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"'If it's not talking to each other, it's not a market.' Europe, despite being a political union (of sorts), does not yet feel like a real market. Part of the solution would be to know more about each other, and to talk to each other more often. That's what 'Whiteboard' wants to offer: a place to find information about interesting businesses and innovation, and to talk about it." So yet another DJ journalist, as professor Mark Deuze would say. Raf Weverbergh left the Flemish magazine Humo and started his own venture, Whiteboard.  He won't be the one who is on stage all the time creating his very own content, but rather he invites contributors to talk about entrepreneurship in Europe. Which seems like a great idea, as Europe is not just that doom and gloom continent - but it needs media ventures to talk about its entrepreneurs and to facilitate the conversation between entrepreneurs. So I cannot wait to hear a thousand (or more) entrepreneurial voices on Whiteboard reporting about exciting new things in Europe! 

"The acquisition could be read as a signal to the world that China is determined to be a major competitor in the future genome sequencing market."

"You Can Be Active with the Activists or Sleeping with the Sleepers: Pirate Cinema by Cory Doctorow" Another book by Cory Doctorow - and I'm still busy reading Makers! Stefan Raets discusses the Doctorow's Youthful Techno-Defiance Trilogy: 'From Little Brother (tech-savvy teenagers take on a government-run surveillance system) to For the Win (tech-savvy teenagers take on unfair working conditions for MMORPG gold farmers) to now Pirate Cinema (tech-savvy teenagers take on draconian copyright laws).'

"What do self-piloting helicopters have to do with the growing movement to transform education online? A day spent with Mr. Ng here at Coursera's offices, with the aim of getting a sense of the company's culture and the ideas that make up its DNA, helped answer that question. It turns out that the links between artificial-intelligence researchers and MOOC's run deep. "

"Thingiverse is also introducing a new "Follow" button that will connect you to the things, digital designs, designers, users, tags, categories: all the stuff you care about most. By following a Thing, you'll get a notification when someone comments on it, makes a copy of it, or remixes it. Some new digital designs inspire a whole family of new Things, and the Follow button helps you keep track of those.  " As Bruce Sterling says, it's almost a social network of things. Now just imagine to have this affordance in augmented reality - you just point your smartphone, tablet or google glass to a thing, you activate some app and you get all this information. Also in the press release, the guys from Thingiverse explain how users have been tagging their uploads with useful descriptors - and so now you can follow tags or categories to get updates in a dashboard. We're talking here about the annotation of our physical reality, bookmarking no longer just the digital world of websites but of the objects which surround us. 

"Microsoft has it's own Project Glass cooking in the R&D labs. It's an augmented reality glasses/heads-up display, that should supply you with various bits of trivia while you are watching a live event, e.g. baseball game. " The information is based on a patent application, so don't expect a Microsoft Glass for Christmas. 

"We, the biological part of the machine, are providing the tools for its uplift, we embed cameras everywhere so it can see, we implant sensors all over the planet so it may feel, but above all we nudge and we push towards a greater connectivity, all this unaware." And also: "We are on the edge of a Paleolithic Machine intelligence world. A world oscillating between that which is already historical, and that which is barely recognizable. Some of us, teetering on this bio-electronic borderline, have this ghostly sensation that a new horizon is on the verge of being revealed, still misty yet glowing with some inner light, eerie but compelling." An interesting and beautiful post, but then again, I'm not entirely convinced, more specifically about the implicit conceptualization of our own Paleo-past. I think our ancestors and many animals had something called consciousness, while all those fascinating machines and networks of today don't have any consciousness at all. The fact that we add cameras and sensors to the networks does not yet mean these networks acquire something like a body. It would be interesting to study how the proponents of cyborg-thinking conceptualize the relationship between mind, body and consciousness. Or am I mistaken here? 

"I ask us - in journalism and in education (and in journalism education) - to aspire to being services. That requires us to start by thinking of the ends." This is so right. Aspire being services, in education as in journalism, as both activities have so much in common. 

" Since 1800, technological advance has been associated with economic growth. The new stuff being built saved labor input, which was then put into the construction of other things. However, the most recent technological advances may not be growth-inducing. As Samuelson puts it, "Gordon sees the Internet, smartphones and tablets as tilted toward entertainment, not labor-saving."" Professor Edward Castronova, who once wrote a book about the exodus to virtual worlds, sees some more evidence of an exodus recession.  He's not just talking about virtual worlds however, but also about your average digital stuff such as tablets and smartphones. It makes us want less 'real' things and so it makes it harder for the economy to grow. One might say, let's measure growth in a different way, taking into account this digital shift. But then again, our social security for instance depends on the economy and the money which is actually earned there.  So will we all hide into virtual worlds to forget the misery of the recession-ridden 'real world'? Or is this speculation very wrong, as the digital evolution is now affecting the 'world of the atoms' in a radical way (think 3D printers, hardware and bio-hacking). 

"Not all those young companies will survive, but the habit of hiring online seems baked in; 64 percent of respondents said at least half of their work force would be online by 2015, and 94 percent predicted that in 10 years most businesses would consist of online temps and physical full-time workers." One more thing: it seems that the educational degree is not considered as being 'very important' when hiring online help. Quentin Hardy (Bits, The New York Times) concludes 'In the future, having a degree may be helpful, but having a reputation will be even better.' Taking this one step further, rating systems such as Klout (not necessarily Klout itself) could become a very important part of your social capital. Of course, such reputation measures could be organized by the major online staffing companies -  like eBay for instance uses its famous reputation system.  Reputation as social capital will translate this way into financial capital - and could be a crucial data point for financial companies which could use these data to decide about your creditworthiness...

