Do you want to experiment with spimes, have a first look at the preliminary OpenSpime architecture? Are you a hardware hacker, a maker, a mashup-wizard? Want to play with spimified Arduinos, SunSpots, iPhones, and more?

Than come to Bastard.it for the OpenSpime Drink-Link!

In a relaxed and friendly environment in design-crazed, fashion-full Milan, we will pass an evening together mashing up our ideas to see what comes out a few brains knocked together.

The event is open to all, but registration is required.

I have been invited to hold a lesson at the California School of International Management‘s course on Strategic Marketing. The lesson will be delivered online, via Skype, and Second Life on the island of Lipari, on Wednesday, February 6, starting 2PM PST (11PM CET). If you would like to attend just let me know in the comments, or write me an email a tweet, or anything else that you fancy, and I will be very happy to have you with us.

During the seminar I will concentrate on analyzing the role of brands and strategic messaging in the future, drawing a parallel with what these concepts might have meant in prehistoric times, and concluding that today we have to speak with the same immediacy, and spontaneity that has formed the basis of communication then.

Thanks, Marc, for the invitation and the organization of the event!

09.35 Right on time Scott Hirsch of the Management Information Group is starting in the Strategy and Business Models track his presentation “Be Like the Ineternet: Collaborative, Disruptive, Networked”. The hall is not full yet, but people are streaming in constantly.

After googling the name of the track Slideshare brought quickly up a stack of slides, so without knowing whether they are identical, I am putting them here (I guess they will be 90% similar anyway!):

| View | Upload your own

09.45 After presenting what MIG does, talks about the “Abandoning the waterfall for the washing machine” slide. Interacting with the audience fairly often. However there isn’t a clear direction to the presentation, really, feels a little rambling… aha, this was just the introduction for twenty minutes. Now he shows the agenda for the morning: Bottom Up Innovation, Group Interaction, Web2.0 Business Models…

10:05 Hmm also said he hates networking, and then asked us to come up to the mike and say what is on our mind in terms of Web2.0 business ideas and challenges, and a couple of us did. Mister Wong asked to help with getting the buzz about the service around, and I spoke about www.metasocial.eu (don’t go there, it is empty now!) asking technical help on how to set it up…

11:00 Finishing the presentation for Ignite (taking a pause in live blogging). Posted my slides for the Ignite presentation on Slideshare: Metasocial Web

11:30 What are business models, and how they compare. Nothing remarkable, I’d say

12:00 Uploaded photos to Flickr from Web2.0 Expo Berlin

12.30 Recorded a new video response to Marc ‘What is Second Life for? – 2‘ this time about ‘Do you really have to pay for everything in Second Life?’

13.00 Panel discussion with startups from SeedCamp. Nothing earthshaking!

14.00 Looked around the halls, at the other sessions, and recorded snippets of the presentations.

14.30 Panel discussion with Venture Capitalists, and Angel Investors about their activities.

There are interesting contradictions in the VC business, which as usual in the technology area, first reach the US, and later Europe. On one hand there is a lot of money that needs to be invested, with funds becoming larger and larger, and on the other hand startups in the web space especially now need less and less money, or they are even able to go from start to profitability with just a small Angel round. Also, when VCs actually manage, and put too much money in a company, that money tends to be spent badly, instead of smartly.

Asked a question to the panel about the changing nature of business plans, that not only show exponentially increasing revenues in three or five years’ time, as they have always, but also are more and more taking into account the exponentially decreasing contstraints. So if the money provided by VCs is going to be maybe one of these constraints, what is the value that VCs are going to provide in the future? The answers were the traditional networking, distribution, completing the team, etc. I find it appallingly weak as a value proposition for giving up 30% minimum of your company!

An other question was from Spain regarding distributed teams, when people, as in many parts of Europe are difficult to move, but can be accessed for working remotely. The answers were rather negative. I see this as a great opportunity! The Venture Capital community is not understanding the changes that are coming! Before asking my question I made a remark, being a Second Life specialist, that just as blogs were not common or people with notebooks during conferences five years ago, and now are almost universal, in the same way virtual teams will be common in five years’ time, and especially in online worlds like Second Life they will be universal, and almost the only acceptable way of organizing your startup’s workforce.

16:00 Going to the keynote session room for coordination with the Ignite people.

17:00 Tim O’Reilly’s keynote quotes Ray Kurzweill on his last slide!

18:10 The Ignite sessions are starting.

See a video about Real 2nd Life!

Real 2nd Life an integrated system composed of a semi-circular screen, of almost 3 meters high, and 7 meters of diameter. The image of the live Second Life grid is spread on the screen through the use of four high luminosity Barco projectors, fed by multi-headed Matrox graphics cards, inserted in standard PCs running a specially recompiled Second Life client which introduces a stereoscopic image doubling calculating the depth of the image in real time. The person interacting with the scene wears a pair of glasses with Infitec filters, which expose the proper images to the eye they belong to, without excessive loss of color fidelity, and a very low dependency on the point of view.

Probably the most important part of the setup is the presence of Ultra Wide Band RFID emitters clipped to the user. The position of up to twenty of these can be tracked 60 times a second, with an individual precision of approximately 10 centimeters. The emitters send very low power signals on a nanosecond frequency in bursts that are indistinguishable from ambient noise unless one knows what to look for. Four receivers detect the differences in arrival time of the signals from the emitters, and send the data through regular Ethernet connections for analysis to other computers, where the position is calculated. Knowing the constraints that regulate the relative positions of multiple emitters, for example on the two shoulders of a person, can significantly reduce the margin of error, to millimetric precision.

