Dean Kamen, to me one of the most brilliant contemporany inventors of our time (know segway? AutoSyringe’s?, Insulin Pumps? and so much more…) seems to have come up with something extraordinary that might as well solve a lot of today’s health problems, have a look at his demo on the Colbert Report for the Water Purifying machine:
you can read a bit more about it at the US patent office.
Add comment April 15th, 2008
Following my first day short notes and even now that I should probably be sleeping before my early flight back do Lisbon, I couldn’t resist and put up some more of my rought-notes about LIFT’s second dayt.
Disclaimer 1: I just wanted to confess that I was quite tired which implied that my attention span was, hum… somehow less than ideal. I didn’t even listened to all the day presentation’s somehow Skype back-channel seemed so cosy! 
Disclaimer 2: as all personal notes, this ones also reflect my own thoughts about some of the conference presentations and as such they shouldn’t be taken literally!
Holm Friebe and Philipp Albers
I had met them the night before as we seated on the same table during fondue but it was not until they’re presentation that I actually knew they were LIFT speakers! I really enjoyed our conversation during those cheesy hours, so it came to no surprise that they’re presentation on the Hedonistic Company felt so compelling! Holm and Philipp created the socialistic-capitalist joint-venture Zentrale Intelligenz Agentur in Berlin as a way to showcase and experiment on new forms of cooperation and collaborative in work environments. They’re Hedonistic Company is grounded by 7 simple, yet powerful, principles:
Radical, hein?
This is a particular interesting rule, since according to this guys we MUST engage client work and self-induced projects with equal energy and effort, knowing that some of the client’s work isn’t always as dear as we wish you shouldn’t really let them take over our energy and attention, meaning that you should somehow balance your client work your other personal projects in an attempt to not let any of them fall short or be corrupted by the other
Money is an incentive, but they suggest a less traditional approach to it’s ‘use’, reuse the money of each project immediately, use it as a direct incentive to your collaborators right after the project finishes, pay all the bills there’s to be paid and reserve 10% for the ’cause’. They’ve actually made a very clever suggestion regarding those pesky yearly bonus: no bonus at the very end of the year! The end of the year might fall short if you consider employee motivation, when the bonus arrives he might had just left
engage your company in trying different approaches to everyday work, experiment, tweak and perfect each ‘modo operandus’. Use collaborative platforms, online and offline and find technical solutions for social barriers/problems within the ‘company’. Real Life Meetings are so last century, take your teams to the next level online meetings!
I sort of lost my self at this point… but in the end I suspect what they meant was allow and support everyone’s intellectual obsessions. We all have them! They’re a BIG part of our inner self and assure our inner balance. By supporting your teams intellectual needs, you’re in reality helping raising the integration and acceptance levels of people within and towards the ‘company’. More Motivation => More Results
There’s no eternally assigned boss, each project needs to have someone in charge, just make sure that everyone gets a seat every so often. Foster off-site team reunions!
Don’t exhaust yourself in trying to be too efficient for it sometimes has the downside effecting of reduce productivity for all the effort that goes into CONTROL! As all things in nature, so will good ideas adapt and catch on even if you neglect them for a while.
Your best advertising is NO advertising. Good products, services and ideas market themselves. No PR! Let you and your team be the best possible PR’s
Henriette Weber
Henriette is a long time friend and still my favorite Danish girl 
we sort of share a peculiar set of special Brainwaves (more on this on a next post) as I joked about, so I’m pretty aware of her ideas on chaos… anyway I’m drifting… Henriette managed to be selected to present a short open-stage at LIFT and as expected I thought her message was not only compelling but also impossible not to overlook again and again at this current times.
Enjoy the Chaos was the motto for the conversation, according to her we’re all part of a silent revolution, the fact is that in a consumer world, much of us (including myself) don’t fully grasp the dimension that consume has in our lives… even if it clearly isn’t making us more happy! So in the end we’re witnesses of a new reality pop here an there about where people opt-out for less as a way of becoming not only more free, but essentially more happy.
According to Henriette the same is happing in business and in particular in marketing these days and it’s of vital importance to them. The normal business approach, of business is business doesn’t seem to apply all the time anymore. But why are the companies so afraid of introducing more chaos on their processes? Aren’t they leaving out the creative revolutionaries at door?
People want relationships, a one on one relationship, whether it’s with a brand, a product or a service, so new forms of dialog are needed, the internet has surrounded us all and we simply cannot afford to leave that proximity goes by untouched.
