2006 January

Polaroid, Nikon & Kodak

January 31, 2006 By Steve Borsch Leave a Comment

Running along the Charles River in Boston some time in 2000, I came across the former headquarters of the Polaroid company. By that time, this purveyor of instant film and cameras was already history. Having had recently finished the book, Land’s Polaroid (about the formation of this company based on a truly groundbreaking invention) the dead company whose building was in front of me was startling.

Next comes the announcement a couple of weeks ago that Nikon is joining Canon in “deemphasizing” (i.e., abandoning) the film camera business in favor of digital. Now comes yesterday’s press release that Kodak’s digital sales last year came in at 54% of gross revenues, which is the first time in the companyâ€™s history that digital revenue exceeded their revenues from film. Kodak also reported that total losses for 2006 could exceed $1 billion.

Perhaps I’ll be running in Buffalo, NY in the future and cruise by the abandoned Kodak headquarters.

Filed Under: Technology

What the Bleep? Evidence of Elevating Consciousness

January 29, 2006 By Steve Borsch 1 Comment

As though you needed more evidence of how the internet and Web is accelerating the connectedness of humankind, read The World is Flat, A Whole New Mind or this article in today’s New York Times (registration required).

To my amusement, the NYTimes article inadvertently presents evidence of a much more intriguing and powerful trend than “Hollywood doesn’t get it”: that there is a large and growing (and relatively unidentified) groundswell of seekers on the hunt for meaning, understanding, social connection, anchors, direction and legacy. Whether you deliver products or services — and are wrestling with how to adapt in this time when people are racing from traditional media to the internet — this group of seekers is elevating their consciousness and I’d advise us all to be watchful and in sync with this trend as it unfolds.

The article talks about the sequel to What the Bleep Do We Know?, a film called What the Bleep!? Down the Rabbit Hole.

“What the Bleep Do We Know!?,” – a quirky cinematic look at the intersection of science and spirituality – spawned worldwide study groups, a cottage “Bleep” industry and a coterie of fans who have been clamoring for a sequel since the film’s release two years ago.

That follow-up, “What the Bleep!? Down the Rabbit Hole,” is to open in theaters in New York, California, Arizona, Washington and Oregon next month. The first film drew gross revenues of more than $11 million, not bad for a film with no immediately identifiable audience.

But Hollywood still seems to be scratching its head over the little hybrid that combined a narrative starring Marlee Matlin, animation and interviews with scientists discussing how quantum physics, molecular biology and neuroscience can affect one’s everyday reality.

What is going on with people that a film like this has such a following?

A Rojo, Google & My Privacy Story

January 28, 2006 By Steve Borsch Leave a Comment

Nervous about your privacy on the ‘net and your ability to control it? I’d like to tell you an uplifting story about one company, Rojo, and the behemoth search company, Google, and what happened with my privacy.

I often look at the referring pages to see how people have come to my blog or any given post within it. It’s enlightening to see where people came from (which often surprises and delights me) and also to see the various search strings that ultimately led someone to click on one of my posts.

Someone did a search in Google for “steve borsch”+ Eden Prairie and ten results were displayed. Much to my horror, one of them had my full signature (address, phone, mobile #, etc.) in it. It turns out Rojo, two years earlier, had inadvertently exposed bug reports publically and Google had spidered them, rendering them searchable (Note: this inadvertent exposure by Rojo was fixed long ago).

Though it’s simple to find just about anyone and data about them if you’re search savvy, this was far too naked of an exposure. I immediately contacted Rojo through email. Did my email fall in to a black hole at Rojo? What was the likelihood that a major company like Google — enbroiled with Justice Department data requests and the shitstorm around cooperating with China on their search restrictions — would care at all about some guys exposed information being brought to their attention by a feed reader company?

Future of the Web: it’s CAPP

January 26, 2006 By Steve Borsch Leave a Comment

There was quite a list of Web 2.0-ish homepage & portal offerings on Techcrunch’s This Week’s New Ajax Homepage today. Some I’d seen before, several were new to me. All of them made me yawn…

We don’t need more homepages or portals and ways to aggregate stuff that we each can point at ourselves. There are plenty of options for that and most are woefully inadequate.

An article today in the BBC News pointed out a Pew Internet study which shows, “The internet has played an important role in the life decisions of 60 million Americans, research shows.

