Touch screen, kiss screen

When dating games become so real, a new form of addiction which brings a whole new level of consequences shows up in couples.

The DS has a mic and a touchscreen, so… one time, she asked me to say “I love you” a hundred times into the mic. I was on the airplane when she asked me that, so I was like, no way. And then there’s the part where you have to kiss her. [...] The girl’s face shows up on the screen, and you have to touch her lips to give her a kiss. That’s pretty weird…. this is embarrassing. I’m sweating right now just talking about it.

My husband has a virtual girlfriend

What football can tell us about society’s evolution

The BBC has a vizualisation of the evolution of premier league players’ birthplace over the past decade. Twenty years during which workers movements have been liberalized after the famous Bosman Ruling ended the quotas restricting the number of non-nationals on teams. What we see here through the lens of sport is the general trend towards globalization of the workforce, where talent gathers in places it can better be leveraged regardless of political or geographical constraints.

Where the Premier League’s players come from (1988)

And in 2009

Arsenal in 1988

And in 2009

Manchester United in 1988

And in 2009

During those years, the English Premier League became the most powerful in the world, and reached multiple continents by capitalizing on foreign stars attracting viewers in their country of origin. Why not think about the lessons that can be drawn here, at a moment where borders are being closed to emigrants because of the crisis.

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.

Living in a “community of emotions”

Here is a quote from Paul Virilio discussing the impact of media on society in a recent French TV show:

There is a phenomena of globalization of affects, a sort of “community of emotions” replacing the community of interests. The community of interests is an economical community, social classes, rich and poor. The community of emotions is something completely new and that can not be mastered by political power.

This is one of the topics that intrigues me the most these days. How we tend to forget our long term interests because of emotions, served in daily and easy to consume capsules by mainstream and social media, all fighting for a bit of attention in the chaos we now have learned to live with.

Like the example I was giving in an earlier post: why is it acceptable to have thousands of policemen run after illegal immigrants when they only cost a fraction of what a trader can lose in a few seconds? Because until this particular crisis came up, immigrants were generating more emotions than bankers. Exactly what Virilio is talking about.

A community of emotions means a society built on patches, constantly trying to deal with the short term without considering the big picture. A community of emotions means a society less and less able to make solutions and problems match.

Maybe people will notice this phenomena, understand it, and become more hermetical to information. Or newsrooms might reinvent themselves, and start wondering if it makes sense to put on the front page of the local paper those sordid “fait-divers”. If a grandma has been attacked in a particularly cruel way somewhere on the planet, should all the senior citizens of the world be freaking out tonight? What exactly do we gain as a community from that news being spread all over?

Information comes with responsibilities. The web might have contributed – directly and indirectly – to make us forget this old adage. Are the side effects just around the corner?

Crisis or transition?

“Ah la crise”, we hear so much about it. I get some questions about it during most interviews: “will you talk about the crisis at Lift09?” Not really, the conference is looking at society 2-3 years down the road, the crisis should be over by then right?

Well, that’s if it ever existed. Is this a crisis or a transition? The numbers that make the news (stocks, commercial balances, etc) are pretty bad, but do they really give us the whole picture?

Yes, the banks are under attack, and deservedly so. Their model is based on a world that does not exist anymore. Like the music industry before, banks have been refusing innovation, sitting on their assets without noticing that society was changing faster than ever. Customers have changed (billionaires now wear sneakers, use Skype and live on the road, while private banks still treat their clients as if they were retired oil moguls), employees have changed, needs have evolved (and customers didn’t wait for the banks to address them, see Loanland or Kiva). There is a price for arrogance (it cuts you from your clients), lack of agility (you can’t follow change), heritage (having an history can be bad for you. Ex: Nokia could never have invented the iPhone). A price to pay for all those things banks seem to have been specializing into recently.

^{Wired: Can innovation – and greentech? – save the world’s economy?}

Then there is unfairness. Switzerland has been making billions off money subtracted from other countries tax authorities. Now the US (other countries will follow) are trying to put an end to that. How sustainable can a business model abusing other countries be in a global world? What leverage do the Swiss have, with their banks having offices all around the world, their existence depending on those same countries that now pressure them? I am not getting into the philosophical debate of whether tax escape is good or bad, I am just saying: how long can you disrespect other countries rules in a global world?

