Is everything going virtual today?wello horld
turning the World Wide Web into a World Wide World
If the name weren't intriguing enough, the people behind it would be.
Virtual worlds for business, I presume. (Via Ogle Earth.)
I was lucky enough to interview Irving Wladawsky-Berger for the Guardian shortly before he retired from IBM. One of the most intriguing hints of things to come concerned virtual worlds:Does IBM have its own internal virtual world system - an intraworld running on its intranet?
We plan to build them; exactly how is all under discussion. We very much feel that many of our clients will want intraworlds in the same way they have intranets.
Then you want to make the navigation between the intraworlds and public worlds as seamless as possible.
Some of the "how" regarding interoperability is being addressed with this interesting collaboration between IBM and Linden Lab:IBM and Linden Lab, creator of the virtual world Second Life (www.secondlife.com), today announced the intent to develop new technologies and methodologies based on open standards that will help advance the future of 3D virtual worlds.
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IBM and Linden Lab plan to work together on issues concerning the integration of virtual worlds with the current Web; driving security-rich transactions of virtual goods and services; working with the industry to enable interoperability between various virtual worlds; and building more stability and high quality of service into virtual world platforms. These are expected to be key characteristics facing organizations which want to take advantage of virtual worlds for commerce, collaboration, education and other business applications.
What's striking about this announcement - still rather lacking in details, but clearly very good news for Linden Lab - is the emphasis on openness:Open source development of interoperable formats and protocols. Open standards in this area are expected to allow virtual worlds to connect together so that users can cross from one world to another, just like they can go from one web page to another on the Internet today.
No surprise there, really - open standards are the only way to build resilient, heterogeneous systems. And if you're contemplating linking together myriad, disparate virtual worlds, it had better be resilient in the extreme. (Via Clickable Culture.)
It feels strange to find myself in agreement with Steve Ballmer (eek), but I, too, find all these social networking sites rather faddish. That's not to say they won't settle down into an important role, but the gold-fever mentality (how many zeros is Facebook worth today? I do find it hard to keep up) seems destined for a dotcom-type deflation.
That notwithstanding, this is interesting, and important:MySpace is gearing up to launch MySpace Platform, according to a number of third party developers who’ve been contacted for input on the product.
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Suddenly Facebook, with nearly 5,500 third party applications, has significant competition around their platform - Within a month both MySpace and Google ... will probably have launched their own services. Platform competition is great for developers, but it also means they need to create and maintain separate code for each platform they choose to play on.
Well, one factor that will doubtedly affect that decision is the openness of the platform. After all, which would you rather code for: one that locks you in and tells you what to do, or one that doesn't?
It is - alas - not often that the relative merits of open and closed source get debated in the House of Commons, but yesterday was such a (frabjous) day. The hero of the piece, as so often in this context, was John Pugh, Lib Dem MP for Southport. The villain - well, I'll leave that for you to decide from the following comment, which as was made by Angela Eagle, The Exchequer Secretary to the Treasury, in reply to John's questions:It is often suggested that open source solutions offer better value because they are cheaper to buy. In fact, the total cost of ownership is considered in procurement, and it is not always the case that the open source solutions are the cheapest. Although they are free of licence charges, because they can involve high levels of support and training costs, they sometimes do not provide the best value for money. External studies have not shown a consistent cost advantage to open source solutions over proprietary solutions.
Now, where have I heard this old TCO argument before? And what a coincidence that a UK minister should be using it, no? I wonder how she, er, happened upon it...?
The Free Culture group are people after my own heart, so much so that their entire manifesto deserves quoting:
The mission of the Free Culture movement is to build a bottom-up, participatory structure to society and culture, rather than a top-down, closed, proprietary structure. Through the democratizing power of digital technology and the Internet, we can place the tools of creation and distribution, communication and collaboration, teaching and learning into the hands of the common person — and with a truly active, connected, informed citizenry, injustice and oppression will slowly but surely vanish from the earth.
We believe that culture should be a two-way affair, about participation, not merely consumption. We will not be content to sit passively at the end of a one-way media tube. With the Internet and other advances, the technology exists for a new paradigm of creation, one where anyone can be an artist, and anyone can succeed, based not on their industry connections, but on their merit.
