial compononents that performs far better than the original. How much can we replace before we are more machines than humans? Maybe it is the brain that makes us human? Some day even the brain will be possible to replace but I don’t want to fantasize about its implications. Replacing the brain is so far ahead and science fiction that I will stop here.

I think that we are in a period where the combination of IT, nanotech, genetics and other technologies are improving with an exponential pace. If not ourselves so will our children certainly face these challenges and questions. The 2 TED talks in the links below show us that in some sence it is already here.

Links:

TED Video: Aimee Mullins and her 12 pairs of legs

TED VIdeo: Juan Enriquez shares mindboggling new science

Blogs about cyborgs

Blogs about Transhumanism

10 Future Shocks for the Next 10 Years – Business Center – PC World.

Social Networking for the Enterprise

The hype around Social Networking is at its optimum and now are all enterprises looking for how to use it, afraid of how their competitors will find all the secrets. Because there must be a hidden secret of success right?

First of all, I am very found of Social Networking both in my private life and in my work. (What is the difference btw?) My job is a little special and I get so many good ideas from networks. My very personal view is that companies shouldn’t rely on proxies with filters. Using the money on better and informed leaders is a wiser investment. The only useful filter is protecting against virus and malware. Punish the bad sites not the employees! With that said I will not argue more about filter or not filter. When I talk about filter here it can as well be a written company policy of how to use resources at the Internet.

Many jobs are about delivering a certain very well defined result at a certain time. The need of research needed is more or less nil and networking will just steel your time from your task. Every enterprise have a bunch of tasks like this. Let’s focus on knowledge workers that are supposed to solve business problems and find opportunities. These people always need to keep up with trends and the latest findings within their area. They can not invent everything by themselves. They must get information and new ideas from other people and they will also contribute with new ideas just by interacting with other people. There is variety of more or less knowledge intensive jobs. A programmer for instance don’t have too much time to spend on networking. They have to deliver their code in time but sometimes there are problems that effectively can be shared and solved by the “crowd” out there. This is a typical situation for all types of knowledge workers. Some have the time and need to do more research and some less but they need to do it in order to deliver a good job.

Enterprise 2.0

Enterprise social software is also known as Enterprise 2.0. It is social software used in the enterprise. Mostly are these tools used internally. From wikipedia: The “unstructured” information provided by social technologies has proven particularly useful in business processes that lack rigid pre-definition, but where people work together in an adaptive way to innovate solutions. The challenge then becomes how to distill meaningful, re-usable knowledge from other content also captured in tools such as blogs, online communities, and wikis. Social networking capabilities can help organizations capture unstructured tacit knowledge.

Of course there are some examples of successful Enterprise 2.0 applications but many companies started up Enterprise 2.0 activities, such as wikis and blogs, without anything achieved. Almost no employee contributes. Big disappointment!  Why did this happen? Here are some typical mistakes:

1. Keeping social software on the intranet behind the filter and the firewall will NOT activate people much. It will only work in some very special situations with an active community inside the company walls.
2. Starting a very structured and heavily moderated forum, will just show the employees that the “company doesn’t trust me” so why participate?
3. The CEO blog can be quite nice reading, but who have the courage to strongly disagree with the CEO in a moderated forum where you can not be anonymous? A CEO’s blog on the Internet is a different matter. It will probably will give a great deal of valuable feedback both from employees, customers, partners and other people!
4. Applications like Facebook, MySpace and Twitter have been filtered out by enterprises as dangerous time-consuming gibber. Even LinkedIn is still filtered out by some enterprises.
   • Maybe they are right in some cases… Many companies quickly understood that their customers and partners can be found out there in Facebook and other Social Networks.
   • Trying to setup internal versions of social networks is just severely wrong! An internal LinkedIn with mandatory participation is the wrong way to go…
5. Finally, the key to success for all of the mentioned applications is the millions of people out there. Self organizing groups, “the long tail” model, “wisdom of crowds” and free resources is something that enterprises have trouble to deal with. “It is not fair that most people get more value than they contribute with”. Where is the business logic? Can we trust free resources? How can we measure quality? Furthermore, it is very hard to get these “crowd effects” inside the walls.

In most cases the real power is outside the the walls!  

 

Can we now open up the walls to social networks for all the employees?

There is no Yes-or-No answer here. Companies are different.

