"news from the future" entries

Should Personal Genomics Be Regulated?

I read recently about the cease and desist letters sent to 23andme and other personal genomics companies selling tests directly to consumers. 23andme has responded, saying that they agree with the ultimate need for regulation, but that harnessing the consumer internet for personal genomics is a really valuable scientific tool. I have to say I find myself doubtful about the…

Daylife's API for the News

Several years ago, my friend Upendra Shardanand tried to get me to join him in starting a company that would remake the way news is created and understood — overturning the worst, ambulance-chasing tendencies of modern journalism, and building tools to help people track and understand the topics and people that shape their lives. I begged off in order to…

WordSpy as Collective Intelligence

I've long been a fan of WordSpy, Paul McFedries' site that features definitions and first use of new words and phrases. It's a great trendspotting tool. The words we use give surprising insight into popular consciousness. Many of them, like junk sleep, silent disco, free-range kid, or Blackberry prayer illustrate new social trends, while others like phantom load or quake…

Inside Innovation at Xerox PARC

We were part of a group of journalists and bloggers invited to hear presentations from 10 different research groups within various parts of Xerox, PARC, and Fuji-Xerox. The format was similar to a science fair or a poster session in an academic conference with small groups moving around to hear presentations from the different projects. While other research labs use…

SpongeBob SquarePants Supports O'Reilly Research Finding

In O'Reilly Radar's recent reseach report, Virtual Worlds: A Business Guide, we contend that virtual worlds will go mainstream. The most powerful data point supporting our argument is that the most active and popular virtual worlds nowadays tend to be those populated by children. The next generation is growing up playing virtual worlds. And now one of the biggest purveyors…

Wattzon.org – How much energy we consume and what to do about it

Saul Griffith has published a version of his talk at ETech as a website, wattzon.org. Saul's key points: Solving global warming is an engineering problem. We know the connection between greenhouse gases and global warming, and can determine just how much carbon we're allowed to put into the atmosphere to give us the temperature we can live with. The…

Laptop penetration in Brazil, rising developer count in China

Interesting email from Paul Kedrosky: You'll find this interesting: The only place I have been where I see as many open laptops in the audience as at O'Reilly conferences is here in Brazil. Really fascinating. In a related note, I talked the other day with Stephanie Martin, the head of IBM DeveloperWorks. She noted that the number of Chinese…

New O'Reilly Radar Report: a Business Guide to Virtual Worlds

Virtual worlds, particularly Second Life, have generated much excitement — and much skepticism. In Virtual Worlds: A Business Guide, the newest O'Reilly Radar report, Ben Lorica, Roger Magoulas, and the O'Reilly Radar team get past the hype (and the anti-hype), detail what is happening in Second Life and other virtual worlds, and lay out what businesses need to do to…

@ETech: Tuesday Morning Keynotes

Saul Griffith started the day with a sober, but ultimately hopeful, talk about energy literacy. The subtitle of the talk was "know what you can do, do what you can," and the core of his talk (we'll point to the slides when we get 'em) was the steps we need to take, individually and collectively, to be able to have…

@TED: Best of Day 4 and a Wrap-Up

The last day at TED is a combination of exhaustion, anxiety, and wistfulness: exhaustion because we've been neglecting our sleep, anxiety because we remember how much work awaits us after the event is over, and wistfulness because we realize we can't live like this all the time. Perhaps because the programmers knew that we'd be pulled in multiple directions, the…