Mashup Camp and Convergence08
Looking forward to two upcoming conferences - Mashup Camp and the very first Convergence 08 conference.
Mashup Camps have been coming to Mountain View for over two years, bringing great startups for their product launches as well as lively discussions about innovations and new products to help the mashup community. There also will be mashup experts from Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, Amazon, and many more key players. Programmable Web has the best coverage of the Mashup topic.
Convergence will have even more provocative content as the first conference to address the intersection of four technologies likely to shape the world in extraordinary ways: Nanotechnology, Biological technologies (gene splicing, stem cells, DNS mapping, life extension) , Information technologies (internet and computing) and Cognitive technologies. This last would, I think, broadly include everything from brain enhancing drugs and devices to artificial intelligence. AI is the most exciting category for me, and I remain convinced that we’ll see conscious computers within about 20 years - hopefully and very possibly less. Conscious computing is likely to change the entire planetary game to such a degree it’s nearly impossible to predict what will happen *after that*, which is one of the issues that will be discussed at the conference.
My main concern is that proponents and predictions keep things real and this does not become a sort of brainstorming session for half-baked ideas and ideologies.
After millions of years of very slow biological evolution we’ve now entered a new age where technology is likely to eclipse most and probably all of our human abilities. Even that fairly obvious idea - which simply is an extension of current developments - leaves many people skeptical, cold to the idea, or even antagonistic about the changes that are coming. Like it or not … we are all in this together and it’s best to keep it that way as much as possible.
Where are you?
Location awareness has been available in GPS gadgetry for some time, but now it is moving into devices like the iPhone and Instinct and that is going to open up a new relationship between people and places. There are obviously some potential ominous aspects of this but I am confident that we’ll find location awareness will bring a lot more good than bad. Some of the neat stuff will be the ability to track friends and associates. For example at a large conference it is often difficult to find all the people you need to talk to even after emails and calls - a system that breaks down when everybody is overwhelmed and there is a flurry of intense activity in a short time span.
More interesting to everybody will be the ability to automatically tag photos and videos with their location. Flickr already lets you enter the location of a photo but it’s too time consuming for most. We’ll start to see millions and soon billions of photos tagged with location, and mapping the world photo by photo will soon be a reality. Imagine an online map that contains a montage of pictures such that you can click on any point on the map and pull up thousands of images from that location.
O’Reilly Reportst on the iPhone’s location applications
Open Source and profits may not mix
Today Reddit, a community driven news and information website like Digg, is going full bore open source,
For some time many have suggested that more openness is not only inevitable, it is the best thing for both users and for companies, essentially acting as a sort of miracle grow fertilizer for the internet ecosystem, allowing cross pollination, mashups, and broad use of good ideas.
I’m still convinced that open source is great for users, but I’m starting to think it is *not at all* the best thing for companies.
A powerful case to support the idea that opacity pays is Google. They zealously guard the precious search algorithm while remaining an enthusiastic proponent of open source in almost all other online environments *except search*. Conspicuously, Google wants openness in places where they are not dominant. e.g. mobile, office suites, mail. They want closed in the *only Google environment* where Google is making more than a trivial amount of money, and they are making a lot of it.
Although it is not great stewardship of the internet ecosystem, from a profit perspective I’m now thinking Google may be very right to keep search closed. The stated reason is dubious - they say opacity keeps the spammers off balance. This has always been a weak argument because spammers are much faster than mom and pops at manipulating closed systems, so you wind up with an extraordinary level of collateral search damage.
The best current example of this is to find a great *new blog* about a topic and note how poorly it will rank for terms where it’s a great resource compared to junky websites that are older and have incoming links. This often is resolved over time, but it is still a key defect that I think could be resolved with a far more robust site registration process than Google currently employs combined with far more algorithmic transparency. Note that many SEO firms actually *favor* the current closed system because it strengthens their claim that websites and developers need expensive, specialized attention to rank well and expensive, lucrative conference series to learn how to work the complex and mysterious system.
Of course the legendary example of wealth through closed source is Microsoft. Their control of the operating system and many major applications have led to more profitability than any tech company in history, and Microsoft probably still would be dominant if they had not been forced by courts to disconnect the browser from Windows and open the search choices in the browser.
Yahoo, on the other hand, has seen profit s slide despite powerfully embracing many open source sensibilities over the past several years.
These problems appear mostly related to Yahoo’s failure to monetize their searches, but note that in an open source world Google’s monetizing algorithm would probably have been used by Yahoo years ago, largely reversing Yahoo’s current sorry state of affairs.