I think that there is no immediate profit for most enterprises in this and it is a huge difference between a company such a Google that lives on the net and a manufacturing company such as Boeing. In general we have at least 2 levels of engagement.

• Show brand presence on the network. This is done by a limited group of central resources. Preparations must be done in order to have a back office to catch up the communications. 
• Let employees in general use Social Networking for knowledge sharing, B2B and B2C activities. 

The second one is not a big deal for enterprises with an established brand and with a customer base that is not in the consumer market. Yet all enterprises have groups that may gain from open source, open specifications, forums and other social networking. Keeping these groups locked in behind filters is the same as throwing away investments by effectively and systematically missing valuable information and opportunities.

There is at least one type social networks that every company of every type should start to utilize more and that is Social Bookmarking.

 There are many choices but my personal favorite is Diigo, as can be seen in Delicious or Twine? The answer is Diigo!

 

Some links of interest:

• Blog posts about Enterprise 2.0
• Blog posts about Enterprise Social Networks
  
• Wired (2007): As Applications Blossom, Facebook Is Open for Business
  
• Chris Anderson (2004): “The Long Tail”
  
• Chris Anderson (2006). The Long Tail: Why the Future of Business Is Selling Less of More
  
• Ted talks: Clay Shirky: Institutions vs. collaboration (Excellent video about the Long tail)

Media moguls, embrace the new opportunities!

In the growing climate of “if you not with us you are criminal” I just want to clarify this:

• Is file sharing illegal? NO WAY! It is all about what files are shared.
• Do I defend illegal file sharing? Not at all! 

What follows is already said many times but it is needed to be repeated over and over again. The new IPRED law in Sweden is severely threatening our privacy. We are talking about breaking basic human rights. Media companies will have the right to enter my home and dig in my personal files without real evidence but in order to get evidence. This is against legal praxis in the western world.

This is obvious for every tax paying citizen. 

Enough about the IPRED law for now. More in the links below.

Instead I will give some advices for free. Listen up media CEO:s and other players! You are missing market shares while you are fighting and wasting resources on the wrong battlefield and other new players will take them before you.

We all have to embrace structural changes. Internet change the way that digital material can be distributed. That changes the conditions for what the current structures are based on. New players will find out better ways to do business. As usual the old players are trying to delay all these changes!

Come on! Don’t try to keep the old structures. You should know better. Look forward! We live in a new era. Look out the window! Big opportunities are waiting. You must change your way of doing business! Fight against progress and development and you will miss market shares. Forget about distributing CD’s once and for all! Start to deregulate this dying business.

Key to reducing piracy is increasing the legitimate ways that users can enjoy artists work online. This is so easy and you can’t do it by make your own customers to your enemies! 

Offer good quality. Guarantee virus- and spam-free material. Find the ways, others are already there and starting to cash in.

Finally, stop lobbying for the impossible…

I also have a good and free advice to our politicians: Continue like this and we will vote for someone else.  This is not about file sharing, it is about human rights. We will find out who are defending privacy and human rights and who is not.

Links:

icmpecho: IPRED, it’s not about file-sharing

Blog posts about IPRED

The Independent: Why Sweden rules the web

Wired: EFF Wonders: Did Obama Violate Copyright Law with iPod Gift?

Robots, Brain and Muscles

I surfed into two completely different links but they both give us a hint about what is waiting around the corner.

Honda connects brain thoughts with robotics

The first one is about robotics controlled by brain. From my perspective, robotics and humanoids is an area that is taking off the years to come. See also humanoids – the next generation.

Honda managed to interpret a mans brain pattern when he thought about lifting his right hand. They converted it to a command to the ASIMO humanoid, the robot that they developed during 25 year. ASIMO lifted the right arm when the man thought about lifting his own right arm. Does this mean that they can now read our thoughts? Not at all! This is of course not a developed technique yet and it will take many years to make it even near to robust. One day it will be more developed and useful for something. The question is for what? I am thinking of people who can not move an arm, for example. But is this something that is relevant after so many years that it will take? After so many years I think that Asimo or his “grandchildren” will understand what to do anyway. If not so, an artificial arm will do the job or maybe a new arm from genetic engineering. This is what the 2nd link below is about.