Allow for a short parenthesis here: most Swiss are very pragmatic and understand this is unfair. See for example this interview from yesterday’s night news, the question from the national television’s journalist is “you are subtracting billions from other countries who need them to face the crisis, this money is in your safes, do you think it is normal?”. So think twice before you generalize to “the Swiss”. And don’t believe they are the only ones doing this. Your bank has a branch in the Bahamas too, and it is not only for the nice beaches. Bank of America, Crédit Lyonnais, HSBC, Chase Manhattan, Banco de Santander, they are all attracted by the “country’s progressive legislation and regulatory structure”. And have offices in Jersey, Monaco, Singapore and other tax havens.

So those living their formerly-high-life along those lines are in trouble, and nobody should rejoice because their struggles will impact all of us.

But on the other side there are the smaller companies, the ones whose numbers don’t make the news, those who are based on more simple and human values. The “real economy”. This part of the world seems to be doing much better. This past week, I received at least 10 job openings from start ups or mid-sized companies, all saying they urgently need a developer, a business manager, or an executive. I have never seen the people around me (mostly entrepreneurs and independents) that busy! Lift will be full again (676 participants for 700 seats as I write this) but Tom Hume had to cancel because his company won a huge contract,  Matt O’Neil (who started his company at Lift06) is currently too busy to attend, Scott Smith is stuck with client work back in the US and asked us to transfer his ticket. It seems smaller companies, those who adapted quickly to the new world because they, in part, created it, those companies are striving, acquiring customers all around the world, working on new and exciting projects, proposing changes and progress to an otherwise struggling society. Bruno Giussani told me that this year’s TED was buzzing with more energy and projects than ever, I hear 3GSM was a total blast, and it is precisely the feeling I am getting from my immediate surroundings. Exciting times!

I understand we all have a partial view of the world, and that I am no exception. I also understand these are weak signals, not backed by scientific numbers, which might not weight much in the face of reimbursing thousands of billions of screw ups. But I am asking a question: is this really the sub primes, or are we facing a peak of inadequacy between large companies and the world they live in? Is this a crisis, or a transition to a new world?

Anybody who has been a teenager knows that transitions can be painful. But they normally take you to a next level, a much more interesting one. Wait and see ;)

Government, police and change

The French Government is launching cyberdouane, a new service of the national customs “to fight against internet trafficking (drugs, counterfeit products, tobacco, weapons and ammunition, artwork etc)”.

“Finally” I hear, “the government is responding to today’s threats”. Then the astute reader will stumble on the headcount of this new unit: eight analysts, and seven investigators. That’s a grand total of 15 people fighting against internet traffic in one of the most wired countries in the world. A bit surreal isn’t it?

It’s like for crime. How many resources are dedicated to financial crime (who is now costing billions to taxpayers all around the world) vs street crime? Why is it acceptable to have thousands of policemen running after illegal immigrants when they only cost a fraction of what a trader can lose in a couple of months?

Society is changing way too fast these days, and governments have a hard time adapting to the pace of innovation, not only the technological one.

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

The problem with Democracy

Well, the situation is not as bad as it was a couple of months ago. This time we got lucky, and seem to have ended up on the right side of the vote. But I think our democratic systems has an increasing number of flaws that will need to be addressed in the near future. What are these issues?