Robin Hunicke
Robin Hunicke is both an academic and practitioner and works for Electonic Arts, it’s hard not to listen when a girl talks passionate about gaming, right? But besides being currently working on BOOM BLOX for the Nintendo Wii and having worked on My Sims, Robin pretty much took us on a journey about the Playfulness of Games and Apps.
When designing a game, a program, a Webapp, some sort of social networking platform or pretty much anything this days, it’s impossible (or should be) not looking at the importance of the Real vs Non-Real. How many games/apps have made us feel like we’re loved, important or helped us show our love with someone? Well in fact, not many according to Robin Hunicke, but at least some, being the top example of one that does: Facebook!
Facebook is a GAME! Facebook is:
for all the above reasons, Robin stated and I could only agree that Facebook is indeed one if not the biggest social online game ever! Facebook works on rewards: lets me decide how to use it, which rewards I might wanna collect, by using it I’m bringing it more and more closer to reflecting my which makes the game in a sense pretty much about ME, like a one-on-one game and not about US or the rest of the crowd. People keep jumping into the Facebook bandwidth because of personal interest not in the interest of others. Facebook makes us feel like:
“I am a person living a fun life and i am LOVED” - Robin Hunicke
One peculiarity in Facebook and on all the so called social apps, or social networks is that is about the people that use it and not about who designs or owns the platform, pretty much reminding me my own quote on the workshop whether when me, you or someone is developing an online community, we should focus on facilitating the conversation and not controlling it in any possible way! The conversation should flow within the community freely at any given stage, for not guaranteeing it would be to sentence it to a time-delayed killing.
People are intrinsically and last time I read biologically drawn to games! No one likes chores, chores like the things we do everyday, wether it’s work, hobbies, house chores or even a relationship can become a sort of chore (which is obviously bad!), what’s missing in all of this ‘chores’? REWARDS! People need the positive reward, that price when they’ve reached the end of it, they’re goals!
Robins conclusions rocked actually and kind of made me envy her passion on what’s she’s working: Put people in the center of some universe, give them space to create and smile and something extraordinaire will pop up! It’s possible to smile at work! We just need to find our rewards!
Add comment February 10th, 2008
Britain’s Prince Charles gave a speech on Monday at the World Future Energy Summit in Abu Dhabi, and instead of actually be there, he actually used a 3-D holographic projection of himself, recorded last year in the United Kingdom:
It will take quite some time before it becomes a mass media, but it’s already interesting to see how much we’ve evolved in the holographic field. Also interesting, is the relation between the use of such technology and the environmental savings we can get from it, we could save quite a lot of unnecessary trips by using holographic projections instead of having the real person on site, truth is, one does not need to be there to make an impression, not to mention the absence of Jet Leg
It’s obviously not the real thing, it still lacks a bit more of quality I would say, but it’s still impressive hein?
Maybe in the future, conferences and talks will actually be leverage by the amount of present or holographic speakers?
Add comment January 29th, 2008
A lot of people argue that services like Twitter, Jaiku and more recently Pownce, are mere services aimed to boost our egos, services born to increase our already ego-flooded world, it might or not be truth, it’s a fact that a lot of their users simple use it to broadcast short status messages with few or no interest at all! It’s my belief that these particular services are the beginning of something unique simply because their particularly different from previous messaging services, and departing from this idea I’ll explain why I believe that we need a nationwide Twitter!
Twitter is much more than a messaging system, it’s a unique multi-platform broadcasting system. Like we’ve witnessed in the past with radio, which was used to helped distribute messages from different services across, simply and quickly, so is Twitter doing it somehow! Two different features in Twitter seem to me the groundbreaking, first it’s a internet based broadcasting network: my message is sent across a multitude of people and mediums originating from the internet, second it’s bridge for inter-connecteness with other systems: by using it’s Twitter public API we’re able to connected to it any system that outputs messages. In the end the process is simple: a message sent from the web, reaches people on their instant messengers, mobiles, or on their contacts page on the service website. The other-way around also applies.
The idea of a nationwide Twitter just pleases me because I tend to be more comfortable the more informed I am: I (unfortunately) have this deeper sense that in the event of something important I’d be the last to know!!
Cellphones don’t handle crises situations nicely! In case of a network breakdown, they’re dead in the sea, so we have to create something more reliable and universal. In the past, pretty much everyone had a radio, so trusting the radio was the obvious choice. Today, due to many factors no technology seems to be such common place, we have to consider that in the advent of something people will have different means depending on where they are at the moment, it could be a computers, a radios, or a simple cellphone, so we really need to have that in mind.