"Our group designs new interfaces that integrate digital content in people's lives in more fluid and seamless ways. Our aim is to make it easier and more intuitive to benefit from the wealth of useful digital information and services. " Pattie Maes and her group at MIT, lots of fascinating projects here, often making me think 'why isn't this ubiquitous right now already?' One of the reasons might be 'the economy, stupid' - like the idea of being able to swipe a file from one mobile app to another, seamlessly.  But eventually we'll get there. The future is fluid. 

"Human brains will someday extend into the cloud, futurist and computer pioneer Ray Kurzweil predicted at the DEMO conference here on Tuesday. Moreover, he said, it will become possible to selectively erase pieces of our memories, while retaining some portions of them, to be able to learn new things no matter how old the person is." Of course, it's all about AI and augmented reality, leading right up to our having an augmented brain. Which, in a sense, we have for so long already - at least since we invented writing. But okay, in many ways we're re-inventing writing.  You'll find the video at Computerworld. 

"Apple's stock dropped 2.21 percent on Monday. A few analysts blamed the drop - worth more than $12 billion - on a strike of 4,000 Chinese workers at Apple's manufacturer. But how do we know that strike really happened? Bloomberg's Adam Minter makes the case that the entire narrative is based on messages posted to China's version of Twitter, Sina Weibo, from a single anonymous user." The journalists as DJs - but they have to know and respect their sources.

" "Commons-Based Peer Production". It's a revolution in how things are made, by whom, and in what quantities. In some ways, the future looks a lot like the past. These blacksmiths are making a local solution to a local problem. And we're going to be seeing a lot more of that." And this was a presentation for the World Economic Forum, in China.  Just imagine how we can use the web and virtual spaces to work with global teams, in order to produce on a very local level... 

"Bloomfield is working on a platform, called the Synthetic Economy Research Environment, that could enable economists to produce games that simulate large-scale economic phenomenon like a central bank." I often wondered whether professor Robert Bloomfield (Johnson School of Management at Cornell University) was still involved in virtual worlds research. He was the charismatic host of the rather high-brow Metanomics talk-show in Second Life. Now I got my answer, via Brad Plumer who published a post about the economics of video games on Wonkblog at The Washington Post. 

Sean Lawson, Forbes:  "If the United States has not yet fully militarized cyberspace, it has taken significant steps in that direction. " Interesting metaphors in this article. Is cyberspace like an ocean, and is it just a normal thing to have a kind of cyberspace-navy? Or is this going much further, with the military trying to expand their role drastically? 

The famous sociologist Manuel Castells in an interview by Paul Mason (BBC):  "With Facebook and with all these social networks what happened is that we live constantly networked. We live in a culture of not virtual reality, but real virtuality because our virtuality, meaning the internet networks, the images are a fundamental part of our reality. We cannot live outside this construction of ourselves in the networks of communication." Ever wondered why people try to redefine themselves by nationalism, regionalism, membership of small subcultures, even though the world is globalizing fast? I think Castells has some anwers on that too:  "The more we are connected to everything and everybody and every activity, the more we need to know who we are. Unless I know who I am, I don't know where I am in the world, because then I am a consumer, I am taken by the market, I am taken by the media. "And therefore people decide that they are going to be different. But to do that, they have to identify themselves as individuals, as collectives, as nations, as genders, all these categories that sociologists have already constructed time ago." Castells explains how people in this crisis engage in co-operative or non-profit work. It's a kind of 'non-capitalism'.  Putting now on my list: his new book Aftermath. 

An academic study co-authored last year by leading virtual world academic Edward Castronova suggests that people get more happiness from being in Second Life than they do from good news in their real life.  Wagner James Au on New World Notes says this is probably also true for other virtual environments, not onlt for Second Life. He also points to the bigger question of the shifting boundaries between virtual and real.  Social media help extend immersive experiences to so-called real world networks. Virtual money is convertible in real money, and solidarity actions for real world issues can start out in virtual environments.  Manuel Castells says we live in a cultural of virtual reality - I think the deconstruction of the boundaries between real and virtual is becoming fairly obvious. Virtual is not some exclusive feature of 3D environments, and reality is ever more being augmented and digitally annotated.

Another great story from Singularity Hub. If this Kickstarter project is successful, it will enable us to explore the oceans by just using our laptop or tablet.  Which in a way reminds me of those cute iPad-robots enabling people to move around , see, hear and communicate from  whatever distance. So yes indeed, let's do this in the oceans as well!  "Eduardo Labarca wants to bring the ocean you. Not through the kind of striking, high-definition imagery that Planet Earth brought, but through an immersive experience where you actually get to navigate the corals, chase the fish, explore the shipwreck yourself. Which is why Labarca created AcquatiCo, a web-based ocean exploration platform. A Kickstarter campaign has been launched for the startup. If successful, it will be the first step in the company's goal of giving people unprecedented access to the ocean's treasures using just their computers, tablets or smartphones. I got a chance to talk with the Singularity University graduate and ask him about AcquatiCo, and his vision to "democratize the ocean." "

"Britain plans to make it easier for technology firms to list their shares in London, the government said on Thursday, in an attempt to stem the flow of high-growth companies heading across the Atlantic in search of capital." Interesting. Countries in a competition to keep their tech wizards at home. But how important are stock markets for innovation? And nation-states? Don't think too fast stocks and nation-states are something of the past...