Archive for the ‘Tech Trends’ Category
Guido, Google, and App Engine
The internet’s most underappreciated feature is its ability to connect fringe players with Hollywood-sized audiences. This is particularly true in the software world. Among hackers, the names Linus, Richard, Larry, Eric, Tim, and Guido have just the same ring as Madonna or Bono. At the same time, the internet superstars seem somehow more accessible, possibly because they drive cars and work for companies: they are not seen in the media. This preconception did nothing to stifle my surprise upon entering a small lecture room and finding that same Guido hunched over a Macbook. I instinctively surveyed the aisles, looking for handlers and bodyguards. None could be found. This was just a product pitch, after all, not an appearance at Radio City. At the end of the talk, Guido even cast off his own cloak, excusing himself to take his child to a sporting event. The internet, it seemed, had not stripped him of his humanity.
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A New Take on Renewables
“Everything that you’ve heard about renewable energy is wrong.” So began Vinod Khosla’s 22 October talk at Stanford on clean enterprise. He was quick to raise a disclaimer about his position, revealing one of his key principles to be that “anything out of the ordinary that you want to do will make others skeptical.” Quoting Stephen Kaggwa, he encouraged the audience of aspirant entrepreneurs to “Try and fail, but don’t fail to try.” The approach worked once for Khosla: in the early 80s he bet, and won, on the idea that the desktop could be a viable power computing workstation. Thirty years later, the founder of Sun Microsystems believes that he has found the next honeypot, and unlike some of the environmental activists that garner only incidental respect from him, he has staked a vast portion of his personal fortune on the notion that renewable energy will become a reality in 10 years time.
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Amateurism: Out from Under the Shadetree
Jeff Howe’s 2006 article “The Rise of Crowdsourcing” called attention to new methods of directing collaborative energy. As with any next “big thing,” the first principles from which this movement grew have been applied for some time. The field of mathematics often turns to the masses for proofs—witness the Poincaire conjecture proof from the Millenium problem list, for instance, or the Universal Turing proof—although these masses are a decidedly rarefied lot. The Ansari X-prize pried space from the hands of bureaucrats, and more than one explorer set sail without professional credentials in hopes of disproportionate payoff. A variety of factors—cheap infrastructure software, fast communications technology, effective information search—now makes it possible to apply this open approach to various tasks. Howe assigned a category to this field: “crowdsourcing”. The Wikipedia definition follows:
Crowdsourcing is a neologism for the act of taking a task traditionally performed by an employee or contractor, and outsourcing it to an undefined, generally large group of people, in the form of an open call.
A more complete definition would make a distinction between crowdsourcing and other forms of collective enterprise such as Wikipedia, Yelp, and the Linux kernel. Whereas compensation for these efforts emanates principally from enhanced reputation and self-satisfaction, crowdsourcing attempts to exploit the power of weak links. Success stories from InnoCentive—one of which is chonicled in Howe’s article—illustrate this objective. As one sardonic wag wryly noted, experts are people who know more and more about less and less until they know everything about nothing. By contrast, an amateur may bring a diverse set of loosely connected skills to bear on a problem. If innovation results from questioning assumptions, then amateurs have an ex officio advantage in that they often do not know which assumptions to make from the outset.
