“Cellphone elbow”, “Blackberry thumbs” and “Wii shoulders”

Whoever is fascinated by how techology changes society (and vice versa) loves these small things that are both funny and revealing of how much innovations can change our habits in only a few years. The “cellphone elbow” is one of these small things, both anecdotical and very revealing. What is amazing is that it did not happen in 1985, when “mobile” phones were weighting several kilos.

Doctors see more cases of ‘cellphone elbow’
As people spend more time gabbing on cellphones, doctors in the U.S. say they are seeing more cases of numbness, tingling and pain from “cellphone elbow.” [...]

“It’s quite interesting, actually,” said Jennifer Howie, a physiotherapist in Toronto. “Today, with technology, we have cellphone elbow but we commonly also see Blackberry thumbs and now Wii shoulders.”

Link

Impact of open source harware

What happened in the web/software industry is now happening with hardware: the distance between an idea and its materialization has shortened, and objects can now be created anywhere on the planet, more easily and cheaply than ever .

Slowly but surely, the capability to create objects is going down to the general public. Arduino is the poster child of the revolution, an open source board than almost anyone can use at his advantage to create simple applications in a matter of minutes (read this Wired article for more information).

Buy a board, connect it to your computer, upload one of the code samples in it and here comes the magic of having created an object. Read a few manuals, harass a friend who studied electronics, and you might be able to rebuild a TV B gone, or create a low cost heart rate monitor.

^{Tom Boonsiri’s low-cost heart rate monitor, or when a person can create a cheap, easy to replicate, openly documented and useful object.}

This is an important evolution, it will impact us in many ways. Innovation will come from everywhere, the price to create and commercialize an object will go down. We will see some shops who create any idea you have, a place where you go and say you want a sky of Leds for the kid’s bedroom and they build it for you. Electronic artisans, a cool new job for all the hackers out there.

Successful designs will end up being copied, cloned, documented so that everyone can rebuild them at home. Fascinating legal questions will emerge (are you allowed to rebuild an iPod at home? can you sell it to a friend), the lawyers will make a lot of money until someone realizes that the only way to protect a product is not to sue the world, but to make it evolve constantly.

Ecological responsibility will be in the hands of thousands of people, not only in those of a few engineers at a global corporation. Emerging countries will have an easier access to expensive objects, probably impacting the designs of the developed world as they tweak existing objects with even more imagination than us.

A big change, around which our next conference in Marseille is built, and that will change forever our relation to objects as they become more fluid, and much less mysterious.

Beyond the web browser

Here is the opening speech I gave at Lift Asia with Jaewoong Lee to explain the theme of the conference, “beyond the web browser”

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Here is the plan of the speech, not exactly what came out but most of the points are here.

• Web is a mature market
  • 1 billion users, your grandma’s on the web, web is like telephone!
  • Overload looming?
    • too much information
    • many things have been done
    • online = local
    • medium is not the message
    • back to resource based hierarchy
    • casual everything
  • Complicated
    • from one job to many
    • more competitive space
  • Less innovation happening inside the browser
• New technologies
  • Geo localization
  • Sensors (weather, pollution, traffic)
  • RF  / permanent connectivity to the network
  • Identification technologies
  • Data input and output
  • New interfaces
  • Cloud computing
  • Green technologies/Power supplies
  • New business models
  • Virtual and online identities
  • Frontier between online and offline being blurred (amazon kindle, google gears)
• There is a whole new ecosystem
  Expect many changes in the next five years
  These are the topics we think are important
• Beyond the web browser
  • New ways to access the web
  • New visualizations
  • Incremental innovation will further embed the web in society
• Virtual money
  • Currency gets digital
  • New business models & usages
  • Privacy and security concerns
• Sustainable technologies
  • Need to redesign technologies
  • Global warming and end of petrol is a radical change
• Networked city
  • 50% of population lives in cities
  • Main place of usage of technologies
  • New forces, bigger than nations sometimes
  • Big challenges and opportunities
  • Optimization of resources
  • Enhancing quality of life
  • Privacy and security
• Aiming for better society
  • Technology can help by flattening society
  • And improve communication
• Future of social worlds
  • Social network is like air
  • Not only on the web: mobile, gaming
  • New social dynamics and behaviors
• Techno nomadic life
  • Private life invading work
  • Get closer to people far away, far from people close
  • New forms of collaboration
• Robots to networked objects
  • Not science fiction anymore
  • ex: senior citizens will need robots in korea and japan
  • robots will be different than what we expected

NYT Magazine Year in ideas 2008

Amazing collection of ideas and innovations over at the NYT Magazine. My picks:

Less Privacy Means Less Discrimination

Take laws that prevent employers from learning about applicants’ criminal records. Because African-Americans are disproportionately imprisoned, such laws are often viewed as blows against discrimination. But Strahilevitz cited research that found that, in the absence of such laws, companies that did background checks on applicants hired 8 percent more African-Americans than those that didn’t do the checks. The latter employers seemed to be discriminating “statistically” — lacking hard data about penal histories, they made more decisions based on skin color.

Cloth Car

The GINA Light Visionary Model is a two-seat roadster with a body made from cloth, developed by BMW. The fabric is a special polyurethane-coated Lycra that’s exceptionally strong, durable and waterproof. But it’s also flexible enough to stretch when fitted over the car’s aluminum frame, whose shape can be altered using electric and electro-hydraulic controls to suit different driving conditions.