If it is possible to detect and interpret brain signals in the future, will also be possible to do the other way around – create and feed the brain with signals. Of course it is, reversed engineering so to say! So again we have this 2-edged sword to deal with (heaven or hell: future scenarios). I don’t even want to speculate about what could be possible to make us do or think with such techniques. It will take a long time before it is real, but it is coming sooner or later if nothing spectacular is happening with humanity before that.

Genetic engineering breakthrough

The other link is about how genetic scientists managed to turn stem cells into muscles in a living body. This seems to be much closer in time than the first news.

Again I was thinking about disabled people that, in some cases, obviously can be helped from this. What about the elderly? Has not their muscles started to decrease in volume and strength?

Another arena is sports with all its doping problems. Is growing new muscles doping? If we can built muscles and maybe even design them to the type we want, what sport result will we have? Should it be allowed? Can it be detected and stopped?

I have no idea, really!

How I combine Twitter, blog and RSS

I have used Twitter for about one month now and I have checked out most of the Twitter tools there are. A good source for tools is http://twitter.pbwiki.com and another one is http://justtweetit.com/tweeter-directory On the right side under the ads you will find a list of tools and other stuff for Twitter. I started this blog almost at the same time as Twitter. Now, the question is how to combine Twitter, my new blog, RSS-links and other links that I publish. It is a lot of saving, cutting and pasting just to get it out to Twitter and to get it to my blog. I will share with you what I learned so far. I welcome any comments about even better methods and tools!

Here are my tools:

1. Twitter
2. TweetDeck
3. Tweetburner (twurl)
4. Twitterfeed
5. Google Reader
6. Diigo and Delicious
7. My blog (this blog)

They are all free and work excellent together and I will tell you how!

The Twitter suit

In Twitter I mainly posts links to news or interesting stuff that I find during my surfing. Of course I also use links in my blog posts. The following tools are, among other things, for handling my links integrated with Twitter and my blog.

TweetDeck is the tool to use if you follow more than 50 people. It is almost impossible to use the standard interface and read all the tweets rolling down the list. In TweetDeck, I can arrange the people I follow in groups. I have the groups:

• Inner circle – my collegues and “physical friends”. 
• Fav’s – My favourites of the people I follow. Currently I have @mashable,  @patrickdixon,  @JamesRivers,  @the_gman and some more.
• TechWatch - people twittering stuff useful for my work. 
• I also use temporary groups. 
• A search can also be used in the same way as a group. For instance I have a search on “Location Based” that continuously is updated with tweets matching that.

Tweetburner is a service that shorten your web-address from its original long form to something shorter such as  http://twurl.nl/m4hh0z (this blog). In Tweetburner you can also see how many that clicked at your link. First set TweetDeck to use the right shortener. You will find it after the “Shorten URL” field. A long list of different services that can shorten your URL’s. Select twurl that is the one connected to Tweetburner.
Now, if you post a link in TweetDeck by first paste it into the “Shorten URL” field and press the Shorten button you will see the short form show up. Fill in your own text and press enter. After a while you can log in to http://Tweetburner.com and get the statistics of how many that clicked your link and when!

Twitterfeed is a tool that automatically can create Tweets from any RSS-feed. All news pages and blogs these days have a RSS-feed. Just take a look in http://alltop.com if you don’t have a clue where to find them!
You can let Twitterfeed use your favorite RSS-feed and put them out on Twitter. You can filter on certain words and you can set the frequency and Twitterfeed will work by itself.
I am not so found of just relaying out a RSS-feed and not knowing what will come. I want to control the feed by myself. This is where Google Reader, Diigo and Delicious comes in!

The RSS and Bookmarks suit

Google Reader is a RSS-reader (you can probably do the same with any RSS reader). I subscribe to the RSS feeds that I find interesting. Select from Alltop.com for instance. One neat function in Google Reader is that you can publish the items that you like just by clicking the Share-button when you read the RSS item. All the links that you share will be published on a webpage that is created for you. Click at the Share folder and you will see the link to the webpage with shared items. That page is also a RSS feed! Use that RSS-feed in Tweetfeeder.com

Diigo and Delicious are two different services to save your bookmarks on a server. They have numerous features, such as tagging and sharing with your friends, that I will not talk more about here. You don’t need to use both of them. I have my own reason to do that. See my previous blog-post Twine or Delicious? The answer is Diigo for more. Lets focus on Diigo for now. Install the add-on to Firefox for Diigo (other web browsers have similar features) From Diigo you can produce RSS-feeds for Twitterfeed as well. For instance when you save a bookmark you can fill in tags. You can use the tag publish or any tag you want for publishing. In Diigo this tag will have its own RSS-feed. Click on the tag in Diigo and you will get the RSS-feed. Just give it to Twitterfeed and it will be published the way you want. When you save a bookmark in Diigo you will get the option to send to Twitter. I normally don’t use this because I want the twurl shortener and not the one Diigo uses. You also have the option in Diigo to set comments and send it to your blog as a draft. This is very useful and can be the base for a future blog-post!