• All voters have the same weight
  Let’s make a parallel with Wikipedia here. I already wrote that giving all users the same power was not right. Wikipedia seems to get ready to do something about it, and we need the same process to happen in society. The big question is of course how? How to reward someone who read all the political programs with care vs someone who is just voting based on (partisan) TV ads? How to detect the “relevant” citizens, and how do we define relevancy? One idea would be to give all newborn a points capital, that can increase in a very restricted number of cases, and decrease following a predetermined scale. A bit like driving license in France.
  Let’s say we get ten points at birth. The vote will count for ten unless a person is found guilty of a crime. At the opposite, voting often or getting elected (i.e. showing commitment to the democratic system) increases the weight of one’s vote. Being a mayor gives one hundred points, a deputy one thousand. Being the president gives a million points as that person knows how the system is working, has headed it for several years. It simply makes sense that his or her vote counts more than the street guy who doesn’t care about politics and votes because a candidate “looks nice”.
• Democracy is built around (increasingly) irrelevant boundaries
  I have lived in Switzerland for almost 15 years now, which means I left France that same number of years ago. Why is it I can’t vote in Switzerland, and can in France? What qualifies me to make a decision that will impact the French daily life, something I do not experience. Why can I vote and don’t have to go through the consequences of my vote? At the opposite, why can’t I participate in the elections that affect me directly? National borders are, slowly but surely, becoming totally irrelevant, heritages of a past way of life that is disappearing. Populations are moving around, cultures get mixed, distances are abolished by technology. We need to find a better way to connect citizens with their zone of relevancy. Why not come up with a system that counts the number of days spent in a country? If I split my time between two countries, why can’t I get half a vote in each for example?
  Another boundary that should be questionned is age. In today’s society, with such a major shift (the web) happening two decades ago, it might be arguable that a 16 years old could give a more informed vote than a 80 years old. Not because he is smarter, but because he probably understands the challenges and the possibilities of society much better than someone who has never had to send an email in his life. There is no easy solution here, but it’s worth thinking about it.
• Democracy is too manichean
  We always need a winner and a loser. But is that what really reflects the reality when you have a country voting 51% for a candidate, 49% for another? Why not come up with a better working system, one that allows for two persons with contradictory opinions to work together? The boundaries between political parties are getting challenged in France (Sarkozy hired socialists in his government) and in the US. But why not find a way to embed that concept into the system directly? Didn’t we all dream of having Al Gore involved in some way after the 2000 election? Should he be silenced because he had a few hundred votes less than the other guy? Why are these few votes ending up counting more than the millions of people who were rooting for him?
• Too many people don’t vote
  This one probably has some solutions thanks to technologies. There is a need to find a way to have voting follow the new ways of life. You should be able to vote while on a trip, or at the hospital, or while working. It is already possible but still too complicated (because mostly paper based). There is a need for a more direct link between voting and voters.
  I also believe there is an issue with reporting here. We don’t have enough feedback on the result of our votes. Obama seems to want to change that (think weekly YouTube address, websites dedicated to more transparency) and it is a welcomed development. But an effort should be made to give voters the impression their vote make a difference – good or bad. I used to work at the UN on financial reporting systems, and noticed that more transparency create more involvement. There is an opportunity here to lure those who deserted the democratic system back into the picture.

“Publicy”, the rebirth of privacy

Update: welcome to the Techcrunch and Cnet readers, please be sure to check the 2010 follow-up post on the matter.

Privacy is not dead. It just went global and public, which doesn’t mean you can’t control what people know about you. Actually, it is now the other way around. Let me explain.

Every time I hear someone alarmed about “the death of privacy”, I remember my grandmother telling me her childhood stories, memories dating back to the beginning of the 20th century. Only a few decades ago, life was very different. You were part of a small community, spent all your life basically surrounded by the same people who ended up knowing almost everything about you.

Peoples’ horizon was family. Families, those constructions who often end up trapping human beings into roles. There was the one who’s successful, the one who’s rich, the one who’s cheating, the one who’s funny. Every person was tagged by the group, and everybody knew everything about everybody else. Any information would end up circulating, then become an eventual chip on one’s shoulder for all his or her life. There was much less privacy than today.

Is that what we are missing? Is what we have today really worse than that?

What happens with social networks is they publish information about you to the world. Two kinds of information: the ones you control, and the ones you don’t control.

The solution to fight the ones you don’t control has been known for years. If you can’t control the conversation improve it! Become the one stop source of info about yourself. Have a profile, more active than any other profile for all matters related to you. This way your content will always beat others’ content, and you get your control back. Then it’s up to you to not being photographed while drunk at that Spring break party. But that was a good ideas (not being photographed) well before Facebook right?

Now that you are back in the driver seat, you have your privacy back. Just of a different kind. You have built a space that could be called “publicy”, or “the plausible me”. It is a credible space where people expect to see information about you. Whatever credible information you say in there will be taken as true by the world.

That is your new privacy. A space that is public but that you control, where you can say anything you want and have it taken as true.

I love doing one thing on Facebook: using my status to say what I am NOT doing. I sometimes write “Laurent is in the train to Zurich” while I am sitting at my desk in Geneva. It’s just a way to prevent last minute calls for lunch on a busy day. I do it sometimes and mostly for fun, but I could also be lying on my relationship status, telling the world I am working on a project I want my competitors to think I am working on, saying I am at one place to cover the fact I am going to another. Your privacy is the fact that, through computers and distance, nobody can really cross check information anymore.

Privacy is here and doing well. It is just different, and not something that is granted at birth anymore. You have to create it, using the tools that were supposedly taking it away from you. You used to have to build your public image, now you have to build the private one. It’s a small change if you know how to do it.

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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