The Louvre of the Industrial Age

This morning I had the chance to get a tour of The Henry Ford Museum in Dearborn, MI, along with Dale Dougherty, creator of Make: and Makerfaire, and Marc Greuther, the chief curator of the museum. I had expected a museum dedicated to the auto industry, but it's so much more than that. As I wrote in my first stunned tweet, "it's the Louvre of the Industrial Age."

When we first entered, Marc took us to what he said he said may be his favorite artifact in the museum, a block of concrete that contains Luther Burbank's shovel, and Thomas Edison's signature and footprints. Luther Burbank was, of course, the great agricultural inventor who created such treasures as the nectarine and the Santa Rosa plum. Ford was a farm boy who became an industrialist; Thomas Edison was his friend and mentor. The museum, opened in 1929, was Ford's personal homage to the transformation of the world that he was so much a part of. This museum chronicles that transformation.

The machines are astonishing - steam engines and coal fired electric generators as big as houses, the first lathes capable of making other precision lathes (the makerbot of the 19th century), a ribbon glass machine that is one of five that in the 1970s made virtually all of the incandescent lightbulbs in the world, combine harvesters, railroad locomotives, cars, airplanes, even motels, gas stations, an early McDonalds' restaurant and other epiphenomena of the automobile era.

Under Marc's eye, we also saw the transformation of the machines from purely functional objects to things of beauty. We saw the advances in engineering - the materials, the workmanship, the design, over a hundred years of innovation. Visiting The Henry Ford, as they call it, is a truly humbling experience. I would never in a hundred years have thought of making a visit to Detroit just to visit this museum, but knowing what I know now, I will tell you confidently that it is as worth your while as a visit to Paris just to see the Louvre, to Rome for the Vatican Museum, to Florence for the Uffizi Gallery, to St. Petersburg for the Hermitage, or to Berlin for the Pergamon Museum. This is truly one of the world's great museums, and the world that it chronicles is our own.

I am truly humbled that the Museum has partnered with us to hold Makerfaire Detroit on their grounds. If you are anywhere in reach of Detroit this weekend, I heartily recommend that you plan to spend both days there. You can easily spend a day at Makerfaire, and you could easily spend a day at The Henry Ford.

P.S. Here are some of my photos from my visit. (More to come soon. Can't upload many as I'm currently on a plane.)

Augmented reality as etiquette coach

Alasdair Allan has a practical goal for AR: putting names to faces.

Identifying local landmarks and uncovering hidden coupons are fun augmented reality applications, but "Programming iPhone Sensors" author Alasdair Allan has a loftier AR goal.

"I'm terrible with faces and names," he said during a recent interview at OSCON. "So, I want those little glasses where you see someone and it's like: 'This is Gary. You met him in 2005. His wife is called Mary. He's got three kids. His birthday is ...'. That sort of thing. That's my ultimate goal."

Allan's ideal is based on facial recognition, which is a step above facial detection. But you can't have identification without detection, and detection is something we're close to seeing in real-time. Allan himself successfully built a real-time face detection demo on the iPhone 3GS. The iPhone 4's improved hardware makes the same functionality easier to implement. (Not trivial ... just easier.)

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Four short links: 30 July 2010

Game Mechanics, Data Privacy, Wesabe Open Source, and Monkey Economics

1. The No-Twinkie Database -- These are all the Twinkie Denial Conditions described in my “Bad Game Designer, No Twinkie!” Designer’s Notebook columns. Each one is an egregious design error, although many of them have appeared in otherwise great games. A collection of "don't do this" for app designers. (via waxy)
2. Cloud Privacy Heat Map (Forrester) -- a map showing the degree of legal support for privacy and data protection across various jurisdictions. (via azaaza on Twitter)
3. Wesabe on GitHub -- Wesabe has closed, but is open sourcing its code.
4. Laurie Santos TED Talk -- monkeys make similar irrational decisions as we do. "The errors we make are predictable and immune to evidence." Sound like you? Watch this excellent talk.

Which social gaming companies are hiring

Disney's announced purchase of Mountain View gaming startup Playdom, follows on the heels of EA's purchase of London-based Playfish last November. Based on active users, Zynga remains by far the biggest online social gaming company. But what other independent companies are growing?

To see which companies are expanding, I used our data warehouse of online job postings¹ to detect recent hiring². Zynga and Playdom put out the most job postings over the last three months, with Watercooler, a Redwood City startup, finishing a distant third³:

While I focused on online social gaming companies, I checked to see which companies were showing interest in games for smartphones, and found not too many were mentioning the iPhone or Android platforms on their job posts. Outside of Zynga, Playdom and Popcap Games, none of the other companies had (many) job postings that mentioned the iPhone/iPad or Android platforms⁴:

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Facebook Mountain ("I wish I knew how to quit you")

Why abysmal customer satisfaction levels won't stop the social giant.

