Status update

Hi all,

The Social Gnome has been awfully un-social over the last few weeks, mostly due to the fact that I have a new job that has taken up a lot of my time.

As of the start of May 2014 I am now the Chief Communications Officer for Sundaya, a solar energy company based out of Jakarta Indonesia.

The job opened up a lot of opportunities for me; not only am I in charged of setting up a whole new communications strategy for a emerging company, I also get to combine that with a passion for clean energy.

I get to do what I love, and I get to help the planet (which I also love) - one small step at a time :).

Part of the reason for why I accepted the new job was that I believe the technology to be good enough now to actually support a new for of communication when it comes to clean energy and solar. Up until recently the talk has been mostly that fossil fuels are killing the planet, and if you dont get of the fossil train, you (by association) are also killing the planet. I never responded well to that type of "threat communication" and never really understood why that seemed to be the bulk of everything pro clean energy.

Now we have gotten to the point where solar cells, and battery packs, are actually good enough to cover most of our everyday energy needs. It is no longer a stretch to use solar - you no longer have to give up any standard comforts - but you can rather easily make the switch, at least for some of the minor products (charging phones and computers for example).

For these reasons I am very excited to work for Sundaya, and I invite you all to follow our Facebook pages and our blog (both run by yours truly).

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/sundayainternational
Blog: http://sundaya.com/blogroll/

Today we have published an interesting article on the blog about Light up Somalia, a project bringing light and jobs to the rural parts of Somalia using Sundaya products. Check it out!

Time to forget, Google

Google is releasing a new web service for EU citizens who no longer want to appear in Google search results. The service , which basically consists of an online form, is a response to the European Court's recent ruling in which a Spanish man were given the right to remove sensitive personal information from the search results. 

The European Court decision is a so called “prejudice” which means the all member courts have to follow the ruling. For the individual it means that all EU citizens now have the right to be "forgotten" by Google - if certain conditions are met.

The EU citizens who want to be forgotten by Google can now submit a request to Google via the new website. Attached to the request shall be a copy of the individual’s identity card, which country's laws are cited, and which particular search string that should be removed. 

Google will review each case individually and then weigh privacy against the public interest. A politician who made ​​a fool of himself for instance cannot expect to disappear from search results since it would probably fall under public interest.

Google has also put together a special task force to try to develop a long term strategy for dealing with the anticipated floods of requirements for clearances to come. The task force consist of both Google big wigs such as Chairman Eric Schmidt and Chief Legal Officer David Drummond, and externals as Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales and UN reporter Frank La Rue.

Want to get removed from search terms? Here is the web form.

Dubai PD utilizes Google Glass

Not only do the police in Dubai have a way cooler police car armada than most other countries, now their traffic cops will also be equipped with Google Glass. 

The whole thing is still in a testing phase, but the Dubai PD have already developed two new Google Glass apps; one that takes photos of traffic violations, and another that allows the officer to identify a car and its owner based on the car's registration number.

Currently Google Glass is officially only for sale in the US but the Dubai chief of police says to Gulf News that, if the test falls out well they will begin to provide more officers with Google Glasses, as the product becomes available in to the Dubai market.

YouTube is acquiring Twitch for $1 billion

The popular video game streaming service may soon be a part of YouTube.

A deal for YouTube to purchase Twitch for $1 billion is closing "imminently," according to a report by Variety.

Sources familiar with the matter say that the deal will be carried out with an "all-cash offer" and would make it the biggest acquisition in YouTube's history since Google buying the video-sharing site for $1.65 billion in 2006. YouTube has prepared for regulators in the United States to challenge the deal with expectations that the Justice Department will decide whether the deal is anti-competitive, sources say.

Chase, director of PR for Twitch, said on Twitter, "For those asking about the story today, Twitch doesn't comment on rumors." YouTube representatives have declined to comment too.

