Group items tagged

make screenshots and upload them to the central server

“These modules seek to penetrate, but in a passing way. A second of your attention is all they ask. Nothing is firing that rends or cuts. It’s a massage, really, if you just go with it. And why not? Some of the most talented people on the planet have devoted their lives to creating this psychic sauna, just for you.” Ersatz environments and colourful advertisements have been with us since the fifties, de Zengotita adds, but the multimedia blitz we experience now represents a whole new level of persuasion. “Saying that it’s just more of what we had before is like saying a hurricane is just more breeze.”

Today’s mass dream, split from the organic foundation of the world and cobbled together from shards of television shows, newspaper and magazine articles, advertisements, films, ad jingles, ringtones – the whole mad fantasy of what’s hip, what’s not, who’s in, who’s out and the international villain du jour – is the raw stuff of the ‘Collective Unconscious 2.0’.

Mainstream media culture currently has all the signs of full-blown psychosis. This is analogous to Jung’s shadow. Confronting the shadow is unpleasant on a personal level, but healing cannot be effected without being confronted with the truth – and as folk wisdom has it, the truth hurts. What is positive about this process is that we’re being forced to confront the very worst in the imaginal output of our great, untethered, free market economy.

We are, ultimately, the stories we tell each other of our past, present and future. We become what we seek. It’s up to us to rule the imagination or leave it in the hands of a select few to shape the future of the mass dream. As Buckminster Fuller once said, “You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.”

open source

we will open-source its code

initially

targeted at netbooks

working with the open source community

share our vision

Speed, simplicity and security

user interface is minimal

out of your way

It should just work

run on both x86 as well as ARM

a new windowing system

software architecture is simple

Linux kernel

applications can be written using your favorite web technologies

these apps will run

on any standards-based browser

largest user base

designed to power computers ranging from small netbooks to full-size desktop systems

Google Chrome OS and Android overlap

June 10, 2009

"It can discover and learn millions of relations, not just one at a time. With TextRunner, there is no human in the loop: it just finds relations on its own."

enter, for example, "kills bacteria,"

insights that "chlorine kills bacteria" or "ultraviolet light kills bacteria" or "heat kills bacteria"

then visit the Web page

ways to preview the text

triples

prototype

the ability of software to achieve rudimentary understanding of text

unprecedented scale and scope

analogous to technology developed by Powerset

a tool that was limited

TextRunner technology handles

arbitrary text on any page, including blog posts, product catalogues, newspaper articles, and more

"this work reflects a growing trend toward the design of search tools that actively combine the pieces of information they find on the Web into a larger synthesis."

lessons about where the industry might go

Fair warning: this is a long post.

In 1969, the Justice Department, ADR, and several others filed antitrust suits

IBM agreed to stop bundling free software

disaggregation is a natural outcome

multiple companies can move faster

backlog of potential creativity

The OS is dissolving into a soup of resources distributed across both the network and the local device, with the application in the middle calling on both

what it lacks in beauty it more than makes up for in rate of change and versatility

hybrids of local and network resources

gradual evolution of a super-OS that includes both the network and the device

we don't have a name for this new thing

trouble talking about it

I'm calling it the "metaplatform"

Although the metaplatform isn't necessarily elegant

compatibility

technological advances always lead to value chain fragmentation

what happens if that company goes out of business or just decides to stop maintaining the product?

If you've incorporated external web services into your site, the site will break if any of those services stops working

We don't have any systematic ways to deal with problems like these

a business opportunity for the next crop of software entrepreneurs

What the metaplatform means

Much of the discussion in this post is pretty theoretical

practical implications

iPhone today gives (in my opinion) the best overall mobile browsing and app discovery experience

APIs that will enable other developers to extend

implementation is often off-target

trying to make their APIs into the business equivalent of an operating system

private ecosystem

opening the application outward

mixed and matched with other functionality in the metaplatform

export data isn’t enough... what springs to mind is open source

Lots to think about

Clayton Christensen

The most effective mobile application are

a framework to predict where most profits will be made

HTML5

changes that are brewing in the mobile industry

excessively complex

multi-level security, governance, and policy controls

more difficult than with other platforms which were designed to function in highly diverse environments

Users should be able to create sites

customize them over time to meet the local requirements

evolve and improve through shared contributions

complexity and high cost