I would wish we could have a multi-plaform nationwide alert system, something that everyone interested, national citizen or not, could subscribe and register with different ids for different alert channels. When some relevant thing happens on the channels I’ve subscribed the system would broadcast an alert on all the mediums I’ve registered for being notified. This would assure that, when needed, the information would reach me somehow.
Everyday I see the more and more services using Twitter massive broadcasting platform for delivery updates on their interests. In Portugal we have Público, that through twittering is in fact delivering alerts for every breaking news they publish on their site.
So it’s probably just a matter of time before we actually see it being used for as multi-channel alert system, at least the “media” is doing it already!
The only reason I think Twitter wouldn’t make it, it’s related to the fact that I think this system should be managed by some Official Emergency Department to avoid and prevents it’s abuse or deviation and therefore ruin it’s success as emergency broadcast system.
Any comments on this?
3 comments September 12th, 2007
6 comments April 17th, 2007
Last year Jeff’s demo at TED made sensation throught out the net! This year he just showed us a bit more about the future of interaction, check out his demo video:
nice hein?
6 comments March 21st, 2007
1 comment March 9th, 2007
Professor Sugata Mitra presented two weeks ago at LIFT an engaging presentation about remoteness and the quality of education. Remoteness not only in geographic sense, but also the remoteness from means, materials and education in general. Professor Sugata has suggested that in many countries (not only those typically associated with third world countries), the schools in remote areas suffer from what he quoted “not good enough”: not good enough teachers, nor not good enough educational technologies.
The first is mostly caused by problems like teacher’s retention, or how can we as society attract more teachers to those almost abandoned areas, and second, for reasons like the preference of affluent urban schools in detriment of the more remote schools for piloting technologies. How apparently in good schools with excellent (or at least rather motivated) teachers and students, the EI is many times perceived as over-hyped and under-performing in the educational values. In Professor’s Mitra opinion, and something I personally believe in, the particularities of the less fortunate and remote schools implies that they should be the ones actually, experimenting and be targeted by the pilots with educational technologies.
States should be actively searching and testing alternatives to primary education, whether schools don’t exist, or simply aren’t enough, schools where teachers aren’t available or aren’t the “best ones”. According to the experiments Professor Sugata conducted along the years, he not only discovered but also helped prove that children are particularly well adapted to self learning and organization.
The Kalkaji, Mandantusi and the “Hole in the Wall“ experiments all seem to enforce this precise idea. The concept of the experiments, were simple: embed a PC into a hole in some remote location; places where children didn’t have much or no contact with technologies. “Et voilá!” the results were not only surprising, but they ended up helped raising more questions than real answers. For instance, the language in which the computers were running didn’t seem important for the interaction, in some cases it even helped demonstrate in a matter of hours/days, how children can actually learn some vocabulary (approx. 200 different words), all of them extrapolated from the simple interaction with the machine.
In a matter of 7 hours of interaction with the PC on the Kalkaji Experiment, 17 youngsters were already browsing in Internet, proving that children and teenagers can actually be self educated. This is more or less common fact, but the truth is that we all keep forgetting how simple this can be and actually happen on a regular basis. According to his presentation, during the Mandantusi, where the PC wasn’t actually connected to the internet, but was only packed with a large collection of CD’s and DVD’s, and an experiment, were the target audience didn’t had any previous education in english, on the post experience interviews, most of the investigators were more or less surprised with requests like “a better processor and nicer mouse”"!! 
The Hole in the Wall project not only helped prove the fact that youngsters and teens can be self taught, but also helped understand a bit of more of the self-learning process. As an example of the results from this experiments, Mitra quoted that personal connections have a deep impact on the learning process: 6-13 yo seemed to learn better when integrated in groups, regardless of their education as a whole, the results were quite uniform in groups with different background. This project also documented the kind of stuff students were using the PC for: basic windows functions, browsing, gaming, chatting, email, music download, painting, learn from educational material and other computer based activities.
Natural systems seem to be self organized, from Chaos seems to arise the order, we all now the paradigm, but what matters to this professor and should also matters for a a lot of people on the education structures is how can we seemly make the transition from the current educational model to the self-organizing model. So should we just be “letting happen” or should we look at self organizing, natural, systems and try to improve from there our current models? Well there’s no master plan yet, but Professor Sugata Mitra did leave some key ideas for the sake of the Primary Education 2.0:
In his opinion the only form to actively solve the remoteness problems of education is thru Outdoctrination, or self-organization, which makes me wonder if this would actually workout in the Portuguese case, or if we could reproduce it on a larger level and maybe try to educate other generations of citizens thru a massive self-learning network and always on system?
