<incom> Media X Day 1

[Steve Cisler]

Report with pictures are here:
http://place.typepad.com/digitalcommons/2007/04/media_x_confere.html

Here's the text for those who prefer email:

Chuck House, director of Media X and highly decorated
computer scientist, welcomes a crowd of 200 plus at
the Stanford Alumni Center for a day and a half of
presentations. There will be ten speakers on Monday
and the 22 on Tuesday.  Media X wants to participate
in the Web 2.0 world.   House says the challenge is to
make technology transfer from the academic research
environment to the business world with high profile
models such as HP, Yahoo!, and Google in his mind. 
Media X is interdisciplinary and seeks to help find
unpublished work in progress and to connect
faculty/students with industry contacts.   He asks,
"How do you anticipate the unanticipated?" I'm
wondering what, if any, will be the role of open
source and sharing, rather than simply the academic
lab to commercial product path.

Each speaker took about twenty minutes. During the
whole afternoon about five questions were posed by the
audience, but there were breakout rooms far from the
conference hall (and break time refreshments) where
you could discuss projects with some of the
presenters. In spite of the one-way broadcast mode, I
learned a lot and did not mind watching and listening
for four hours.

*Robert Sutton gave a sort of inspirational talk on
"treating your organization as an unfinished
prototype."  After a year long ethnographic study of
IDeo, the famous design firm, he is trying to bring
design thinking to business theory. He mentioned that
Yahoo has dozens of experiments going on at once
because they have such a large user base, and if they
change a web site they have a built-in control group.
In one case they moved the search box from the left to
the center of the screen, and the increased
click-throughs brought in about $20 million extra in
revenue. Sutton offered advice from Andy Grove, former
head of Intel:

-act under temporary conviction as if it were a real
conviction. Correct course very quickly. If you are
depressed, you can't motivate your staff. So you have
to keep your spirits up even though you well
understand that you don't know what you're doing.-

If only Rumsfeld and his boss had heeded the second
sentence...

*Sebastian Thrun runs the Stanford Racing Team. They
won the DARPA grand challenge for robotic vehicles in
2005 when their car navigated 150 miles off road in
the Mojave desert. Using the prize money and
sponsorship from Google, Intel, VW this year's Passat
is equipped with devices that can scan 360 degrees and
has a GPS system with 5 cm of accuracy. Because this
year's race will be in traffic (not just scrub and
sagebrush), the VW has a databank of 11,000 car images
so it can sense when a car is in front or in back.
There is a 3D laser to sense other objects that are
rendered, and maps to show the progress. The image to
the left shows the VW after it has calculated it can
pass one car and avoid another.  I immediately thought
of the military applications, and indeed Thrun
predicted a production military vehicle would be off
the assembly line in 2015 and a car for the public in
2030. His dream is right out of Popular Science from
the 1950's or GM's Futurama where the family travels
in a bubble car chatting, playing cards, and watching
TV. he added that you could do your email after
pushing the "chauffeur" button.

B.J. Fogg of the Persuasive Technology lab thinks
otherwise. "How email cheapens your life and 5 things
you can do about it." He has a new book called "Mobile
persuasion" about the future behavior attributed to
cell phones.  As for email, he believes the  more you
use it to manage your closest relationships, the worse
those relationships become. For distant contacts it's
okay but not for close friends and family.

People far away can be brought closer, but those close
to us drift away. Our happiness is dependent on our
closest relationships not those far away. 

The solution:
1. Focus on the most important relationships. 
2. Share your emotions. 
3. Know details about someone else. 
4. Give gifts with shared meaning.
5. Use email for just those things where you have to
use it.

His own enterprise www.yackpack.net   and pbwiki.com
allow you to connect with friends using voice messages
and recordings. His demo found most of his close
friends online (perhaps waiting for this particular
demo), and I thought that was fine if you are in the
same time zone and connected at home but not for many
other situations. Still, it looked like it might serve
some of my needs at work.