Twitch is a significant player in gaming today now that new consoles like PlayStation 4 and Xbox One can take advantage of Twitch streaming out of the box. A deal like this can be beneficial for Twitch to scale up in its infrastructure, but there are other concerns too like YouTube's copyright claims. It'll be interesting to see how this plays out and what it really means for gamers.

Good night Nokia - Good morning Nokia Microsoft Mobile

Today Nokia officially belongs to Microsoft, and according to a leak so it seems a name change is imminent.

Nokia-Microsoft deal is going to close soon and a leaked Nokia’s letter to its existing Devices and Services business suppliers base reveals two interesting things. First revelation is about renaming of Nokia Oyj to Microsoft Mobile Oy, which will be a wholly-owned Microsoft subsidiary and may be the name of Microsoft’s mobile devices arm. Good thing for suppliers is that current terms and conditions that they have with the Devices and Services business will not change post deal-closure.

"Please note that upon the close of the transaction between Microsoft and Nokia, the name of Nokia Corporation/Nokia Oyj will change to Microsoft Mobile Oy. Microsoft Mobile Oy is the legal entity name that should be used for VAT IDs and for the issuance of invoices."

Nokia has already announced that 25th April will be the date of Nokia-Microsoft deal-closure. The deal faced hurdles in China due to local vendor’s apprehensions and in India due to the ongoing tax issues. 

In an interesting development, HTC has shown interest in buying Nokia’s Chennai plant, if it is up for sale!

This is an era that is being laid to rest today. It is a little sad especially considering that Nokia once dominated the world's mobile phone market. One cannot help but wonder how, and when everything went south... 

Ten 3D Printed Houses In A Day

2014 is looking to become the year of the 3D printer. There really doesn't seem to be a thing you cannot print. Adding "building a house in a day" to the list of accomplished projects may seem to be pushing it; 10 houses on the verge of impossible. 

However a Chinese company recently proved the skeptics wrong.

The WinSun Decoration Design Engineering Co. has printed 10 homes in 24 hours out of recycled materials. The houses, each covering an area of 200 square meters, are printed entirely in concrete.

This isn't the first attempt at 3D printing large structures in a short amount of time. Researchers in California are making a printer that can build a house in 24 hours.

In Amsterdam earlier this month, construction of a 3D printed house began. The house is made out of plastic bricks that fit together like Lego. It's also being printed onsite. The Chinese houses, on the other hand, weren't built onsite. They were printed in pieces and then put together in Shanghai's Qingpu district.

The pieces are made using recycled construction materials and industrial waste to form a concrete aggregate, Gizmodo reports. The 3D printer used to build the houses is 500 feet long, 33 feet wide and 20 feet high. Each home costs around $4,800.

"We purchased parts for the printer overseas, and assembled the machine in a factory in Suzhou," the company's CEO, Ma Yihe, said. "Such a new type of 3D printed structure is environment-friendly and cost-effective."

The final product. Needs some paint but essentially ready to move in to. 

WinSun plans to build 100 recycling factories in the country, one in every 300 km, to collect and transform the waste into materials for 3D printing through special handling, processing and separation technology. WinSun hopes their 3D printer and technology could offer "affordable and dignified housing" for the impoverished.

Do you think 3D printed houses are the way of the future. Please leave your comment below. 

60 years of being Boring

Every day, something significant to human history must happen … right?

Wrong. The computer program True Knowledge defined April 11, 1954 as the most boring of the 20th century – a day where absolutely nothing happened. Algorithms using weighted values for more than three million facts including historical events, birthdays of significant people, etc. made experts conclude that April 11, 1954, was really, really uneventful.

But why was it so boring? Usually in other days, someone famous was born, someone notorious died, or something significant happened. On this specific day apparently none of that went down. The leading scientist who came up with that date, William Tunstall-Pedoe, searched for a day where no result really popped up:

"It occurred to us that we are able to objectively measure the importance of every day in history. Some days are highly eventful and on some days far less happens and we can also objectively estimate the importance of these events. For fun we wrote the program and set it going. When the results came back the winner (or perhaps loser) was April 11, 1954 – a Sunday in the 1950s.”

