Techcrunch donates party proceeds to DataPortability and OpenID

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Techcrunch’s Geek goes Chic party in LA last night attracted 2,100 people, which is probably the biggest gathering of well-dressed geeks in history. Techcrunch divided the $13,000 raised in ticket sales ($10 each for the 1,300 who weren’t cool enough to be on the guest list) to DataPortability and OpenID. Michael Arrington has been a big supporter of these initiatives, which has the potential to create a more open web that is far more valuable and useful. The money will be used to create benefit to the community.

In other DataPortability news, the 15 finalist logos from their logo competition I wrote about recently are now up. My favorite is below – anyone can vote so go check them out.

The evolution of blog ranking mechanisms (Trends in the Living Networks ranked #549 by Wikio)

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Wikio represents the new breed of media and blog aggregation, bringing together a range of features to improve access to breaking news. It includes the top-ranked breaking news, top blog stories, latest stories and conversations in 16 categories, and a shopping section featuring the most popular products, with user rating of stories. The founder Pierre Chapaz has described Wikio as “Google News meeting Technorati meeting Digg”.

The company is based in Luxembourg and until recently has had a primarily European audience – it is particularly popular in Italy and France. It officially launched in the US in December, with Mashable at the time calling it the Rolls Royce of MemeTrackers.

Wikio has had a swift development path, regularly adding new features. The latest is a ranking of the top blogs, overall and by category. Certainly the site that Wikio is most comparable with is Technorati, the original and once predominant blog search engine. While it is still the reference blog search engine, it has been losing presence primarily to Google Blogsearch, though other blog search engines include Ask Blogsearch, Icerocket, and Blogdigger. As importantly, attention has been shifting somewhat from blogs to Twitter and other conversations.

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The many layers of collaborative filtering – news and entertainment comes to us

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For the last ten years I have believed that collaborative filtering will be one of the most fundamental platforms for business and society. In a world of massively increasing information overload, the only way we will cope is to collaborate to filter what will be most relevant to us. Early this decade I was finding myself very surprised by how slow progress had been over the last five years, despite some interesting research and initiatives. However the last five years on the Internet could almost be characterized as the rise of collaborative filtering. Our Web 2.0 Framework is in a sense a description of how we collectively filter information. Almost all the significant developments on the web I would interpret as related to this evolution of collaborative filtering.

An article out a few days ago in the New York Times titled Finding Political News Online, The Young Pass It On described how young people share political news they are interested in by email and on social networks. In the same way, many young people primarily read articles that has found them in this way. In short:

“..they rely on friends and online connections for news to come to them. In essence, they are replacing the professional filter — reading The Washington Post, clicking on CNN.com — with a social one.”

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Device convergence in our pockets

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An interesting article in the Sydney Morning Herald titled Is that a computer in your pocket? examines how mobile phones, PDAs, portable computers and more are converging. It quotes me as follows:

According to Ross Dawson, chairman of the Future Networks think tank, other obstacles will also frustrate users looking for a portable mobile computing solution. The first is the limitation of existing small screen technologies to give a satisfying viewing experience. The second is the need for a more efficient means of inputting data on the device or through accessories such as fold-away keyboards.

He adds that the usability of a mobile for computing functions is also dependent on whether you must hold it to your ear or not.

“When you do that you cannot see it. Although more people are using ear buds or Bluetooth, they are still the minority. If you are making appointments when speaking to someone you need to have a separate interface”.

While there are many issues at play here, the interfaces to mobile devices are probably the most important factor in how they will be used in the future. I’ve written before about the role of video glasses and portable displays in making mobile devices more embedded in our lives. Similar issues of interfaces and immersion apply in home entertainment and living online.

I absolutely believe that mobile devices will be central to our lives and even entertainment, however first the interfaces for input and output must become seamless and compelling. The current generation of mobile devices and peripherals is on the verge of that becoming reality.

Trends in the Living Networks has been Slashdotted…

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The recent Slate article on the future of libraries, together with the Extinction Timeline referred to in the piece, have been slashdotted.

For those not familiar with this term, Slashdot was the first of the user filtered websites, and has always proudly sported the moniker “News for Nerds”. When I wrote about it in my 2002 book Living Networks, it was already a focus for the technology community in finding out what was hot news. To be “slashdotted” meant to be linked to from Slashdot, and the massive ensuing traffic often resulted in servers crashing.

Today servers and bandwidth are far more solid, so sites are less likely to fall over. Moreover, attention has shifted to the new generation of user filtered websites and services such as Digg, Reddit, StumbleUpon, and many more. However Slashdot still has a devoted following in the tech community, it remains a great source for what is important, interesting, and quirky, and it still gives a massive boost to traffic.

