"thought provoking" entries

Ignite Boston 4 — Videos Uploaded

Ignite Boston 4 was an interesting and insightful event. We have many things to take away as we plan our next event for January.

Daniel Suarez: Bot-Mediated Realities

I enjoy exposure to new world views, the feeling of one's brain being stretched to fit a new frame. For that reason, I enjoyed Daniel Suarez's talk to the Long Now Foundation, entitled "Daemon: Bot-Mediated Realities". You can listen to the talk as I did, or read Paul Saffo's summary. Suarez sees a world in which bots run everything from…

Energy Savings, Strange Attractors, …

… the Intrinsic Cost of State Change, Orbiting Alien Voyeurs, and 200 Square Kilometers of Solar Panels Somewhere in Texas The Silicon Valley Leadership Group and Berkeley National Labs recently published the results of their first Data Center Demonstration Project (pdf). (Disclosure: My colleague Teresa Tung of Accenture R+D labs was the report's principal author). The study follows up on…

An ESB for the Web?

I spend a great deal of my time encouraging "enterprise people" to think more like "web people." Focus on adoption, use platforms to enable emergent capability, build the "generative enterprise," and that sort of thing. So, imagine my surprise when I saw the web acting a bit like the enterprise with the launch of Gnip. As the web moves toward…

What A Tiger Can Do

This past weekend I watched a superhero fall to incredible lows and rise to unbelievable heights. I wasn't watching one of the manufactured Marvel superheroes on the big screen. I was watching Tiger Woods live on TV. I was watching him create one of the most compelling stories ever in sports. Late Saturday afternoon, I began watching Tiger fight his…

Phone in the Toilet?

My friend Sara sent me an email: "Linda, Sorry that I'm not able to call you back. My phone fell into the toilet." We live in a world where phones can fall into toilets because our phones are following us everywhere. Untethered. Free. Free to fall into the toilet. Last week, a high school sophomore told me that she brings…

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…

Unexpected Pleasures in Gates/Ballmer interview at D Conference

In the joint interview with Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer at D last week, I loved some of the stories about the early Microsoft, especially Ballmer talking about how Gates wouldn't let him hire anyone unless he could prove that they would pay for themselves. Gates was incredibly conservative, and always wanted to have enough cash on hand to…

A Successful Experiment

During Web2Open yesterday, we ran an experiment that turned out to be a big success. Because it felt like a model that could be extended and used by others–but it hasn't been blogged about widely–I'll explain here what we did. We started with the idea that we wanted to hold a conference speed-dating event. But we didn't have a natural…

GSM Cracking: Coming Soon to a Computer Near You via a Web Service

A new web service, based on specialized hardware, will make cracking the GSM A5/1 protocol fast and cheap.