Paul Saffo, on sabbatical from the Institute for the
Future does a great delivery, but his material was not
very fresh. However, since he looks ahead so many
years, many in the audience had not heard or read it
before.  He thinks the so-called information
revolution is over: "when it goes deep and ubiquitous
it becomes meaningless."  He explained the main trends
since WWII and reminded us that it takes about 20
years for a technology S curve to peak. He is attuned
to what doctors called prodomes: indicators or
whistles in the Zeitgeist of things that are coming. 
He thinks that robots are the next big thing. And he
closed with the advice to pay attention to how you
feel about change.

Qwaq.  This is a private virtual space with editing
and spatially placed voices in the virtual business
offices. Real time collaboration is possible, and you 
can do markups in shared spaces importing documents
from Open Office or proprietary formats. This young
business is built on Croquet--which uses Squeak--and
is part of an open source consortium. At the end of
March 2007 they released the software toolkit
<http://croquetconsortium.org >.   Greg Nuyens, CEO,
mentioned workers in Tajikistan and Nigeria making use
of this, and I asked how it worked in low bandwidth
situations. During the breakout XX explained that you
need about 60 kbps to move the messages, but most of
the work is done in the 3D software on your machine.
As for what machines work he said that almost anything
less than two years old would be good, and more
recently laptop makers prepared for this by including
fast video cards because MS Vista had some 3D
requirements. My two year old Power PC Mac might not
work well he said.
http://www.qwaq.com/

Scott Burns, Director of "an inconvenient truth" spoke
about converting Gore's long slide show into a feature
film and the process they used to shape it. I still
don't understand why they focused more on Gore and
what kind of guy he is now rather than the topic at
hand. Bringing in his family crises might be
appropriate for the campaign trail but not a movie
like this.

"Unleash your inner video producer"  Dave Toole and
J.D. Lasica (author of Darknet: Hollywood's War
Against the Digital Generation) run Ourmedia.org 
("It's your Internet") to encourage people to make
their own videos using original material or
combinations from different sources. They now have
130,000 users but seem to feel they are in the shadow
of YouTube--along with the 360 other video hosting
sites around the world.  Their talk encourages
sharing, and they are trying to build a community
based on open source. They are looking for sponsors to
build up the online learning center, and I pointed
them to Video Volunteers and should also mention Pixel
Corps.

Roy Pea, Stanford Center for Innovation in Learning
spoke about 'video conversations' --not recordings of
conversations but the discussions about videos which
could yield more content than the video. He demoed
Diver, a tool that can point to and annotate video,
much like footnotes in a text document.
http://scil.stanford.edu/research/projects/diver.html 

House introduced the 3D visualization talk by Paul
Brown of the medical school: "If you have not
experienced Second Life next year we won't let you
in," he joked.  Brown gave credit to a commercial
company called Fovia as he showed the kinds of fly
throughs of high resolution models of anatomy. I never
knew how complex my teeth are, and now I understand
why root canals are so much fun--and so expensive.
Brown showed how you can explore a skull, look inside
it, or just roam around the teeth.  He remarked, 

"Pretty soon your medical personnel will be crawling
around inside your data sets." And he showed real time
rendering of live patients as well as Sherit, a little
girl who had been dead for thousands of year: a mummy
from San Jose's Rosicrucian museum. In one minute the
device took 490 images and then later it was taken
apart using VR methods. Quite an amazing visual
impact.

The final speaker was a fellow I knew at Apple, Eric
Hoffert who was the principal architect of Apple's
QuickTime. He's had several companies since then, and
today he showed ShareMethods to encourage "teams that
play together." First he went though public tools like
wikipedia and Flickr. While ShareNow is a commercial
service it is open source and serves as a sales and
marketing portal. What was most impressive was the
claimed adoption rate by the the employees (who may
not have had any say in choosing the system introduced
by the IT department).  I need to find out more about
it. http://www.sharemethods.com/

Steve Cisler