Startups carnival 2008 – judging the next generation of startups

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The energetic Vishal Sharma of VS Consulting Group is running a Startups Carnival over the next two weeks, bringing together a promising field of Australian technology startups. I am a judge for the carnival, together with Justin Davies, and Duncan Riley of Techcrunch fame – bios for the three of us are here.

Detailed applications from 23 Australian startups giving insights into their strategy and situation have been received – the full list is here. I’ll keep you posted on some of the insights and results.

Logo competition for DataPortability.org: how to get the best

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I love this kind of thinking. DataPortability.org, the extremely important web initiative I have written about before, needs a logo. Redhat claims that its existing logo is too similar to theirs.

Chris Saad, the chair of DataPortability.org, has launched an open competition to design the new logo, with the winner determined by open voting on the web from a short list selected by the steering group. This being a highly prominent initiative that is potentially enormously valuable to the whole ‘net community should attract some talented people. However Chris has also got a whole host of prominent people and companies who support the initiative to kick in prizes, to in fact make this a very attractive proposition to the winner. Prizes currently offered (with more continuing to come in) include:

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Initial submisssions

Current prize list:

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New Australian broadband chip could change media distribution and home entertainment

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The Sydney Morning Herald reports that NICTA – Australia’s peak national technology research and commercialization body – has developed a new chip which could have a significant impact on the technology and media field.

The key features of the chip are:

* Very fast: 5Gbps (an HD movie in seconds)

* Short range: Up to 10 meters

* Small: 5mm by 5mm chip

* Inexpensive: Less than $9 in mass production

* Low power: Uses less than 2 watts

* Uses 60Ghz spectrum: faster and less crowded

* Out soon: available in one year

* Cute name: GiFi

A few of the potential applications:

* Download an HD movie (or any other content) to a mobile phone or PDA at a kiosk on your way home, then transfer it to your home entertainment system

* Link all your home devices, including PC and home entertainment so every device has access to the Internet and content can be transferred between devices and across rooms.

* Modular PCs, with CPU, screen, keyboards, drives, mouse all separate devices.

Just two days ago GigaOM wrote about the potential of using 60GHz spectrum and some of the obstacles. It seems that the Australian team has nailed them. GigaOM now says: “I’m impressed,” and also points to similar efforts from Vubiq and SiBeam.

I’m looking forward to this technology being available. Let’s forget Megabits per second and start talking Gigabits per second.

Interview on SkyBusiness TV: the state of the Yahoo! – Microsoft battle

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Yesterday I was interviewed live in the studio on SkyBusiness TV on Yahoo!’s rejection of Microsoft’s offer and what it implies. Some of the points I covered:

* There are few alternatives for Yahoo! to Microsoft’s bid. New Corp, which conceivably could have been interested, has denied any plans, AOL has been rumored as a merger partner but is very unlikely to be willing to spend that much, a consortium of private equity firms could be interested but has not emerged.

* The other mooted alternative is to do a deal with Google on search and possibly divest its holdings in Alibaba and Yahoo! Japan, though this is unlikely to be a viable alternative.

* There is strong pressure from the many investment firms that hold stakes in both companies not to increase the bid or to get into a war that will destroy value for both companies. An article in the New York Post shows (below) how many investors would prefer Microsoft to get their way. It also says that Microsoft is looking to hire a proxy firm which would make the situation very hostile. Legg-Mason, which owns 6% of Yahoo!, cannot see alternatives to Microsoft’s offer.

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Predictions for the future of the home and immersive technologies

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Connected Home magazine’s January/ February issue has a feature article titled Beyond Tomorrow, based on a presentation I gave at the Influence conference on Six Trends that are Transforming Online (the link has some more detail on what I covered), followed by an interview with me. The intro reads:

“Techno ‘crystal ball gazers’ have got their predictions horribly wrong in the past, but this has not put off one commentator. Ross Dawson puts himself on the line talking to Paul Skelton about ‘immersive’ technology in the automated home of the future.”

Unfortunately the article is not on the web, so below are the parts of the article that directly quote me – the rest of article consists of anecdotes about futurists and references to specific current technologies that illustrate my ideas.

“Rather than dwelling on fantastical ideas, Future Exploration Network chairman Ross Dawson, the best-selling author of Living Networks and the award-winning Developing Knowledge-Based Client Relationships, has made it his business to realistically predict how technology will affect our lives in the future.

Speaking in September at the Media Connect IT industry’s Influence Forum in the Hunter Valley, New South Wales, Ross said Internet protocol (IP) and home entertainment technology will become a much more immersive experience.

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