Category: General

Walter Mossberg went on vacation without a laptop:

Increasingly, it’s possible to leave a laptop home on some types of trips and rely on a combination of a high-end cellphone and an iPod, devices many people carry anyway for their core functions — making phone calls and listening to music. The added capabilities in these gadgets are, in effect, bonuses.

To test this theory, my wife, Edie, and I recently went on vacation to Ireland and Scotland without a laptop. I carried only a digital camera, a new video-capable iPod and a new, enhanced BlackBerry phone I was testing, the 8700c, which will soon be sold in the U.S. by Cingular.

His conclusion: “To my surprise, the no-laptop vacation worked really well. The experience convinced me that even some short, light-duty business trips could be conducted without a laptop.”

WSJ writes that venture capitalists are thinking bigger:

Overall, the portion of money invested in bigger, later-stage companies like Visto rose to account for half of all venture financings in the third quarter of this year, according to data from the National Venture Capital Association, an Arlington, Va., trade group. That’s up from 33% in the year-earlier period and 15.5% five years ago. Meanwhile, the percentage of venture money invested in seed- and early-stage companies fell: Such funds accounted for just under 19% of all venture investments in the third quarter, down from 22.4% in the year-earlier period and 27.4% at the end of 2000.

The average investment in a later-stage company, which a trade group defines as one with a widely available product that is generating continuing revenue, was about $10.6 million in the quarter ended Sept. 30, up from the $10.1 million average investment a year ago. Start-up and “seed” stage companies drew an average of just under $2 million, while slightly more developed “early-stage” firms took in an average $5.4 million each, according to the venture trade group’s data.

Such trends are a sign that many venture-funded companies, particularly those in industries like wireless and pharmaceuticals, still need significant cash to ramp up operations. But it also indicates a problem for venture firms: Their funds, which raised tens of billions of dollars during the dot-com boom and never spent it all, are now scrambling to find places to put their remaining cash before the fund’s life, usually 10 years, runs out.

Tomi Ahonen writes about seven media:

1. Printing Press
2. Recordings
3. Cinema
4. Radio
5. TV
6. Internet
7. Mobile Phone

WSJ discusses the quickest way to board a plane – and it is not what we’ve been made to do.

Several years ago Menkes van den Briel, an industrial engineer at Arizona State University, tackled a “nonlinear assignment problem with quadratic and cubic terms in the objective function.”

In other words, he wanted to stop people from bumping into each other when they board an airplane.

Mr. van den Briel’s research has led to an innovative boarding system at America West Airlines called “reverse pyramid.” The first economy-class passengers to get on the plane are those with window seats in the middle and rear of the plane. Then America West gradually fills out the plane, giving priority to those with window or rear seats, until it finally boards those seated along aisles in the front.

WSJ writes:

A decade after they began encouraging spenders to put everyday purchases on plastic, financial institutions now want people to use them for even smaller transactions. Known as “micropayments,” these transactions typically are less than $2 and can ring up sizable industry profits even when they are less than a dollar.

After making a big appearance in online transactions a few years ago with the ability to charge a 99-cent song downloaded from Apple Computer Inc.’s iTunes, tiny payments now are showing up more often in the physical world.

The push toward smaller transactions is part of the credit-card industry’s continuing strategy of getting consumers to use plastic instead of more traditional forms of payment. Consumers already are moving in that direction: The number of U.S. electronic payments topped the number of cash and check payments in 2003 for the first time, according to a study conducted by the American Bankers Association and Dove Consulting, a Boston consulting firm. Cash and checks now account for 45% of consumers’ monthly payments, down from 57% in 2001 and 49% in 2003, according to the latest version of the study, issued last week.

[via John Battelle] George Dyson writes in Edge:

We can divide the computational universe into three sectors: computable problems; non-computable problems (that can be given a finite, exact description but have no effective procedure to deliver a definite result); and, finally, questions whose answers are, in principle, computable, but that, in practice, we are unable to ask in unambiguous language that computers can understand.

We do most of our computing in the first sector, but we do most of our living (and thinking) in the third. In the real world, most of the time, finding an answer is easier than defining the question. It’s easier to draw something that looks like a cat, for instance, than to describe what, exactly, makes something look like a cat. A child scribbles indiscriminately, and eventually something appears that resembles a cat. A solution finds the problem, not the other way around. The world starts making sense, and the meaningless scribbles (and a huge number of neurons) are left behind.

