Geniuses vs crowds

Why innovation will never only be about asking people what they need, but also the fact of dictators geniuses like Steve Jobs:

“design research is great when it comes to improving existing product categories but essentially useless when it comes to new, innovative breakthroughs. I reached this conclusion through examination of a range of product innovations, most especially looking at those major conceptual breakthroughs that have had huge impact upon society as well as the more common, mundane small, continual improvements. “

Don Norman, Link

Meet SpaceShipTwo

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Nice, only 200’000$ a seat, contact your accredited Space Travel Agent now ;)

Robot designers and nature

The latest member of the swimming robo-fish family shows how bio-mimetism (the concept we were recently introduced to by Gunter Pauli) is inspiring engineers around the world.

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There are great projects in the region, the EPFL developing the salamander and fly robots. Makes me think it would be a nice theme for Lift10, I would really be eager to hear the results of the experiment that had robots and cockroaches interact in Belgium (see video below).

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Open Source Camera

Lift France 09‘s theme was “hands on future”, “a future where we are all actors of change, where objects are not just smart and connected, but also customizable, hackable, transformable, fully recyclable”.

This new paradigm is happening slowly, and several mainstream objects are being opened around the world. After the open source phone comes the Frankencamera, an “open-source digital camera, which will give programmers around the world the chance to create software that will teach cameras new tricks“.

Andrew Adams, who helped design the prototype of the Stanford camera (dubbed Frankencamera,) imagines a future where consumers download applications to their open-platform cameras the way Apple apps are downloaded to iPhones today. [...]

users will be able to continuously improve [the camera], programmers will have the freedom to experiment with new ways of tuning the camera’s response to light and motion, adding their own algorithms to process the raw images in innovative ways.

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Link

Wikitude

If one of your friends has an Android phone, ask him to give you a demo of Wikitude, a far from perfect but interesting application adding a layer of user generated content on top of the world (seen through the lens of the camera of the phone).

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Meet the 21st Century Stadium

Amazing new home for the Dallas Cowboys, a new 1$ to 2$ billion (depends on who you trust) project with tons of super high tech embedded:

Technology will ensure that fans can e-mail photos to friends, find lost children, cash in wireless coupons and watch customized content on the thousands of televisions [...]

Fans will immediately notice the new stadium’s 60-yard-long video boards hanging above the field. However, those are just a few of the 2,800 monitors, which include concession stand menus, TVs in suites and electronic advertising signs. Each will have an IP or Internet protocol address allowing a computer operator to play different content on each screen.

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Walsh said he wants to create a system allowing parents to get their children bracelets imbedded with a RFID or radio frequency identification tags. If a child wandered off, parents could use the technology to quickly find her or him [...]

Even more cutting edge is a plan for interactive ads similar to ones targeting Tom Cruise’s character in Minority Report, although they promise to be less intrusive and less creepy. Walsh said he’s testing a pilot program for a system that would beam electronic coupons to someone with a smart phone passing a concession stand. The fan then could accept or reject the coupon for food or drinks.

Link

Virtual thumb

“there has been growing interest in the design of multi-touch based mobile devices. However, multi-touch interactions with one hand on the mobile device are diffi-cult in terms of usability. In spite of this, few have at-tempted to address a supportive approach for multi-touch operations with one hand. In this paper, we present VirtualThumb, a set of software-based conceptual techniques that enables a user to handle multi-touch operations under the limited physical resources available”

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A technology coming out of KAIST CT.

Seeking innovative technologies for the meetings industry

I will be on the judging panel of the EIBTM WorldWide Technology Watch for the second year, looking forward to find out about great new technologies we will assess with a panel of international experts and under the guidance of meetings’ industry legend Corbin Ball. Send us your application if you developed an innovative product or service, you will get exposure at one of the industry’s biggest event!

WorldWide Technology Watch

If you have developed a new technology, product or service for the meetings and incentives industry, this is an excellent chance for you to receive recognition and gain increased exposure to your product.

Our specialist industry judging panel each year is looking for a new technology development or product that will have the most impact within the meetings, incentive and business travel industry. If you feel you have that development or product, you should enter the EIBTM 2009 WorldWide Technology Watch – Closing date for entries is Friday 4th September 2009.

Winner benefits:

• If your entry is selected as the winner you will receive a FREE stand to exhibit at the MPI Technology Village @ EIBTM in Barcelona 2009.
• You will receive recognition in all the EIBTM 2009 WorldWide Technology Watch promotional material leading to widespread promotional coverage in the industry!
• You will be able to present your winning product to an audience alongside the EIBTM Technology Hour during EIBTM in Barcelona.

Link

Korean IT sector reproducing Japanese disaster?

It seems Korea is touched by a local form of BigCompanizite, with innovations being kept at bay by monopolies and walled gardens:

For starters, Korea is the only developed country in the world that has yet to see iPhones, the gold standard of modern smart phones. Local carriers, bent on protecting their walled garden are still hesitant to embrace the breakthrough phone [...]