Whether it be career advice, helping people through an illness or finding a new house, 45% of Americans turn to the web for help, a survey by US-based Pew Internet think-tank has found.”

People are on the hunt. They want information. They want expertise. They need filtering by experts and their peers. They can’t invest most of their attention and time trying to find it.

There’s got to be a better way.

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Filed Under: Innovation, Web 2.0

Is Microsoft Expression the game changer?

January 24, 2006 By Steve Borsch 4 Comments

Before I start this gushing, enthusiastic blog post, you need to know three things:

1) I’m an open source advocate

2) Though literate with the PC and Windows, my preferred platform is Mac OS X

3) I’ve been on a major hunt for next generation web technologies and enablers for the new adventure I’m on.

Knowing that major changes in the paradigm of tools to build richer web applications were underway by several companies, I keep my eyes and ears open and talk to lots of people in leadership positions and just in-the-know about what’s going on. Robert Scoble’s post today about the release of Sparkle (the code name for the now beta released Microsoft Expression) led me to the Expression site. There are videos, you can download a beta release, and read FAQ’s, specs and more.

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Filed Under: Innovation, Web 2.0

Brain & Body Hacks

January 23, 2006 By Steve Borsch Leave a Comment

This article in New Scientist touches on something that is certain to accelerate: augmentation of our brains and bodies. People are hacking software, hardware, cars, bodies (now with tattoos), business models, music (mashups and remixing), and more frequently their brains.

WHAT if there was a drug that helped you do your job better, and your boss was pressuring you to take it, even though it could be bad for your health? There are already drugs that can boost memory or alertness, but whose long-term effects are unknown.

Having personal experience with attention deficit — and the methalphenyidate (e.g., Ritalin) which enhances and enables focus — I’ve been acutely interested in the apparent increase in non-medical use of neuroceuticals (cogniceuticals, emoticeuticals and sensoceuticals), in particular the use of drugs like Ritalin by those with so-called ‘normal’ brain function. This practice has been going on for many years with students (a recent law school grad I know was amazed how most of his classmates used Ritalin to focus during cram time before finals).

Think about all the steroid scandals in major league sports. Is this augmentation and hacking of the body? You bet. There isn’t a snowballs-chance-in-Hades that the body builder above could’ve been pumped like this picture without the use of steroids…but in the future it may not matter as evidenced in the picture of the kid wearing an exoskeleton.

For more about brain hacking, see Zack Lynch’s column on the Corante network and, especially, his 15 Laws of the Neurosociety.

As I read Ray Kurzweil’s new book The Singularity is Near, he provides very cogent arguments about machine augmentation for cognition, as well as for our bodies…and that developments are accelerating exponentially (encapsulation here in this interview). Undoubtedly we’ve already been augmented in many ways with surgeries and procedures (e.g., Lasik for eyes), knee replacements, cellular manipulation (e.g., chemotherapy) and in the future exoskeletons.

As enhancements continue to increase in scope and availability — and competitors in schools and for jobs hack themselves to accelerate their performance — what will you do?

Filed Under: Brain/Mind

Connecting the Dots podcast for January 21, 2006

January 21, 2006 By Steve Borsch Leave a Comment

Lots to discuss:

A Whole New Mind
The Singularity is Near
Entrevis
Heartland Circle
Newsvine
Raising of the collective consciousness
Participation, participation, participation (did I mention participation?).

Download or listen to this week’s podcast

Filed Under: Conversational Marketing, Innovation, Life, Liberty & the Pursuit of Happiness, Podcasting

Are you hiding something?

January 19, 2006 By Steve Borsch Leave a Comment

This is being written about all over the ‘net, but it is so disturbing — and how this has added to my continued outrage over domestic surveillance and its threat to our privacy — that I felt compelled to be yet another blogger posting about it.

According to a San Jose Mercury News article this morning, “Yahoo, Microsoft and America Online all complied with a government request for data on consumers’ Web searches, a Justice Department official said Thursday.

Court documents and sources maintain the information did not compromise users’ privacy.

But Google has refused to accede to government’s demand, and on Wednesday the Bush administration asked a San Jose federal judge to force the Mountain View search company to comply with the subpoena.”

Hallelujiah Google.

According to a Justice Department spokesman, Charles Miller, “My understanding is we were seeking what keywords are put in and URLs. Nothing personal.”