This is why Google works so well. All the answers in the known universe are there, and some very ingenious algorithms are in place to map them to questions that people ask.
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My visit to Google? Despite the whimsical furniture and other toys, I felt I was entering a 14th-century cathedral not in the 14th century but in the 12th century, while it was being built. Everyone was busy carving one stone here and another stone there, with some invisible architect getting everything to fit. The mood was playful, yet there was a palpable reverence in the air. “We are not scanning all those books to be read by people,” explained one of my hosts after my talk. “We are scanning them to be read by an AI.”

When I returned to highway 101, I found myself recollecting the words of Alan Turing, in his seminal paper Computing Machinery and Intelligence, a founding document in the quest for true AI. “In attempting to construct such machines we should not be irreverently usurping His power of creating souls, any more than we are in the procreation of children,” Turing had advised. “Rather we are, in either case, instruments of His will providing mansions for the souls that He creates.”

Google is Turing’s cathedral, awaiting its soul. We hope.

CNN Money has an article by Michael Copeland and Om Malik:

A new technology boom of potentially unprecedented power and durability is spawning in all of the nation’s tech centers from Palo Alto to Seattle to Austin to New York.
…
The tech industry in many ways is following the classic arc of boom-and-bust cycles produced by transformative technologies of the past, from the steam engine to electricity to the automobile. Each time, the revolutionary technologythe Internet, in today’s casebrought a burst of new enterprises that were just too early and got wiped out by brutal consolidation.
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For now, most Web ad spending is going to the big players, steadily adding to their accumulation of scads of cash. Google is sitting on more than $7 billion; Yahoo has about $3.5 billion. Microsoft remains the cash king with almost $40 billion on hand. A lot of that money will be earmarked for strategic objectivesacquisitions, say. But a good chunk of it will be spent in other ways, creating a slipstream that will pull many other companies along and provide strong impetus to the boom.

Jeff Jarvis answers: “The Crowd.”

So who owns that collected wisdom of the crowd? Id say the crowd does. Others merely borrow it if they continue to have the trust of the crowd and if they pay dividends back to that crowd. And if those others try too hard to control that wisdom, to limit its use and the sharing of it, then they not only reduce the value of it under the theory (and its still a theory) that a smaller crowd is less wise but they also risk turning away the crowd that creates this value.
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I believe we start with the notions that:
* We all want to control our contributions.
* We all want the community to benefit if we in turn benefit.
* We expect mutual trust in the forms of transparency and honesty
* And we all individual, collective, enabler find uncivil behavior (spam, fraud, hate) unacceptable.

But theres one more fundamental notion that informs this new society, a notion that big companies and institutions invariably forget because they were build in the old order:

This is no longer a centralized world, a world controlled by those institutions. This is a decentralized world, a world controlled by us.

Dave Pollard writes:

…there is no doubt in my mind that becoming a better listener, learning to perceive instead of always conceiving, and improving one’s attention and relaxation skills, are legitimate steps to becoming more open, aware, collaborative and imaginative, and that that will necessarily make us, and the teams we work with, better able to come up and develop useful ideas and approaches to complex challenges. And I do not think there is any science to this — it’s very soft, difficult, and can only be done through practice rather than book study, and our left-brain science-oriented human languages are decidedly unhelpful.
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To shift back to awareness of the experiences themselves, Varela suggests we need to develop three capabilities:

1. Suspension (of our habitual pattern of ‘objectifying’ the experience, instead leaving ourselves in the experience);
2. Redirection (of our undivided attention to what is really happening, to the whole and not just to discrete objects in it and our conceptions about them); and
3. Letting Go (of the terribly human tendency to analyze, interpret, think about meaning, and of our own perspective, so we instead ‘see’ what is happening from inside it, rather than from our traditional position as ‘objective’ viewer).

Tom Evslin writes:

I think the urge to cooperate and contribute to the community is baked into our genes. Seeing other people acting cooperatively sets off a rush of hormones that makes us want to cooperate as well and vice versa. In the old days cooperation was local because local was the only sphere in which most of us could contribute or cooperate. Remember Think Global, Act Local bumper stickers?

But on the Internet everything is local. Anyone who can afford Internet access and has free time can provide volunteer tech support to anyone else worldwide languages permitting. Anyone can contribute to wikipedia or wiktionary or add open source software to a collection. Pretty much anyone can (and does) blog.

..We volunteer and act cooperatively on the Internet for no more profound reason than that we can. Were programmed to want to help and, given the opportunity, thats just what we do. A lot of Web 2.0 is about giving us that opportunity. There is a profit opportunity in enabling people to do what they want to do.