The moral of the story? What is good for the goose is no good for the gander. Open source is great for users and bad for companies.
Mashup Camp - it´s a wrap…
Here is my wrapup of Mashup Camp 6 over at WebGuild.org. I´m glad the excellent mashup Mapdango took first prize as it was my favorite and I felt one of the few with commercial potential.
Web Scraping Issues
Here at Mashup Camp, I´m sitting in a session led by Stefan of Kapow, a company that allows you to turn any website into an API for mashing up their data.
In the old days of the internet - lo some 4 years ago - web scraping was considered bad form, and even illegal in many cases. Now, the mantra is ¨ data wants to be free ¨ and it is considered bad form to *prevent* mashing up of data unless it is clearly proprietary or confidential.
Google is the most successful web scraping operation in history, as they process almost all the online data and then rank and describe and expose that data for searches.
Mashup Camp 6 continues
Today will bring the most fun AND educational part of Mashup Camp which is the speed geeking of new mashups.
Here are listings of the first four camps:
- Mashup Camp 1 Speed Geeking page
- Mashup Camp 2 Speed Geeking page
- Mashup Camp 3 Speed Geeking page
- Mashup Camp 4 Speed Geeking page
The best source for mashup info remains:
Mashup Contest for students - from Microsoft:
Microsoft Press Release:
To raise awareness for Microsoft’s Live@edu, Microsoft is holding a contest among student software developers to see who can design the best application for Windows Live!
● One Grand Prize Winner - $10,000 cash
● Two Runners Up - $2,500 cash each
● Two Third Place Prizes - XBox 360 Halo 3 Prize Pack ($500 value)
Contest Link:
http://www.campusmashups.com
Sample Mashups and how to get started:
http://dev.live.com/mashups/
- JUDGING -
● 25% Public Opinion (GET YOUR FRIENDS TO VOTE!)
● 25% Usage of Windows Live Tools
● 50% Creativity and Utility of Application
Participants must submit their application by March 31st, 2008!
Mashup Camp 6 in Mountain View
I am at the computer science museum in Mountain View at the first part of Mashup Camp where API providers are showing their stuff. There will be a lot more tomorrow, and then on Wed and Thursday mashup folks will be showing off their stuff.
I get the impression that this is a different crowd from the first camps, where most were already familiar with mashups, though perhaps those folks will be coming Wed and Thursday for the main camp.
Anxious to try Intel Mashmaker, which looks good.
Most of my blogging about this will be at WebGuild
Mashup Camp 6 returns to Silicon Valley
Mashup Camp 6 is in about 10 days and I’m really looking forward to the firehouse of new mashups, APIs, startups, and application information that’ll be there. I attened the first two which were both great, then missed the last three including Dublin which would really have been fun.
Incredibly, this *four day* technology conference is free of charge. This is especially notable because from an education point of view Mashup Camp is arguably one of the very best conferences in Silicon Valley, laregely because it’s run in large part by the participants and this always leads to excellent levels of interaction and information flow. Everybody knows that the best conference stuff often happens in the halls or after hours when you can really get into good conversations with speakers and other folks, where at Mashup Camp this type of interaction is more likely to happen right in the sessions which are generally very unstructured and informal.
Organizer David Berlind had actually started out by charging some attendance fees this time - partly just to reduce the number of no-shows that can make conference planning even more difficult. But concerns about the fees led him to refund them all, making the conference totally free, supported by the many sponsors who help with everything from the espresso cart to the excellent lunches and great Mashup party on Wednesday Night. I’m not clear why anybody would protest the trivial $35 for developers and observers, though people who routinely pony up that much on a bar tab can be notoriously cheap when paying for education. Perhaps though the protests came from some of the Venture Capital folks for whom the formerly free entry fee was boosted to several thousand.
Twixter - very impressive!
I’m really impressed with the new mini photoblogging service Twixter and I’ve not even posted a picture yet. Thanks to Mike for showcasing Twixter today at TechCrunch. Unlike Twitter, Twixter allows photo posts, geolocates you and contacts using a nice Google maps mashup, and cross posts to twitter and Facebook (though there appeared to be a glitch with this part as it gave a bad link for my cross post). Overall this is a very impressive application, and with the Twitter posting capability Twitter better take note. I’m not using Pownce much because fewer people are on board there, and they don’t have the clever TwitterFeed-like capability yet.
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