We refuse to accept a future of digital feudalism where we do not actually own the products we buy, but we are merely granted limited uses of them as long as we pay the rent. We must halt and reverse the recent radical expansion of intellectual property rights, which threaten to reach the point where they trump any and all other rights of the individual and society.
The freedom to build upon the past is necessary for creativity and innovation to thrive. We will use and promote our cultural heritage in the public domain. We will make, share, adapt, and promote open content. We will listen to free music, look at free art, watch free film, and read free books. All the while, we will contribute, discuss, annotate, critique, improve, improvise, remix, mutate, and add yet more ingredients into the free culture soup.
We will help everyone understand the value of our cultural wealth, promoting free software and the open-source model. We will resist repressive legislation which threatens our civil liberties and stifles innovation. We will oppose hardware-level monitoring devices that will prevent users from having control of their own machines and their own data.
We won’t allow the content industry to cling to obsolete modes of distribution through bad legislation. We will be active participants in a free culture of connectivity and production, made possible as it never was before by the Internet and digital technology, and we will fight to prevent this new potential from being locked down by corporate and legislative control. If we allow the bottom-up, participatory structure of the Internet to be twisted into a glorified cable TV service — if we allow the established paradigm of creation and distribution to reassert itself — then the window of opportunity opened by the Internet will have been closed, and we will have lost something beautiful, revolutionary, and irretrievable.
The future is in our hands; we must build a technological and cultural movement to defend the digital commons.
I was particularly pleased to see from this New York Times article that they have also realised that the ramifications of defending the digital commons reach much further than merely demanding read-write media:
But in recent months, the group has made a point of branching out beyond music copyrights. At its first national conference, held at Harvard in May and attended by more than 130 people, speakers gave presentations on topics like enhancing Internet access in impoverished countries, and loosening patent regulations for pharmaceutical drugs.
“File-sharing may have brought these issues to public consciousness, but it’s not our only inspiration,” said Elizabeth Stark, founder of Harvard’s Free Culture group.
Some chapters have rallied around the Federal Research Public Access Act, a bill that would make it mandatory for government-financed research to be published in online journals, free to the public.
Young idealism: don't you just love it?
It would be hard to imagine a greater contrast between Larry "Ninja" Ellison's personal plaything, aka Oracle, and the hacker's scripting tape-duct duct-tape of choice, PHP. And yet the miracle that is open source is able to bring even these polar opposites together in an act of seamless connectivity:Continuing to deliver on its long-standing commitment to the Open Source community, Oracle today announced the contribution and a preview release of an enhanced Oracle Call Interface (OCI8) database driver for PHP. This helps bring breakthrough scalability to PHP applications, further enhancing PHP as a viable development environment for mission-critical applications. The OCI8 database driver for PHP supports important Oracle Database features such as connection pooling and fast application notification, enabling a single industry-standard server to support tens of thousands of database connections while providing higher availability.
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The enhanced OCI8 database driver for PHP provides new, improved integration between PHP and Oracle Database 11g, to allow a server-side connection pool shareable across web servers and languages, significantly enhancing the scalability of web-based systems.
(Via Alan Lord.)
This was bound to happen:Eerily ergonomic, infinitely adjustable, incredibly expensive, the Aeron chair is a fetish item in the computer industry, so it's not surprising that Residents have made virtual versions of them in Second Life since the very beginning. All that's changed, however, because Herman Miller, the company behind the Aeron, has just set up their own official store in SL, and is giving away chairs made with their official imprimatur. For a limited time, Residents with knock-off Aerons can bring them to the Herman Miller outlet in Avalon and exchange them for an officially branded SL version, for free.
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And with that announcement, the first public salvo has been fired: a real world corporation is loudly and actively asserting its real world intellectual property rights against Resident-made objects which allegedly infringes them. Many wondered when this moment would come, and though DMCA notices have been quietly filed by companies through Linden Lab, this is the first move I'm aware of that's being done in conjunction with an official move into Second Life, and a marketing offer.
How many more of these will it take before the music business realises that it's over?