Come on…let’s get real. What’s going to happen if they match multiple inquiries to a given user’s IP address? Think that will be “just cause” to get a warrant and go after a given searcher if, say, they were going to child porn sites? Oh yeah I forgot…the government doesn’t need warrants anymore and — similiar to dissenter’s patriotism being called in to question after 9/11 — anyone fighting this will undoubtedly be painted as “siding with the pornographers and are against safeguarding our children.”

You’d better hope that your search history, web sites you’ve visited, library books you’ve checked out, non-cash purchases you’ve made, organizations you belong to, cell or phone calls you’ve made (all subject to tracking and being data-mined) couldn’t possibly provide just cause to law enforcement to come after you.

You’ve got nothing to hide, right?

Filed Under: Current Affairs

Single Sign-on, Identity Management & Trust

January 18, 2006 By Steve Borsch Leave a Comment

Thank God for tabs and password management in Firefox. Open right now in my browser are several services I use daily: my Vonage dashboard, Gmail, Typepad, Newsgator, Newsvine, Feedburner, Blue Host (my web site host), Pandora and a few others (and don’t even get me started on the 15 or so newspapers and magazines that require their "free" registration!). Each require credentials (username and password) in order to use these web services and Firefox can store them for me so I don’t have to remember these and dozens of other combinations.

Password management has become a running joke.

My solution to managing personal credentials is my own unique password generation scheme…but most people that I know use the same username and password across all the web sites they use (including their bank, brokerage, eBay, etc.). This is a huge problem since discovery of one combination would provide a black hat hacker with the key (or at least an idea about how you set ‘em up) to a wide range of sites as well as the user’s privacy.

We desperately need a better way…especially as web applications continue to explode and more of our computing life is online.

Single sign-on has been the business mandate (and Holy Grail) of the Information Technology organizations in companies for several years…especially as browser-based web applications have exploded within organizations. Having one sign-on for you and I to then have access to all consumable web sites, web applications and services would be great, wouldn’t it?

There’s a problem. Who *are* you and I?

Identity management is a critical key component of enabling single sign-on and access to many online offerings — and determining who the person is actually using them. The Liberty Alliance is a promising, cooperative industry group trying to tackle this issue head-on. One aspect of the Trusted Computing initiative is to minimize fraudulent use of a computerized system or device, but facilitating identity management is fraught with peril (someone steals your laptop, knows your credentials, and can easily spoof systems telling them that it’s you).

The last part of the problem I’m seeing is one that not many people are talking about: it is one of simple trust (or the lack thereof). From NSA performing domestic surveillance and a history of it in the Federal government to security expert Steve Gibson’s report that there is a "back door" Microsoft put in to Windows for who-knows-what reason (though Microsoft denied it just like they did back in 1999), it makes a guy wonder if the government or even a cross-industry alliance could be trusted?

If the Web is to truly live up to the potential we all know it could (online voting, more commerce, human relationships) then single sign-on, identity management and especially trust need to be figured out.

Filed Under: Computing, Innovation, Open Source, Technology, Web 2.0

Newsvine…

January 17, 2006 By Steve Borsch Leave a Comment

Received an invite to the private beta of a new RSS-based service called Newsvine (though I’m in the second wave of people). I like the service!

You know what though? It’s kind of a mashup of concepts around aggregation, blogging and social promotion of articles.

Surprisingly, the service seems to have hit a unique sweet spot that combines the best of Digg (reader picks and promotion of articles based on, shall we say, popularity of reads); a news aggregator like Newsgator; and a *very* easy way to “Seed Newsvine” with anything a person reads while surfing the ‘net through a Seed Newsvine link in my Bookmarks Toolbar.

They have a *very* interesting twist: they’ve added a participatory piece to Newsvine. You can set yourself up as a “columnist” and post, seed articles, place links, and more. I can see very quickly three things:

1) There will be too many columnists
2) There will be too many articles
3) People will vote for articles en masse getting to what I’ve said previously in posts: too much content, too little time, and I don’t necessarily care what everyone else cares about.

Still, I really love how attractive it is and that it is laid out so cleanly. This makes it inviting to use and I think you’re going to hear a lot about Newsvine soon.

Filed Under: Blogosphere, Innovation, Web 2.0