The best the machine could muster for the day was the fact that Belgium had its fourth post-war general election and that a Turkish academic who taught electronics was born. But it could all have been so different for April 11. On April 12th history notes that Bill Haley and the Comets recorded Rock Around The Clock, forever inscribing this day in musical history. 

Other major events on April 12th 1954 include US forces organizing a major airlift of military supplies to forces in Indo-China, RAF bombers sweeping over the forests of Kenya, dropping tons of explosives on Mau Mau hideouts, and electricity finally being brought to the households of East Anglia, the UK, home of among other buildings the Cambridge University.

True Knowledge (now known as Evi), which provides a direct answer to a question instead of providing a list of links like other sites such as Google, was launched online in February 2007. The system can store hundreds of millions of facts about people, places, events and businesses.

The funniest thing is that the most boring day ever is now somewhat interesting, because of its status as the most boring day ever. So does that mean the second most boring day ever is now the most boring?

11 min funding

What are you able to finish in 11 minutes?

Most people would probably answer along the lines of grill a nice steak, bake a pan of cookies or play one round of Candy Crush. Not Micheal Armani and David Jones however. They would get their dream funded. 

Called the Micro, their personal 3D-printer smashed its Kickstarter goal of $50,000 and is now well on its way to becoming one of the most interesting projects on the site.

Created by a team in Bethesda, MD, the Micro originally sold for $199 for early birds and his since risen by $100. It’s a tiny printer, to be sure, with a 4.5 cubic-inch build volume and a special internal spool that holds the filament inside the printer’s case. It can build objects 4.5-inches high, which isn’t much but it’s enough to have a bit of fun.

The founders, Michael Armani and David Jones, have done something quite intelligent: they’re building a very bare-bones printer with some very interesting software. However the full success of this campaign this is not because they have a great product. 3D-printers have been around for a good long while now, and if you really wanted one you would have gotten it already. 

Instead, what they do have is a shown a well structured purpose and functional solution. There a few key take-aways from this success story:

• Affordable, consumer printer: Micro keeps repeating and showing this. The product is affordable, making it available for any consumer
• Effortless: It is super-easy to use. The technical problems that may arise for consumers (How do I get blue-prints? How do I hook it up? What programs do I need?) are already explained and solutions provided by the company. This puts the consumer at ease with the product, making it comfortable.
• Power efficient = lower cost: By using more energy efficient components they can produce a better and more efficient product, which in the end lowers cost. 
• Showing of functions: The video clearly shows and highlights different real-life, momentary problems where the product can be put to use. It shows a woman fixing a broken shower curtain, a man printing a prototype for a project, or even just printing a small espresso mug because the last one broke.
• Explaining why they need money: This may be the most important and best part of this video. They explain the project, the funding, and the plans they have for the funds expertly and simply. There is no doubt in my mind, why they are asking for my money, and where the money I contribute is going to end up should I choose to fund them.

In short, an expertly executed project. Please have a look and comment below!

Selfie Ban sinks Gym Chain

Earlier this week, Swedish new radio P3 News, reported that gym chain Friskis & Svettis introduced a "selfie ban" in the changing rooms at their gym in Stockholm . 

The decision came about because people were taking pictures and publishing in social networks, and other folks who were unfortunately unclothed in the background then inadvertently ended up on the picture online. To protect involuntary models from accidentally ending up on photos in social media so the chain has now introduced a policy prohibiting any photography from the the locker rooms. 

Problems arose however when the headliner at P3 News published the title "Selfies banned from Friskis & Svettis" which of course is not true. It is still allowed to take photos at the gym, just not in the locker room .

The news spread quickly on Twitter, and other news agenvies picked it up and ran the same error in the title. Even though the article itself set everything straight in the body, all to many people decided to just share and retweet the erroneous headline. The pictures below are from Swedens major news agencies; P3 News , DN, Metro and SVT.