Here's someone else who gets it: Yahoo Music VP of Product Development, Ian Rogers.I’m here to tell you today that I for one am no longer going to fall into this trap. If the licensing labels offer their content to Yahoo! put more barriers in front of the users, I’m not interested. Do what you feel you need to do for your business, I’ll be polite, say thank you, and decline to sign. I won’t let Yahoo! invest any more money in consumer inconvenience. I will tell Yahoo! to give the money they were going to give me to build awesome media applications to Yahoo! Mail or Answers or some other deserving endeavor. I personally don’t have any more time to give and can’t bear to see any more money spent on pathetic attempts for control instead of building consumer value. Life’s too short. I want to delight consumers, not bum them out.
(Via TechCrunch.)
Makes sense:At the core of Google's phone efforts is an operating system for mobile phones that will be based on Linux, the open-source software, according to industry executives familiar with the project.
While Google has built phone prototypes to test its software and show off its technology to manufacturers, the company is not likely to make phones, according to analysts.
In short, Google is not creating a gadget to rival the iPhone, but rather creating software that will be an alternative to Windows Mobile from Microsoft and other operating systems, which are built into phones sold by many manufacturers. And unlike Microsoft, Google is not expected to charge phone makers a licensing fee for the software.
"The essential point is that Google's strategy is to lead the creation of an open-source competitor to Windows Mobile," said an industry executive, who did not want his name used because his company has had contacts with Google. "They will put it in the open-source world and take the economics out of the Windows Mobile business."
In the red corner:
So what about the OpenDocument Foundation? We fall into the middle area of trying to perfect the conversion to XML regardless of the fact that our two groups have the world caught between a rock and a hard place.
And in the blue corner:The OpenDocument Foundation seems to try to clothe themselves in the mantle of the open source community and pontificate on how the big bad vendors treat interoperability. But are they speaking as a non-profit or as a vendor? Take their DaVinci plugin, for example. Where is the source code? Why isn't this open source? Are we to follow the Foundation's claim of 100% interoperability, based on blind faith, without seeing some proof in the form of working code? I've been working on document conversions and document file formats of one kind or another for almost 20 years. I've never seen 100% fidelity conversions of anything but trivial formats. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. But we have nothing here, just white papers from two guys without a garage.
Ouch. Who would have thought document standards could be such fun?
Good Craig:Craig Venter, the controversial DNA researcher involved in the race to decipher the human genetic code, has built a synthetic chromosome out of laboratory chemicals and is poised to announce the creation of the first new artificial life form on Earth.
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Mr Venter said he had carried out an ethical review before completing the experiment. "We feel that this is good science," he said.
Bad Craig:He has further heightened the controversy surrounding his potential breakthrough by applying for a patent for the synthetic bacterium.
The old dichotomy....
Nice little piece by Charles Arthur in the Guardian today that pulls together a bunch of disparate stories (including my Alfresco profile from yesterday's edition of the same) to explain why giving stuff away makes economic sense. I particularly liked the following:What I do find ironic though about the (very laudable) OpenStreetMap model is how it's acquired. The key element is Global Positioning Systems, aka GPS, aka sat-nav. GPS didn't just fall into the sky. It cost a lot of money to put it up there, and a fair bit to keep going - about $400m annually, including satellite updates.
But here's the thing about GPS: it's free to use, and in the short time that it's been available outside the military, its use has exploded. Figures for the value of the market are hard to come by, but EADS-Astrium estimates (in the graph at the end of the link) that this year it's worth about €40 billion. That's a hell of a multiplier on something that you give away for free, given a comparatively small investment.
Hopeful sign, here:The COMMUNIA Thematic Network wants to place itself as the European point of reference for theoretical analysis and strategic policy discussion of existing and emerging issues to the public domain in the digital environment - as well as related topics including, but not limited, alternative forms of licensing for creative material; open access to scientific publications and research results; management of works whose authors are unknown (i.e. orphan works). The network will cover the whole geographical territory of the European Union as well as neighbouring and accessing countries; it will also build strategic relationships with third countries such as the United States, Brazil, etc, where similar policy discussion on the above topics ongoing.
The COMMUNIA project will base its 3-years long activity on a tight schedule of thematic workshops and conference (respectively, 3 and 1 per year) with the goal to maintain a strong link between all the participants and use face-to-face meetings as a source of material for the analytical and practical work of the project, including the production of a book; an academic journal; a "best practices" guide for European research and reference centres on the topics covered by COMMUNIA; a final strategic report containing policy guidelines that will help all the stakeholders - public and private, from the local to the European level - tacking the issues that the existence of a digital public domain have raised and will undoubtedly continue to raise.