Note: Bruno and Stephanie also posted their notes (much, much sooner then I) about Professor Mitra presentation at LIFT, in case you’re interested just follow the links to their blogs!
2 comments February 28th, 2007
UPDATE: Lee, just posted his own notes plus the presentation PDF file.
Lee Bryant’s actually presented on of the most interesting presentations I’ve watched during LIFT, his presentation was about how to effectively collect and empower knowledge inside companies. Lee is founder of HEADSHiFT.COM a social software consulting focussed on the development of social tools for the work environment.
Most of his premisses are based on a set of general thoughts: we should just be re-factoring the factory, but “we should also be using technology to feed our minds instead of the machines”! Tools should serve people’s actions, not the other way around. People are better and have greater power in activities like pattern matching. Most IT systems (definitely) don’t understand the way we work, the way our brain works! People have peripheral vision and intuition, abilities we’ve always used on our life’s, abilities that aren’t only hard to achieve but their also quite hard to emulate on the computer level. Based on this small set of thoughts we’re simply wasting way to much knowledge on the enterprise and large organizations today!
So the question Lee posed was what can technology do to stop the waste? The now so called web 2.0, is actually giving place to a more accepted “social web” and with it, we’re witnessing the birth of a new set of tools: The Social Tools: tools like wikis, blogs, bookmark sharing sites like del.icio.us, cms’s, and a whole bunch more tools and websites, what Social Tools have in particular is that they intrinsically harness the network effect to get better along the way, feeding themselves on what people do while using them, in particular with the information people produce by using them.
So what’s the definition of the new enterprise IT working environment, the “enterprise 2.0″?
The IT infrastructure for the next generation of enterprises, those companies that will effectively use employees power as competitive advantage, will certainly for sure master social tools, as a mean to harness knowledge and effectively share it across all their structure dimensions. These social tools will need to create an ecosystem of information, data and will depend on a connected infrastructure that facilitates the idea or notion of information everywhere or ever present information scenario. Participation is mandatory, not only with the purpose of sharing information, but also because internal staff reputation will probably be built upon those contributions.
Lee also mentioned one important feature, these so called social tools must effective have to ensure their success: subscription and aggregation. Together their the only way you can actually be acknowledged and get to know, what’s being made and updated on your enterprise universe.
In general today’s companies are searching for better internal understanding, more effective and better collaboration, better decisions. In general we’re talking about gathering and optimizing the Collective Intelligence. CI already exists in some defined communities today, like Wikipedia, Digg, Slashdot, etc. and it reflects their native cultures and norms, and in large companies, they’re just like most of those communities, they have the “man power” to scale and take advantage of these collective intelligence gathering tools. CI represents both a challenge and an opportunity for the IT departments within those companies. Too much time and knowledge is being wasted today’s, which reinforces the idea of possible massive savings in terms of productivity, effective work, increased peripheral vision, reduce duplication and extend the work relationships in a more closer and personal matter: people might contact themselves directly instead of depending on the rigid structures most companies have to get in touch with someone.
With all this information sharing inside and outside of the enterprise, another problem arises, how can we effectively sort out what to read, or even write? Individuals, groups and divisions inside the companies work as funnels: on a typical day you might have 100 items suggested by your social network, from those, 10 might be sufficiently important for you to link or tag them, but in the end you’ll only write/blog about one entirely. So social reading and filtering drives relevance! Others can also share what you blog, link or tag, information is most probably finding you these days instead of the other way around if you already take part on such groups.
Lee’s presentation left some nice tips towards the CI in the enterprise: start by deploying some social tools, tools that allow you to have feeds everywhere for everything, so that people might subscribe what interests them and be notified as soon as new information is available. Create ways of adding value to your online library, tools like social news-readers, allowing people to recommend and share bookmarks and documentation between them. Allow people to create internal blogs, as a window to their functions and work inside the company. Tools that not only share collections and remixes of other documents, posts, etc, but also allow some sort of social search driven by attention data and link authority.
So, as you can see, software isn’t enough, to reach the second wave adopters, not you or me, but the remaining working force, we need to actually create localized or situated apps like Lee mentioned, applications that are designed not to change behavior, but to extend the already existing workspaces, in a sense that they facilitate and augment todays tasks, having always in mind the collective intelligence harness that their supposed to collect and redistribute.
In the end, it’s all about context and engagement.
Add comment February 18th, 2007
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