OpenSpime is the infrastructure company for an open Internet of Things!

OpenSpime creates hardware reference platforms, and software environments for collecting, and managing information about the world around you, where you live, you work, you travel. And through the aggregation of multiple validated data streams online, it enables new ways of visualizing the data collected.

Free hardware, free software, open APIs and communication protocols. OpenSpime’s business model is about the provisioning of the SpimeID identification numbers for the trusted communication of validated data streams between spimes and the OpenSpime servers.

We will be presenting the first OpenSpime prototype hardware sensor for CO2 level detection at ETech next week, and are actively seeking funding for OpenSpime, Inc. which is being incorporated in California.

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David Orban
“Strategic Marketing Evolves – The changing role of brands in the network age”
Disintermediation is immediacy. After a hiatus of ten thousand years, during which more and more sophisticated tools were needed to overcome the lack of contact between the producers and consumers, today, with the new opportunities that the network gives us, we can go back to rely on reputation as the surest guide on which to base our transactions.

You can also download the slides, and the audio of the lecture separately if you prefer.

[Update: I also uploaded the audio of the QA session following the lecture]

Dealipedia is launching today, aiming to apply wikinomics to the collection and mashing up of information about corporate deals, including financing, IPOs, mergers and acquisitions, and even bankruptcies.

So many times there are announcements of interesting deals that are shrouded behind a ‘details were kept private’ veil. What Dealipedia is betting on, is that there will be a large set of parties, who will be interested in filling the blanks, and let everybody understand the details. Investors, bankers, principals, PR people will all potentially use Dealipedia as a repository and a source of information. Think ValleyWag, but less animosity, ill feelings, and more collaborative and quantitative meat to the daily gossip!

Dealipedia is a creation of Michael Robertson who is at it again, this time disrupting the closeted world of technology dealmaking, bringing into the open its details, the ‘cui prodest’, ‘whose benefit’, that is actually an essential piece of information the market should not be left without. (Robertson is a libertarian. I am sure that if he could he’d also make sure insider trading would be made legal, for example: at the end it is one of the most efficient methods for the market to learn about what insiders think!)

It is also very good to see that Dealipedia is licensing all its contributed content under a very liberal Creative Commons Attribution license. What does that mean? That the data contributed to it is not sitting in a one way silo, closed away from creative uses, but that anybody can take it for mashups, the creation of visualizations, derivative second-order knowledge, and even make money off it if she wants to!

…and with proper participation in it, if you want to know how much Michael and others made from the sale of MP3.com, now you can!

I also wrote about Dealipedia briefly on the Metasocial blog.

The Internet is the public space of the modern world, and through it governments now have the opportunity to better understand the needs of their citizens and citizens may participate more fully in their government. Information becomes more valuable as it is shared, less valuable as it is hoarded. Open data promotes increased civil discourse, improved public welfare, and a more efficient use of public resources.

The group is offering a set of fundamental principles for open government data. By embracing the eight principles, governments of the world can become more effective, transparent, and relevant to our lives.

There are also some videos that I shot, photos

Your comments are welcome here, or on the discussion group we created!

I created an experimental video channel using Mogulus, and, connections/firewalls permitting, there will be a live video stream from the “Italy Silicon Valley Experience” (pdf of the program) event today at 6PM CET, on top of live blogging.

You can connect to davidorban.com/video right now to check if you can see the video, as I am now piping content that was previously recorded. Go to the main Mogulus channel instead to also enjoy its social functions, like real time chat, and others.

17.20 Chris Anderson is in Milan at a conference, organized by ‘The Ruling Companies’, and a bunch of bloggers have been invited to cover the event live, so here I am, sitting in the first row, and listening to what is being said. I am actually curious to see if there will be new nuggets, and what the Italian speakers here are going to say.

The Minister of Communications, Paolo Gentiloni, is also here. Which is fun, since a law that came up just last week promoted by him would have made blogging in Italy impossible except by big budget professional publishers.

17.30 Chris Anderson: “Where we are standing right now may very well be ground zero of what we now call the long tail, since Milan, and Italy in general has grown even in the industrial age on niche styles, and products of high couture, fashion, wine, food, which now has spread, through the internet to the rest of the world”

He is doing his slideshow. Excusing himself for the American examples in front of the European audience, and translating the Bell curve into Gaussian distribution, and the power-law into Pareto’s.

17.53 “The network effect is… uhm… the network effect is… argh, I have a hard time explaining it on-stage. You know, the internet, the web, right?” A true bushism.

“Hits succeed because they make the most efficient use of a limited distribution. They are a product of supply chain, not of demand

The cost of shelf space has fallen to zero. For the first time everything made in the world is available.

The fastest growing part of the market is what was missing in the culture before

Redbridge from Anhauser Busch, a beer for people with glutin allergies, is the example of a shift in culture, which is independent of the internet. People everywhere are developing a taste for niches.”

18.00 “The Ryanair Effect: with choice in travel the destinations are becoming more varied, as we reveal the new places where we want to spend our time”

I don’t know if I will be able to ask questions, but if I will here are some that I would:

1. Copyright is an agreement between content owners and society. When the legislative criminalizes behavior that a large portion of society deems possible, and legal, to protect content owners, the balance of this agreement hurts what is the perception of the importance of legality in the entirety of society itself. Isn’t it time to reconsider the original agreement?