The price? A million European bendy ones - and cheap at the price. (Via Creative Commons.)
...it seems:The supervisory board of SWIFT has approved the plans for the restructuring of the systems architecture of the financial messaging network the outlines of which had been known for some time. The core of the realignment is the creation of a global data processing center in Switzerland.
And into the fire:To this will be added a command-and-control center in Hong Kong.
So now it will be the Chinese eavesdropping on our financial transactions, not the Americans. Oh well, at least it reflects the world's coming New Order....
I didn't comment on this piece from TechCrunch entitled "The inevitable march of recorded music towards free" since it largely recapitulates stuff that I've been wittering on about for ages (although it's good to see an A-lister joining the choir).
However, what is really interesting is the level of, er, wrong-headedness exhibited in the comments - about how copying digital files is "stealing" (infringement of an intellectual monopoly, actually), about how musicians never create without concrete financial incentives (oh yeah? Ask Schubert), how no one could make enough money from touring to make up for loss of income from CDs (apart from these musicians, that is) etc. etc.
If the readers of TechCrunch can be so ill informed, maybe this is going to take a little longer than I thought (or maybe TechCrunch readers are dafter than I thought....)
Interesting:BT and FON have joined forces to create a Wi-Fi community that allows its members to connect for free in thousands of places around the UK and the world.
Two things strike me: that BT has effectively sanctioned the use of its data network for Fon connections - and hence validated the whole Fon idea; and that the (revolutionary) idea that everyone gains if everyone shares is being promoted by one of the largest and most traditional companies in the UK. We're making progress.
Not something you see everyday - yet:IBM has put into the public domain and withdrawn its application for patent number US2007/0162321 - Outsourcing of Services. This patent application covers analyzing work flows, skills, economic costs, etc. Here’s why we are withdrawing it — IBM adopted a new policy a year ago to sharply reduce business method patent filings and instead stress significant technical content in its patents. Even though the patent application in question was filed eight months before the policy took effect in September, 2006, had the policy been in place at the time, IBM would not have filed the application. We’re glad the community pointed this application out so IBM could take swift action.
It's always good to see people who have given to the commons finding a way to make some dosh too. I've written before about the worthy OpenStreetMap, and now it seems that Steve Coast, the man behind it, has started a new outfit, Cloud Made, that aims to put it to commercial use. Alas, its Web site isn't very informative yet:Building on our expertise in the fields of community mapping, open data and open systems we offer innovative solutions customised to your needs.
CloudMade approach problems differently.
Applying agile techniques to heavyweight problems, we can help you make the most of exciting new opportunities that commons based production methods offer.
Er, right.
Bit more info here, though:ZXY, the company behind Cloudmade, is comprised of London-based entrepreneurs Nick Black and Steve Coast. They are two of the proprietors of Open Street Map (Steve launched the project and is on the board; Nick is a spokesperson; Both contribute to the map). ZXY is also behind geo-advertising company Mappam (Radar post). As two of the leaders of a large, open source project the pair will have to balance the needs of their business with the needs of the project -- luckily these will usually be in sync. OSM now gets over 1000 contributions a month (a huge milestone). I suspect that commercial deals will be viewed as validation by the community.
Indeed.
This was bound to happen:YouTube is now an important teaching tool at UC Berkeley.
The school announced on Wednesday that it has begun posting entire course lectures on the Web's No.1 video-sharing site.
Berkeley officials claimed in a statement that the university is the first to make full course lectures available on YouTube. The school said that over 300 hours of videotaped courses will be available at youtube.com/ucberkeley.
Berkeley said it will continue to expand the offering. The topics of study found on YouTube included chemistry, physics, biology and even a lecture on search-engine technology given in 2005 by Google cofounder Sergey Brin.
