The long anticipated wait for a true global ID system might soon be over. OpenId is indeed gaining ground in an interesting way (you were right O’Reilly Radar), and might reach critical mass with more news like this one:

Kevin Rose [CEO of Digg] just announced that Digg will adopt the OpenID decentralized digital identity platform […] later this year”. […]

This Digg news comes just after Microsoft and AOL announced their support as well. Yahoo, LiveJournal, and Wikipedia are among the other services that have previously announced adoption.

More on TechCrunch

We are not in a single-sign on world yet, but it finally looks like there is a strong movement towards the adoption of the global identity system we so badly need.

RFID will soon “look about the size of the period at the end of this sentence.” Hitachi managed to build an RFID tag that is so small it can be fitted in a paper sheet.

Hitachi Ltd., a Japanese electronics maker, recently showed off radio frequency identification, or RFID, chips that are just 0.05 millimeters by 0.05 millimeters and look like bits of powder.

Sci-Tech Today: Hitachi Shows World’s Smallest RFID Chip

Prepare for networked objects, and order Adam Greenfield’s Everyware now to measure how much you life just changed ;-)

…computer giant PC World has announced it will no longer carry the floppy disk once current supplies run out.

Link via Slashdot

We bought 400 floppies back in 2006, to create the lunch coupons for LIFT06. And I am still wondering what happened to the data-mining program of Office World when a decade of floppies were suddenly sold in a day at a random Geneva store.

La semaine prochaine, � Genève: 16e Journée de rencontre:

Avec l’apparition de nouvelles technologies telles que l’identification par radiofréquence (RFID), les capteurs sans fils ou les robots miniaturisés, les objets peuvent maintenant communiquer et interagir, que ce soit entre eux, avec d’autres systèmes ou avec les utilisateurs. La 16ème Journée de Rencontre qu’organise l’Observatoire technologique le 11 décembre prochain tentera de présenter ce nouvel Internet des personnes et des objets et de mettre en lumière certains des enjeux fondamentaux qui y sont liés.

14h00 – Message de bienvenue de l’Observatoire technologique
14h05 – Introduction de la journée, Mark Muller, Conseiller d’Etat
14h15 – « L’Internet des objets », Lara Srivastava, UIT, Genève
14h50 – « Internets des objets, des lieux et des personnes », Nicolas Nova, EPFL, Lausanne
15h25 – Pause
16h00 – « Le développement continu des nouvelles technologies et leur mise en application : quels enjeux sociaux et individuels ? », Sami Coll, Université de Genève
16h35 – « RFID : défis techniques, architecture et déploiement de la technologie », Olivier Liechti, Sun Microsystems, Gland
17h10 – Conclusions et perspectives, Jean-Marie Leclerc, CTI

Date et heure : Lundi 11 décembre 2006 de 14h00 � 17h30
Lieu : Ecole d’Ingénieurs de Genève, aula Charpak, Rue de la Prairie 4

When we first drafted the LIFT06 program, one of the key project I wanted us to talk about was an experiment of the Geneva hospital to fight bulimia using a web site.

They had a very interesting idea: bulimia patients have a problem with their image, and admitting being sick is shameful and tough in our society. Using the web, they could more easily get in touch with the patients and still reproduce the richness of a doctor-patient relation, monitor the weight losses, communicate the daily menu, etc…

The network would even provide a comfortable and constructive environment for exchanges. Patients wouldn’t have to walk down the street and feel observed by bystanders, and emails allowed for more direct conversations.

I thought this was interesting as it demonstrated that people are willing to rely on technology for very intimate things. And it is a key evolution for businesses. Technologies CAN carry personal relationships.

Proof is this article found on BankWatch stating that “making online banking feel personal is the next step”.

In the 1990s, online banking’s early promise fizzled for lack of a human touch and a physical place to do business. […]
Now banks say the standard is making their online “branch” do all the things that a branch manager or a loan officer reached in person or on the phone could do.

Link

Internet users are demanding that we take the services to the next level. And this time they want the machines to feel more human. We are back in the 2002 situation where demand is ahead of the offer (full article here).

FinanceTech has an article on 5 Technologies You Need to Know About that talks about holographic storage, a “technology that uses three-dimensional imaging to dramatically increase – nearly 10 times – storage capacity on a disk.

Seems this is right around the corner, even if it will not reach the mass market before a little while with prices like 8’000 to 10’000$ for 300GB at the end of 2006.

I always experienced the same thing with my computers: at buying time I thought “this hard drive is way too big, I will never use all the space I have”. This just to find myself scrambling to delete files a few months later. This should be history soon.

The 15-25 years old are turning to instant messaging for text communication. They are tired of the spam that comes with email accounts.

The former darling of high-tech communication is losing favor to instant and text messaging, and to the chatter generated on blogs and social networking sites

We are now down to two ways to reach the teenagers: IM or blogs, with blogs being the only “one to many” channel. That should tell you about the importance of this medium.

The following sentence, explaining that email is to teens what post cards were to my generation, made me feel really old:

Young people see it as a good way to reach an elder – a parent, teacher or a boss.

We will soon have kids opening Gmail accounts to keep a communication channel with their parents… Things move so fast in this game.

Link

During Wednesday’s panel, somebody asked me if I thought it was a good thing that more and more human relationships are going through machines. That’s a big question, and the solution will probably be in balance between real life and computerized interactions.

I think that:
• we went from having a few close friends to having a lot of distant friends (and still a few close friendships we build during our childhood, we are not born with iChat accounts after all).
• technology can not reproduce the richness of human contact, and can even be dangerous (remember: people correctly understand the mood of an email only 50% of the time!)
• face to face is still the best way to know someone, and despite the fact video conferencing has been here for a while now we continue traveling around the world.
• technology is expanding our social possibilities. Beyond the most well known tools (blogs, mySpace, IM, email), I’m very interested in more borderline and innovative possibilities like:

Communications are being reshaped. We will have to learn how to benefit from these technologies – and from the new possibilities they offer – without losing our humanity.

“The only reason Friendster didn’t work was because the site failed. The most important thing I learned from Friendster is to have a good engineering team to scale the database and servers and the right architecture. It’s not easy. It’s really hard to scale these sites this quickly.”

TheDeal.com: Friendster finds no love (thx marco)

Paradoxically, you can’t worry too much about scaling at the beginning of a project…

Don’t scale. Don’t worry about five 9’s or even two. Worry about getting something to a point where there’s reason to worry about it.

Jason Fried on the signal vs noise blog

…as you will have to restart from scratch anyway:

“The fact is that everyone has scalability issues, no one can deal with their service going from zero to a few million users without revisiting almost every aspect of their design and architecture.”

Dare Obasanjo

I still think you need to design for scalability at the first second of any mainstream web project. But the idea is not to focus ONLY on that, as if you succeed the problem will demand a complete overhaul of the project.

David Galipeau: Knowledge vs Wisdom vs The Enterprise

the root cause of business problems is not financial, not product-related and not structure-related. Businesses live and die by its executives’ and employees’ talents, levels of empathy and ability to play well with others… and by their willingness to listen and acknowledge that customers (also people) just may have some valuable input. […]

The solution is not a new business model: or organizational model: it’s a new people model.

We don’t need a new ad campaign or a new org chart. There are no quick fixes. The skill sets needed in today’s times are not management consultants or marketing specialists. If we’re all really honest with ourselves, what we really need are psychologists and coaches and relationship experts. We’re talking about real people connections, not a personalized direct mail piece.

And this is why blogging and other social technologies have exploded onto the scene.

Link