Finally, my blog – this blog. From the feature in Diigo that I mentioned above I will have a bunch of drafts with comments and a links. I can mix them as I like and get ideas to new blog-posts. Whenever I publish a new bog-post I also post a tweet in order to inform about it. Be careful to not only promote your own blog because your followers will eventually disappear. Tweet helpful links and other stuff and the tweets about your own blog will come natural.

I often post in Twitter manually with copy and paste to TweetDeck and that is no problem but with the methods mentioned above I get a continuous flow of tweets based on bookmarks that I think is interesting and would like to save anyway.

I hope that you can pick up something from all this and use it in a way that suites you. Please let me know if you have some other methods and tools!

Will e-Readers save the world?

I am the type of nerd that can’t handle papers. If I get papers I don’t know where to put it and finally I will forget that I ever had it or can’t find it when I need it. Sometimes however I print large volumes of paper for use in my work. Large volumes are not very convenient to read from the pc-monitor. Paper is much more relaxing for the eyes.

The world consumption of paper has increased 400% in the last 40 years. Close to 4 billion trees or 35% of the total trees cut around the world are used in paper industries globally.

An e-Reader is a device that is used to display documents. There are a bunch of e-Readers available such as Amazon Kindle,  Sony’s e-Reader and Fujitsu’s FLEPia. Currently they all suffers from either being too small or too expensive and of course the black-and-white displays, except for FLEPia which has color, are limiting as well. Another problem that some e-Readers have is a very low refresh rate of the display. You have to wait several seconds for the screen to turn page.

Amazon Kindle 2

In general, Kindle of today is just not good enough to replace paper. I know that many are using Kindle but they are in the first wave of users. The forgiving type: Wow! Look I can load documents and read it! Cool!
Kindle displays documents in black and white and the format is too small. The price, however,  is almost OK: ~$350.

FLEPia from Fuijitsu

The latest FLEPia has a color display, still a little bit too small and way too expensive! Most new e-Readers, including Amazon’s Kindle and Sony’s e-Reader, use electronic-paper technology that is easier to read than conventional displays. But e-paper still suffers in comparison to conventional liquid crystal displays in terms of refresh speed and vividness of color. FLEPia is LCD-based and first in the industry with color display. FLEPia may still have a way to go.  1000€  is just too much. I think that people will hesitate to buy when the price is on the same level as a good laptop.

Plastic Logic

I expect new types of e-Readers to come soon with A4-format and really thin. One candidate is Plastic Logic that announced an e-Reader to be launched in the beginning of 2010. It is a black and white device. If the price is right, such as 200€, this will be a success and I am sure that it will be easy to get back the invested money, fairly quickly. I mean paper cost, ink cost, printer maintenance and other. E-Ink, the company behind Kindle, has announced development of a new e-Reader. The preliminary plan is  late 2010 and then it is a color display but the price tag is unknown.

Paper

The cost per printed paper is something between 20 cents to 1€ depending on how you calculate it. If the cost for an e-Reader is less than 200€ it is easy to get back the investment fairly quick. That should mean much less paper used worldwide. Even if it takes a while to change peoples mind there are some really good business cases not only in office environments. For instance within manufacturing of complicated products and products with many variants, all over the world loads of paper is used during the assembly. The assembly instructions are following the product along the assembly line.

The feeling of a real book have its own merits especially an old one. I regard this as an art form but for how long will that be the standard book? How long will we have newspapers on paper every morning? Will we have newspapers at all? BTW, I stopped reading morning papers a long time ago.

A lot of forests to save and of all trees used by man, it is the process of making paper that is the most environmentally unfriendly technology.

Eventually the e-Readers will give a reading experience as comfortable as paper with non-scattered displays and easy to use interfaces. Maybe e-Readers will not save the world but they sure will be a good help.