"Apple is 'Evil' and Facebook is 'a Photo-sharing Site'" -- Fred Wilson, VC (investor in Twitter, Foursquare, Zynga).

It's the ultimate form of respect when the competition vilifies and diminishes your accomplishments, so take respected VC and blogger Fred Wilson's comments in that light. After all, he's got investments in a number of companies that Facebook is a potential threat to.

But let's face some facts. Love or hate Facebook, you don't grow to 500 million users if you are not doing something incredibly right.

Moreover, you don't engage those same users to the point that 50 percent of the active user base logs in daily unless you have found a way to turn the social equivalent of lead into gold.

Mind you, this is a service legions diss, dismiss and outright distrust. A service with customer satisfaction levels that rank below the airline industry.

It begs the question: Why isn't this ship sinking, as opposed to being an unstoppable force that's swallowing up the web one 'Like' and Facebook Connect sign-on at a time?

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Four short links: 29 July 2010

Non-Profits, UK Legislation, Mobile Web Variation, and Scaling

1. How to Raise Funds for Non-Profits (Joi Ichi) -- One organization sent a message to all of their donors during the Haiti crisis asking them to give to an NGO that they had vetted. They didn't ask for any money for themselves. This had a hugely positive effect and the donors trust in the group increased. Wallets aren't zero sum.
2. legislation.gov.uk -- very elegant legislation system for the UK. Check out the annual analysis, for example. (via rchards on Twitter)
3. The Great WebKit Comparison Table -- So far I’ve tested 14 different mobile WebKits, and they are all slightly different. You can find the details below. (via Andrew Savikas)
4. Node and Scaling in the Small vs Scaling in the Large (al3x) -- In a system of no significant scale, basically anything works. The power of today’s hardware is such that, for example, you can build a web application that supports thousands of users using one of the slowest available programming languages, brutally inefficient datastore access and storage patterns, zero caching, no sensible distribution of work, no attention to locality, etc. etc. Basically, you can apply every available anti-pattern and still come out the other end with a workable system, simply because the hardware can move faster than your bad decision-making.

Startup Showcase submissions at the Web 2.0 Expo NYC due 8/2

We are looking for startups to show-off at the Web 2.0 Expo in NYC. We always find a place to showcase them and this year is no different. This year we’re hosting our first ever Startup Showcase. Highlighting the startup ecosystem’s creativity and variety, the Showcase will give you a chance to get in front of hundreds of potential users and a couple of high-profile investors. On Wednesday night, September 29, we’re going to have approximately 30 startups demoing in one large room. We’ll provide you with a small table and room for two people to demo—you’ll bring a laptop (or two) and a founder (or two). The Web 2.0 Expo runs from September 27-30th.

Expo attendees will have 50 minutes to see your demos (we’ll sound a chime every five minutes, letting people know it’s time to circulate). As they walk around, attendees will vote on their favorite demos. At the end of the hour, Tim O’Reilly and Fred Wilson (Union Square Ventures) will talk about NYC, technology and entrepreneurship. Following that conversation they will each announce their top pick along with the audience favorite. These three startups will then each give a pitch and have an on-stage conversation with Tim and Fred. Fred just blogged his involvement.

The submissions for the Startup Showcase are open until next Monday, 8/2. Let us know you are interested now.

The program for the Web 2.0 Expo NYC is complete. We have sessions for Developers, Designers, Marketers and Biz Dev. We will have speakers from Google, Twitter (Ryan Sarver), Facebook (Bret Taylor), Foursquare (Dennis Crowley) and many, many other companies. Radar readers get 20% off with the code (wait for it...) radar.

Capturing health data in everyday life

Paul Tarini on the link between health care and observations of daily living.

Last week I was privileged to speak with Paul Tarini, team director of the Pioneer Portfolio at the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation.

Our full interview is available in the associated podcast. Topics and questions we covered included:

• What happens when you actually solve a health care problem?
• How the foundation's Project HealthDesign aims to capture observations of daily living (ODLs) like sleep patterns and eating habits.
• Current trends in computing and health care. Specifically, how capturing, tracking, and understanding health data can help manage chronic disease

Disclosure: The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation was a sponsor of the health track at last week's OSCON convention.