2. What is the Long Tail of Politics? (just popped into my mind, since lately I am thinking a lot about open government, and wonder if the expression actually means anything.)

18.20 Shows a drab corporate photo of Steve Ballmer and says “Microsoft has an image problem” then the video “The Day Of The Long Tail”

18.30 Minister Gentiloni says “We are not outside of the wave of transformation that Chris Anderson described”. Yeah. We might not be outside of it, but Italy certainly is at the periphery of it. Look at Google deciding that it wasn’t worth keeping Italian programmers enticed with their contest for the Android applications because of bureaucratic complications. I stopped listening to him, and after a few minutes asked Paolo Valdemarin sitting on my side if he was saying anything meaningful. He says “No.”

18.50 Question time. I actually got to ask the first question, and it was, more or less, the first one I listed above. Chris answered confirming that during the day he works for copyright, and by night whatever he does he releases with Creative Commons Attribution license. He says “I don’t own an excusive license to my ideas, and I want to share them, and get the feedback from them”

Gentiloni remarks, relevant to Italian…

Wow, as I was writing this, and sorry for the time jump (19.09) and interrupting myself, but answering a question from Camisari Calzolari, Gentiloni (telepathic, or maybe my question was obvious enough) has just answered my second question, and he said that the Long Tail of Politics is the presence of 22 parties in the Italian parliament.

…so, getting back in time to the answer to the first question, he says that the Urbani decree (putting jail term for copyright infringement, which as many laws in Italy has never been enforced) has to be changed. We’ll see.

I also had the chance to tell Chris that I already uploaded a video highlight of his talk while he was talking, with a Creative Commons Attribution License, and complete with titles, and credits, and got his applause

19.15 Answering a question from Roberto Dadda about Free, his new book, Chris confirms that it will be available as a free digital download, as a free audiobook! Woot.

19.20 Answering an other question about ‘The Machine is Us/Using Us’ he says that “Yes, we are building an artificial intelligence in Google, but I don’t see a way this could become corruptive and be used against us.”

END

Now on for the ‘Long Dinner’ where I heard Chris is actually going to join us!
(Sorry for many links missing. I will put them in shortly. In the meantime you can use Google!)

‘The Long Tail‘ is the title of a book by Chris Anderson, editor of Wired, and of an apparently new phenomenon which many of us following the online worlds have come to understand from Chris’s blog of the same name ‘The Long Tail’. Put succintly, the concept of the long tail refers to the distribution of desirable content, which is today not limited anymore to what can practically made available from the side of the content distribution channels.

I am not going to dwell in depth about how this came about, and give several examples, since the concept is very well analyzed in, for example, the wikipedia article about the Long Tail. Neither I am going to write a proper book review*. Instead what I want to describe briefly is my view that the long tail of satisfied demand is a truely new phenomenon, and not only a purely economical one.

In the current arena of ubiquitous networks there is literally no demand that is not satisfied by a given content, and vice versa, there is no writing or content in general produced, that doesn’t find a readership. I know… as I often write of exotic subjects as the Singularity, or Quantum Computing, online worlds, etc. The possibility of monetizing this relationship is good, but its existence is what is important, and it could not exist before ubiquitous networks.

It is not a coincidence that, having realized that the long tail goes beyond traditional economics, now Chris is writing a new book about ‘Free’!

*I should, and hope that at the end this post can be considered one, since Chris has been kind enough to send me his book for review as it was coming out, and I successfully procrastinated writing about it until now. So if it is, this is a review then it certainly belongs to the long tail!

“From e-tail to v-business: are virtual goods an entirely new category?”

The conversation was very lively, and well moderated by Adam Pasick. I am especially proud of Cory Doctorow having sat through it, and asked a question as well! I met him in the speakers’ lounge after lunch, and he said that he wasn’t sure he could make it, so it looks like my short pitch helped (as well as the fact that he was on the panel after ours!).

Follow the link to the Metasocial Web video on YouTube if you don’t see the embedded video…

Well, that was fast. I thought of the Metasocial Web a few days ago, and looks like I will be delivering a speech about it at Web2.0 Ignite in Berlin tomorrow.

A lot of what the Metasocial Web should be is in flux, naturally, so it will be good to get the feedback from the audience, and compare notes on how to quickly progress towards it. The core of the argument is that we are ready to pull together information from public data repositories, and use crowdsourced effort to manage the data to get a better dynamic understanding on how our political, social, and economic systems interact. The goal is to be able and build as much second order knowledge about these systems as possible, in order to operate them at a higher level of efficiency then possible before.

I am calling this the Metasocial Web, or Societal Software, as social networks concern themselves with individuals, and their groupings, while the Metasocial Web is concerned about societies, and their possible competitive comparisons. My idea is that countries that adopt a Metasocial Web are going to be much more effective in allocating their tax resources, and that given this competitive advantage, all countries are going to be pushed towards it quickly.