to be continued

moving to wowstreet.wordpress.com

Top trends in 2007

Thanks to a ever Green-conscious world, this year could easily be the year of Energy.

The top most that comes to mind is the revival of nuclear, solar & bio-fuel energy. While bio-fuel didn't seem to live upto the hype, the action in the rest of the renewable sources is interesting to see.

Next comes the action Electric/ Emission-Free vehicles - Aptera, Tesla, Venturi and the rest.

Dollar hitting historic lows, oil hitting record-setting highs were interesting not only because everyone had long predicted these but also because people apparently had better things to worry about than this (housing finance, environment).

In the early years of the decade i would have easily sworn that this first decade in the new millenium - just as the last decade in the last was all about computing and the internet - is going to be the year of bio-tech/stem-cells/genetic engineering. But the green/ ecology-concerns overtook anything i could have ever imagined for bio-tech.

Thank God, how boring that would be - to live in a world where everything happens the way everyone foresaw it.

Grants vs Prizes

This surely has to be one of the best trends i saw/ realized in 2007: X Prize Foundation.

Be it Space-age transport, Genome sequencing or Autonomous & Green/ Emmission-free vehicles, the Prizes appeal to a worldwide audience of participants channeling and harnessing both the energies and imagination towards these interesting areas.

It was also interesting to see it complement - and sometimes even replace - grants to university and defense/ other research establishments.

The global appeal of this idea itself is enormous.

Espresso - The Bookshop in a Box

See Publishers Weekly's Jun 2006 Article here.

WorldBank's Poverty & Growth Blog reports on InfoShop, where OnDemand Book's Print On Demand miracle Espresso has been installed.

Sign of 'things' to come

Can iRobot's success be the harbinger of 'things' to come.

Will be intersting to see how the pioneers in this space (Lego Mindstorm, Friendly Robotics and the mighty soft with its Robotics Studio) advance the robotization of the home and office.

Don't miss Helen Greiner's interview to Knowledge@Wharton.

AUM trends: Patents

NYT reports an interesting trend:
Patent activity among financial services firms began to soar in the late 1990’s, prompted by the boom in new technology and by the fact that banks were spending enormous sums to upgrade their in-house systems. A federal court decision in 1998 that software and business methods could be patented also fed the rush to seek patents.

The result was a virtual stampede among top financial services firms to the United States Patent and Trademark Office. In 1997, there were 927 patent applications for various methods of processing financial and management data. Last year, there were 6,226.

Machinima. Coming to an iPod near you

When i read of Machinima in the BusinessWeek i was thrilled.
The name, the concept and everything - with its own set of Blogs and Academy - is so kewl.

I always had a feeling that the Gaming generation is onto something very interesting - one with the potential to become far bigger than we can imagine now.

Seeing Machinima described as a sort of Gamer's Blog gives me visions. What they actually said was this:

"Since it emerged in the late 1990s, machinima has been the playground of mainly hard-core gamers who cobble together characters and sequences from favorite games, adding voice-overs laced with references that only fellow gamers can grasp. But with more user-friendly software tools on the market, novices can create their own narratives. That will democratize the movie business, machinima enthusiasts say. Anyone with a computer and off-the-shelf game software can now make and distribute animated movies over the Internet. "This is to the movies what blogs are to the written media," says Paul Marino, executive director of the Academy of Machinima Arts & Sciences, a New York nonprofit."
- BusinessWeek

Where to look for the Next cool language

Ever heard of a finance company that had its own programming language.

Morgan Stanley seems to have had its own language A+ developed inhouse for high performance analytics work. Originally developed as an replacement for the Array Processing Language (APL) on Unix platforms, A+ seems to have had become the central language for building Morgan Stanley's analytics applications and real-time trading systems in the early '90s.

Find the language developer Arthur Whitney here and his new/ next language K here.

World of War Craft

When i heard of Edward Castronova's Synthetic Worlds, i remembered skimming through Howard Rheingold's The Virtual Community in the late '90s.

Its surprising how quickly (or slowly?) have we reached the world of MySpace, YouTube and SecondLife (and WordPress, ,WikiPedia, World of Warcraft) from where we were when The Virtual Community was first published.

While SecondLife reached almost 800,000 at the end of Sept 2006, WoW currently has 7mn subscribers.

Castronova's interview to BW is here.

See Wikipedia profiles of Linden Lab's Philip Rosedale and Blizzard's World of Wardcraft.

The WorldOfWarcraft Flickr stream is here.


PS:
The wow in this wowstreet, doesn't have any relation to the other WoW btw.

Get a new life in SecondLife

2006 SEPT 28 - The Economist declares:
A Californian firm has built a virtual online world like no other. Its population is growing and its economy is thriving. Now politicians and advertisers are visiting.

The SecondLife Flickr stream is here.

And don't miss Mitch Kapor's talk on SecondLife, as told by 3PointD btw.

The Inspiring Mr Musk

See Elon Musk's profile on Wiki.

Not content with founding PayPal, eMusk launched SpaceX - a space exploration venture that tries to dramatically reduce the cost of mass launches in future.

He is also backing Tesla Motors, an electric car company with noble ambitions.

Auto industry going through a major revamp?

First it was Tesla Motors with some high profile backing from Google and PayPal founders.

And, now Venturi of France announces a couple of models (Astrolab & Eclectic) ready for rollout in 2008.

Al Gore's Inconvenient Truth

An Convenient Truth sounds very interesting. Lets see when i get to see it.

The Wizard in Woz

A very wonderfull Lunch with FT with Steve Wozniak:
He was - indeed, still is - the primal computer nerd, a bearded whizz who rode a boyhood love of electronics to spectacular early successes of the computer industry. The Apple II, a machine he designed single-handedly in 1976, is reckoned by many to be one of the most impressive engineering feats of recent decades, a machine that laid the blueprint for the desktop and laptop machines that have become central to modern life. It turned him and Jobs into stars and multimillionaires, and launched the personal computer revolution almost overnight.

For Wozniak himself, nothing else has ever come close to that early glimpse of engineering perfection. While Jobs later returned to Apple and launched a second act, Wozniak’s later efforts - a company that built unified remote-control devices for the living room, and one that tried to create wireless electronic tags that people could use to keep track of pets or personal items - fizzled.

He professes satisfaction from the years spent as a concert promoter, philanthropist and (for eight years) teaching 10-year-olds, yet still clearly hankers for a place back at the centre of the personal-computing revolution he helped launch.

So what does Steve Jobs, four years younger and at high school when the two first met, make of Wozniak’s rendition of this slice of Valley history? “From what I understand, he read it and thought it made him look like an asshole,” says Wozniak.

I can see Jobs’ point. Wozniak’s book, iWoz: From Computer Geek to Cult Icon, tells the story of how, after those sleepless nights wiring up Breakout - one of the first hit video games - Jobs, the salesman, gave him half of the $700 he said Atari had paid for the work. Only it turns out Atari actually paid several thousand dollars, and he claims Jobs had short-changed his friend.