A set of Java Servlet programs transforms the three dimensional position data of the emitters in a smooth sequence and makes it available through a web interface. In Second Life a series of synchronized scripts dispatch the coordinate positions via asynchronous html requests. As the tag coordinates are concatenated in a single request, the system’s performance is independent from the number of tags used.

The avatar representing the user is moved according to the positions calculated, and its movement is simultaneously reflected in the live Second Life grid! When the system is set up so that the field of view is at a scale of 1:1 with respect to the user, then the visualization of the avatar representing the user is not necessary anymore, as there is a direct correspondence between the scene, and the user’s proprioception!

See also a set of pictures about Real 2nd Life on Flickr!

The request was to support that

“a 1974 era computer running 2007 algorithms would beat a modern computer running 1974 algorithms”

and ideed that is apparently the case.

I asked about a year ago Marvin Minsky if he saw an exponential increase in the power of software to solve problems, just as hardware, and he said that in the course of the decades he did indeed see a positive trend, but his assessment would be that of a linear increase at most. We would need a good deal more data points than just two to confirm weather he is right or wrong. (My guess is that he is wrong, and that the increase is more than linear. See also below.)

What we see in hardware is the relentless application by computers via automated CAD systems of a given architecture’s possibilities. When there is a jump, it is because as the then current technology becoming exhausted, one of the groups exploring alternatives gets lucky and it is their solution that becomes the base of the next generation’s hardware planning by computers once again. Software development on the other hand is seldom automated: code generators have not become widespread, as their output was difficult to optimize further, and re-writing was deemed a better choice instead. This means that there is a less orderly exploitation of any current software architecture, and of its possibilities, and farther spaced increases are more likely to be jumps into new paradigms.

I was wondering why would one apply the masochistic exercise of running a slower algorithm on a faster hardware, or a faster algorithm on a slower hardware. The second is common in the change of platforms, where energy consumption considerations impose the use of less power-hungry CPUs: for example when moving a given application set to a mobile platform from the PC. The first is an even more important event in my opinion, because the relatively less well optimized set of solutions often leads to higher readability by humans, a richer set of programming and debugging tools, EDIs, etc. The latest generation of languages, like Ruby, is a testimony to this, and their expressivity and readability widens their circle of adoption, even if they are not optimal. Sometimes it is actually possible to achieve both highly optimized execution and high expressivity and readability, as in Mathematica for example. What reliable and widely used software can do, and stay manageable, has definitely increased in the years. Certainly not bug free, and now often hiding behind a permanent ‘beta’ tag, but the threshold of a few million lines of code as maximum possible seen 10-15 years ago has been greatly exceeded.

As an anecdotal aside, among those who have been busy thinking about helping software productivity and reliability is Jaron Lanier, the inventor of the term ‘virtual reality’ whose company selling gloves, and goggles for immersive virtual reality, was called VPL Research. ‘VPL’ stood for Visual Programming Languages, because he felt that in order to achieve better software throughput we needed new interfaces, and that immersive VR would be needed. (This is not Second Life style object creation, as there the code is still written traditionally, while Jaron saw the programmer juggling algorithms in 3d…)

Go to http://iphonelaunch.tv! What I wonder is what will happen to the embedded video once the launch is over… Live video doesn’t make too much sense when the event is gone. (Update: the video loops in a recorded channel after the launch.)

We Feel Fine is an incredible display of the power of the web to transform the way we think about humanity. Emotions are among the most human of characteristics, and being able to see their power dynamically is astonishing.

We Feel Fine is a website that analyses blog postings to search for those that contain an indication of the feeling of the poster. It also goes and collects publicly available profile information to establish the location, age, and gender. Via elegant and flexible options, the data is represented as a dynamic display of art, but at the same time it also shows the ebb and flow of emotions in such a detail that it could be useful for more practical applications as well.

There is also an API for We Feel Fine, so if you think you can take advantage of what has already been done, and maybe integrate it in your own blog analytics suite, you can have fun mashing up!

Ok. It is a long shot. Just a bunch of database fields filled by volunteers might not amount to much. But I cannot help myself, and as I read about Metaweb’s Freebase on O’Reilly Radar and in the New York Times, my mind goes to common sense knowledge base projects like the bottom up Open Mind*, and Mindpixel*, and of course the hugely ambitious, and hugely unsuccessful Cyc. Will they succeed where others haven’t? I certainly hope so. A lot of us waste our energies pampering computers, and trying to help them achieve better what we easily can. Once that is taken care of, we can go back to our gossips, love-stories, politics, and conquest. As we have been doing for a few millennia.

*It is a mind boggling and heartbreaking coincidence that both the founder of Open Mind, and that of Mindpixel died, while very young, and without seeing what their projects would become. I wrote to Chris McKinstry shortly before his death, asking him about the project, and his response was very hopeful of promise, and success. It wasn’t to happen.

The push that Linden will receive will be towards an acceleration to opening the source of the server platform, since the number of Second Life residents will have to grow faster than Linden Lab is able to sustain it. Already there are evident strains on the infrastructure, which newcomers are not going to tolerate. Opening the servers, after having opened the clients, is going to keep Second Life on the leading edge of virtual world development.