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Goalkeeper Science

What’s the best way to stop a penalty kick? Do nothing: just stand in the center of the goal and don’t move. [...] why do goalies almost always dive off to one side? Because, the academics theorized, the goalies are afraid of looking as if they’re doing nothing — and then missing the ball. Diving to one side, even if it decreases the chance of them catching the ball, makes them appear decisive. “They want to show that they’re doing something,”

Drone-Pilot Burnout

On its face, it seems like the less stressful assignment. Instead of being deployed to Afghanistan or Iraq, some pilots and other crew members of the U.S. military’s unmanned Predator drones live at home in suburban Las Vegas and commute to a nearby Air Force base to serve for part of the day.

There was “a pervasive problem with chronic fatigue,” Why is this? Part of the problem lies in what Tvaryanas calls the “sensory isolation” of pilots in Nevada flying drones 7,500 miles away. Although there are cameras mounted on the planes, remote pilots do not receive the kind of cues from their sense of touch and place that pilots who are actually in their planes get automatically. That makes flying drones physically confusing and mentally exhausting.

The One-Room School Bus

an experimental program transforms the school bus into a mobile classroom [...] two of the three buses that serve Grapevine are now wired for Internet connectivity. High-achieving students who are accepted into the program are issued laptop computers and enrolled in online math and science courses, including algebra and advanced-placement biology. On the way to and from school, they complete assignments, do research and communicate with instructors by e-mail.

Timesculpture

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Protect skin from Artificial Electromagnetic Waves

I missed a news that has probably widely been discussed in the blogosphere long time ago. But Clarins – famous cosmetic company – created a product that uses a “Magnetic Defence Complex” that “protects skin from the ageing effects of Artificial Electromagnetic Waves”.

It is interesting to see this industry react to innovation, and propose products surfing the fears/uncertainties of the people, knowing that it will necessarily trigger a cascade of negative reactions.

The lawyers went to work, came up with the fact that one needs “robust scientific evidence” proving that waves have a negative impact on the skin, the FDA changed the classification from cosmetic to drug, and after all that noise you can still order a bottle for a little bit less than 45 Swiss Francs.

TechnoArk 2009

Want to attend this event? Leave a comment below or email me and I will send you one of the 10 Lift invites!

Aside from Lift, we are helping an increasing number of conferences to build their program and event, by advising them on the format, finding relevant speakers, and moderating the discussions. For the second year Lift is involved in the Transformeurs event, a one day conference on the internet of things.

This year Jean-Louis Fréchin (ENSCI), David Orban (Open Spime) and Daniel Kaplan (FING) are among the speakers, with great workshops and start ups presentations also scheduled.

^{Jean-Louis Fréchin’s latest project: Wablog}

The event is free for last year’s attendees and students, and costs 150chf otherwise. More info on technoark.ch

Do you poken?

Poken is probably the most exciting Swiss project I have seen since I started Lift three years ago. It is a cool little device with one goal: connect people. Just Poken your friends and you’re connected to them on any social network both of you are using.

This would be really cool at Lift. Let’s see what I can do…

The world’s patents

My friend Marc Laperouza, one of the world’s most interesting experts on Asia ICTs (blog, Lift08 talk), digged some interesting stats about the number of patents per country.

 

Link

The total number of Asian patents is stable (44.1% in 2000, 46.2 in 2006) but Korea and China are rising to compensate Japan’s slowing innovation. Europe is kind of worrisome, while the Swiss are keeping up with the big guys and living up to their reputation of one of the most innovative crowd there is on this planet. Africa is nowhere to be seen, maybe hiding in the “Others” category somewhere?

Of course these figures do not represent reality – many innovations never get patented – but they are an interesting indicator of the economical forces fighting for consumers money on the planet, and of where you should be looking at to find the next big social changes.

GPS taxi for Korean women

Hae-in – who is one of the members of the Lift team here in Korea – told me about “Navi Call Taxi”, a pretty cool service that women can use to be driven home safely. The concept is quite simple, even if I am afraid that we won’t see it anytime soon in Europe…

1. Call a taxi and give your location AND destination
2. The car picks you up, people you choose (parents/friends) receive a SMS with the name and number of the taxi you are in
3. The car is tracked via GPS in real time
4. If the car deviates from the normal trajectory (remember your destination is known and entered in GPS) an alarm is triggered.

The service was created after an incident where two girls got murdered by a taxi driver in this normally super safe country.

The combination of geo-localization and telecommunication technologies with our daily life will produce millions of opportunities for new and useful services like this one. More information about this future in Lift Asia’s Networked city session on Friday morning with Jeffrey Huang, Adam Greenfield and Yang Soo-In.

And during that time the North is creative too

This is Korean innovation day on this blog, and I had to also mention the north of course! Because these guys can be creative too:

South Korean intelligence authorities have reportedly learned that North Korea has developed a device capable of jamming the GPS signals used by state-of-the-art guided missiles and precision bombs, and has been attempting to export the device to Middle East countries including Iran and Syria.

A South Korean government source on Wednesday said they are keeping a close eye on the communist country as they understand that North Korea has developed a GPS jammer by copying a Russian device, and has been looking to export it to the Middle East.

The source added that North Korea has been promoting the GPS jammer to several Middle Eastern countries by offering a better price than the Russian device.

When the Iraq War began in 2003, the Iraqi Army caused a stir by using a Russian-made GPS jamming system to disrupt the U.S. military’s guided weapons systems.

Link

Innovation, counter innovation. The story goes on and on…