But at last it seems to be happening:This case involved a guy who was trying to patent the concept of "mandatory arbitration involving legal documents." The USPTO denied the patent. After a failed appeal, the guy went to court, and CAFC is also saying that his concept does not deserve patent protection, with this being the key quote: "The routine addition of modern electronics to an otherwise unpatentable invention typically creates a prima facie case of obviousness." In other words, simply taking a common process and automating it on a computer should be considered obvious -- and thus, not patentable. This doesn't rule out business model or software patents by any means -- but it at least suggests that the courts are beginning to recognize that the patent system has gone out of control. The court also specifically addresses its own earlier State Street decision, suggesting that people had been misinterpreting it to mean any business model was patentable -- when the USPTO and the courts should still be applying the same tests to see if the business models are patentable. It then notes that a business model on its own shouldn't be patentable unless it's tied to some sort of product, and then states: "It is thus clear that the present statute does not allow patents to be issued on particular business systems -- such as a particular type of arbitration -- that depend entirely on the use of mental processes."
As I said, but don't take my word for it, just ask Microsoft:The Zune Marketplace online store has been restocked and redesigned to make it even easier for people to find what they are looking for. The Zune software has also been completely redesigned with a new look and feel and lots of helpful new features. In addition to offering more than 3 million songs, the updated version of Zune Marketplace will launch with thousands of music videos for sale and over 1,000 of the top audio and video podcasts available for free. Consumers will also be able to choose from a selection of more than 1 million digital rights management (DRM)-free MP3s, which can be played with Zune or any other digital media player.
(Via Boing Boing.)
One of the things I've always admired about Richard Stallman is his belief that if you do the Right Thing, eventually you'll win everyone over. That's seems to be happening in software, but I've always been slightly sceptical that it might work elsewhere. I was wrong, it seems:The European Union's drive to set standards has many causes—and a protectionist impulse within some governments (eg, France's) may be one. But though the EU is a big market, with almost half a billion consumers, neither size, nor zeal, nor sneaky protectionism explains why it is usurping America's role as a source of global standards.
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If you manufacture globally, it is simpler to be bound by the toughest regulatory system in your supply chain. Self-regulation is also a harder sell when it comes to global trade, which involves trusting a long line of unknown participants from far-flung places (talk to parents who buy Chinese-made toys).
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Obey EU rules or watch your markets “evaporating”, a computer industry lobbyist tells Mr Schapiro. “We've been hit by a tsunami,” says a big wheel from General Motors. American multinationals that spend money adjusting to European rules may lose their taste for lighter domestic regulations that may serve only to offer a competitive advantage to rivals that do not export. Mr Schapiro is a campaigner for tougher regulation of American business. Yet you do not have to share his taste for banning chemicals to agree with his prediction that American industry will want stricter standards to create a level playing-field at home.
What this says is that tough regulations in the EU plus globalisation work to spread high standards for business throughout the world. So how about the following?
If the EU brought in laws that imposed an environmental impact tax on every item sold in the EU - determined by working out the cost/damage to the environment caused by that single item, and calculated by the EU - then the above logic would imply that companies around the world, including the US and China, would have very strong incentives to minimise environmental damage.
Moreover, as the above quotation points out, global companies would also start pushing for such legislation to be enacted in their home markets in order to create a level playing-field with their local competitors. The greenness would flow from Europe across the world, without the need for a post-Kyoto treaty or anything similar.
C'mon Europe, time to save the world. (Via PlexNex.)
The current system of highly-centralised power production is extremely vulnerable - be it to man-made or natural disasters - and a more decentralised approach, based on local generation of power, has many benefits. He's someone who has the right credentials to explore this line of thought: Bob Metcalfe, inventor of Ethernet:There is a lot to be learned from building the Internet over the last four decades, and we should make that analogy and apply those lessons. The “Enernet” is what we are all building to meet the world’s need for cheap and clean energy. It will not happen overnight, and it will be hard to predict how the various technology will play out over time. For example, the Internet was built to network mainframe computers and now it connects mostly cell phones and PCs. That was a big surprise.
Also look at the lessons of standardized interfaces. For the Internet, it took some years to figure that out. Some of them didn’t emerge, like the web, until 1989. For the Enernet we can look to the methods of standardization and how we choose to organize this thing. Fuels, biofuels themselves, are a standard.
Well, maybe, but biofuels are not a panacea - not least because it's clear that done badly they can actually exacerbate environmental problems rather than ameliorating them.
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