Four short links: 28 July 2010

End of Open Phones, More Geek Women, Social-ish Teenagers, and Premium Cycles

1. The end of the road for the Nexus One (LWN) -- The pessimistic among us can be forgiven for concluding that the battle for open handsets is being lost. The carriers determine which devices will be successful in the market, and they have absolutely no interest in openness. Customers are irresistibly drawn to heavily advertised, shiny devices with low up-front costs; they just do not see any reason to insist on more open devices or, even, freedom from carrier lock-in. Attempts to create a market in open handsets - Nexus One, OpenMoko - seem to go down in flames. By this reasoning, we may well all be using Linux-based handsets in the future, but the freedom that attracted many of us to Linux will have been lost. (via Hacker News)
2. Women in Technology -- says almost everything I learned from helping women into O'Reilly conferences. Amen!
3. Teenagers and Social Participation (Nina Simone) -- [M]any older visitors enjoy the vibrancy of social events and are more than willing to share stories with other visitors in the context of a museum experience as long as it isn't overly technology mediated. There is another, surprising group that is much less likely to participate in dialogue with strangers: teenagers.
4. Three New Features for Reddit Gold -- I've been watching this with interest. They asked supports to sign up to subscription program before they said what they'd offer in return. Now they're developing premium features to see what sticks. They're offering the ability to turn off ads, no surprise there, but also some features (such as resortable lists) that are computationally expensive. I like the idea of offering subscribers the expensive-to-compute services above and beyond freemium.

Open government is a mindset

Analysis: Connections are forming between social media, open government and e-government.

I recently talked about the role social media can play in open government at Social Security's Open Government Employee Awareness Day. My presentation is embedded below:

As I said in my talk at the agency, what I've seen in my reporting over this year suggests a nascent connection between the evolution of social media, open government and e-government. The economic meltdown of the past few years has pushed state governments to do more with less. The federal government has explicitly -- and sometimes implicitly -- endorsed the use of several types of online social software as tools for open government. The top-down open government directive has come at a time when there is an active network of civic hackers finding innovative ways to use free services, open data and partnerships with social entrepreneurs.

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Data as a service

A look at how services and widgets are democratizing data and visualization.

The last two months have seen some important developments in the way data is made available. First, Infochimps created a web API for publishing data. The number of datasets is relatively limited; there are five available now, of which four have to do with Twitter data, and one maps IP addresses to census data (and that one appears not to be available yet). Their site allows you to request (or vote on requests) for new datasets. Pricing is reasonable. You can do significant experimentation, or even run a useful low-volume application, without running up any charges.

"Data as a service" is not a new term, by any means. There have been any number of data services over the years. But this is something different from the many services that have sold data -- or even the more recent services that have sold data via the Internet. Data as a service is another part of the cloud computing alphabet soup, on par with "infrastructure, software, or platform as a service" (IaaS/SaaS/PaaS). Infochimps makes possible applications where data lives in the cloud. Granted, you're not going to access terabyte datasets over the Internet. But neither do you have to download (or have shipped) a giant dataset for the few Kilo- or Megabytes that interest you. Infochimps is pushing a bit beyond simple data access. Their Twitter APIs aren't raw data, but implement trust metrics, influence metrics, and more. So perhaps it's better to call this "algorithm as a service" (AaaS), not unlike the Prediction API (machine learning using Google's algorithms) that was announced at Google I/O.

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Detroit 2.0: Motor City to Maker City

Maker Faire Detroit opens this coming weekend at The Henry Ford in Dearborn. Our goal is to create a fun, family-friendly event and showcase talented makers from Michigan and aroundthe Midwest. I also think the event gives us an opportunity to consider ways that makers can be part of re-inventing Detroit from the ground-up. This Thursday, just before Maker Faire Detroit, we've put together a special program Can Do Camp to explore what makers are doing and what can be done.

One of the presenters will be K. Venkatesh Prasad, Technical Leader, Infotronics in the Research and Advanced Engineering Group at Ford Motor Company. At Maker Faire in the Bay Area, Prasad spoke about about Automakers 2.0, (see links below) which was the idea that there would be a new generation of people working on cars and thinking of the car as a technology platform.

Here is a brief sketch of Prasad's ideas for a new Detroit that leverages its capacity for building physical things but also extends into a digital world where more of those things are connected.

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Recent Posts

• Redesigning the New York City subway map | by Julie Steele on July 27, 2010
• Four short links: 27 July 2010 | by Nat Torkington on July 27, 2010
• Wrap-up of the health care IT track at O'Reilly's Open Source convention | by Andy Oram on July 26, 2010
• Why fragmentation is a good sign for Android | by Mac Slocum on July 26, 2010
• Four short links: 26 July 2010 | by Nat Torkington on July 26, 2010
• Web 2.0 risks and rewards for federal agencies | by Alex Howard on July 23, 2010
• Four short links: 23 July 2010 | by Nat Torkington on July 23, 2010
• VistA scenarios, and other controversies at the Open Source health care track | by Andy Oram on July 22, 2010
• How open source can improve health care | by Brian Ahier on July 22, 2010
• Four short links: 22 July 2010 | by Nat Torkington on July 22, 2010
• Day one of the health care IT track at O'Reilly's Open Source convention | by Andy Oram on July 21, 2010
• Detroit Can Do Camp - July 29 | by Dale Dougherty on July 21, 2010