Samsung and LG may be selling some of the most advanced touchscreen phones in the global market, but amazingly when those high-end phones are released for the local folks, they are sans Wi-Fi for fear of getting on the nerves of local carriers. [...]

The freedom of speech in the Korean Cyberspace is rapidly deteriorating as well, amid flurry of recent legislation that ranges from the real name log-on system that invited a sharp rebuke from YouTube Korea and the three-strike rule for online copyright infringements. [...]

The recent developments in the Korean IT sector remind many industry observers of the spectacular failure of another nation in Asia — Japan.

Back in the late 1990′s and well into the early 2000′s, Japan was full of eye-popping handsets that were an envy of the global IT world and a torrent of sophisticated innovations were pouring out of the mobile Internet sector. But like the Galapagos Islands, Japan took its own unique evolutionary path in the technology, cut off from the rest of the world. It is now a well-established fact that Japan had to hurry later to catch up with the Web, ironically because of its sophisticated — but highly insular — innovations in the homegrown mobile internet.

Link (thanks Olivier)

Reinventing education

“Education is not the filling of a pail, but the lighting of a fire”
William Butler Yeats

“Educated, confident, creative people are dangerous to the status quo, dangerous to a centralized economy, dangerous to a centralized system of command and control. Those in power don’t want you educated. They want you schooled.”
PS Pirro, 101 Reasons Why I’m An Unschooler

Great discussion about education with Philippe Tarbouriech and Salman Farmanfarmaian at our latest entrepreneur gathering. It started when we discussed Philippe’s trip to India to make pictures of Hole in the wall, a project we all discovered at Lift07 and that has, since, inspired Slumdog millionaire.

Sugata’s project showed that a model we took for granted (an adult teaching kids) could be reinvented in an unexpected way; and that in some cases (rural  India) there was actually no other choice than coming up with something new for millions of kids in need of knowledge. Education is evolving, and these shifts are of course driven by new needs, namely:

• In the rich world, the need to adapt to a generation of kids who are more unique, social, connected, autonomous, and collaborative, who sometimes know more than the professors themselves.
• In the developing world, the need to adapt to the social context of millions who are left out of the traditional system.

The debate will certainly rage in the coming years. Interesting ideas are emerging:

• Self education is not new
  We think that self-education is unintuitive and a bit weird. It might even be dangerous to leave kids alone, having to sort out the good from the bad?
  But isn’t it the way we learn how to speak? As babies we hear adults who speak good or bad, dirty or classy words. In the end we make sense of all this and learn by ourselves one of the most complicated thing in the world: a language.
• Collaborative learning beats top down processes
  Learning does not have to be a lonely, humbling, boring, painful experience.
  One of the biggest contradiction of our system is that it wants to prepare us for professional life but creates a different framework than the one we will find at the end of our studies. Why don’t schools tolerate two of the resources one has to master to survive in a corporate environment, namely information retrieval (Google, encyclopedias, books) and collaboration with co-workers. Why can’t we call a knowledgeable person or use Google during exams when we can at work?
  Collaboration is being experimented, notably in computer games. Students are together in a virtual world, each facing a mathematical or logical challenge. When a student is done with his challenge he can help others who are slower. No one can go to the next level unless every single puzzle has been solved. Interesting idea.
• Education can be free
  Bing Gordon at a recent “hacking education” event: “Knowledge is a non-rival good. If I eat an apple, you cannot also eat that same apple; but if I learn something, there is no reason you cannot also learn that thing“.
  Just as software and music tend to become more open and accessible under the assaults of new distribution channels (the web) and vanishing barriers to entry, knowledge is held by a large number of persons who, bearing a well designed and rewarding framework, will want to share what they know, and make it accessible to the world. Things like the University of people or Open Course Ware are already happening.
• Diplomas are increasingly irrelevant
  We know how the most admired entrepreneurs in the world don’t have anything else than post-fame honoris causa diplomas. Steve Jobs, Paul Allen, Bill Gates. Our very coveted paper certificates are challenged in that way, but not only. What if our credentials were stored online and freely accessible via Google, replaced by powerful references like peers and clients endorsements, online portfolios, press articles, etc. Why not have decentralized certification mechanism, one where you get a diploma after a certain number of trusted sources (universities, but also clients, co-workers, bosses, etc) endorse you? Follow a class at MIT, do an internship at Microsoft, write an article for the New York Times, get a degree from these three institutions. I even think there is a nice business model here…

Education is a fascinating topic, one that is hard to deal with because everybody has an opinion on how it should happen. We are about to see a brutal evolution, because what we have in front of us might be one of the biggest ever gap between two generations, between the digital migrants and the digital natives.

Who will vehemently resist these ideas? Teachers of course! Like journalists when they saw millions of web users invade their territory, they will instinctively want to fight back and protect their experts status. It is a lost war, the wrong approach. Educators will eventually settle in their new – and improved – place in society. After all, isn’t it more rewarding to collaborate than to direct, monitor, grade, and punish?

Links (thanks Salman!): An Unschooling Manifesto, Hacking Education.