Friskis & Svettis now have a small crisis on their throats, something they need to handle and explain quickly. I have already seen customers who want to refund their entire memberships just because they believe that the ban is just crazy. I myslef understand them, however I also wished they would have read the entire story, because I also understand and agree with Friskis & Svettis. 

When you see how fast a headline escalates in the media, and especially in social media, even though it is completely faulty and disproven in the article itself, it goes to show how damaging an uncontrolled spread like this really can be. I dont know how much revenue Friskis & Svettis has lost over this, but my guess is that it sure have dented their results, at least in their customer service department. 

As of right now Friskis & Svettis has yet to issue an explanation. 

Court Case eases up on Piracy

What is a downloaded movie worth? What is a reasonable punishment for a person who downloads a movie, and one that uploads a movie? Is piracy theft, or should it just be consider plagiarism?

Internet piracy is still a relatively new phenomenon, most countries are currently far from nailing down their legislation on the spectacle, and the debate is well under way on how piracy should be treated in the justice system. Sweden, being a fore runner when it comes to both Internet piracy, and piracy prevention, is still leagues from a solid answer.

Therefore, leading judgments are important, and since the Internet and information sharing is global, it is very interesting to examine how other countries deal with their cases of piracy. A case well worth putting under the microscope is a subpoena from the U.S.; Malibu Media Llc vs. John Does.

Malibu Media Llc saw how some of their movies (and other IP products) were leaked on the Internet. The company then tracked the IP-address used for sharing these files over a Bittorrent protocol, and based on that IP-address the company found the uploader. This time it happened to be a home user rather than a public hotspot. Subsequently geo-location was used to find the physical address, and the subscription service used, and thereby identified the physical person behind the uploads.

Or so they thought.

The law suit is as a classic example of what may cause many pirates to choose to hide their IP-address, i.e. example via VPN services, but interestingly enough, the judge in Florida decided to go a different route. The judge ruled that although the address was correctly identified, you cannot rule out the possibility that someone else used the computer. Home networks and home computers are after all often shared by several people.

Similar judgments have been identified previously in the U.S., and seems to be increasingly common. In Sweden we have had relatively few court cases of piracy that had been triad on the basis of IP-address, but this case may be setting the stage for how these cases can come to be interpreted.

What do you think about internet piracy? Please comment below. 

Google Taking Action for Free Speech

In an obvious nod to the recent controversy surrounding the freedom of speech on the web, Google is now taking a clear stand, advocating for a free and unsupervised Internet. It was on Wednesday, January 18th, that Americans stood up in opposition to PIPA and SOPA – bills that would have censored the Web and imposed harmful regulations on primarily U.S. businesses, but also the entire world.

Individuals took action and closed down their personal blogs, companies closed their websites, and thousands of US citizens called their elected representatives in Washington, voicing their mistrust. Their voices were heard. Washington recognized the damage these bills could inflict on the Internet, and as a result, PIPA and SOPA have been indefinitely postponed. However postponed is not good enough; these bills needs to be buried forever. Google recognizes this, and is not petitioning everyone to sign up for a free Internet.

This development follows quite expected from the recent year’s disclosure of Internet espionage. It may seem like ages ago now, but it has not even been a year since former CIA employee Edward Snowden ,in a series of exposés beginning on June 5, 2013, publicized thousands of classified documents to several media outlets. The leaked documents revealed operational details of global surveillance programs run by the NSA, and the other Five Eyes governments of the United Kingdom, Australia, Canada, and New Zealand, with the cooperation of a number of businesses and European governments.

Within the immediate days that followed Snowden had gotten his passport revoked, fled to and from several different countries, charged with espionage, and quickly seen himself go from patriot to traitor. However some people would say that he has made the exact opposite journey, and gone from traitor to patriot. Seldom has one man been called so many different polar opposites; a hero – a villain, a savior – an enemy, a patriot – a traitor.

The disclosures have fueled debates over mass surveillance, government secrecy, and the balance between national security and information privacy. Two court rulings since the initial leaks have split on the constitutionality of the NSA's bulk collection of telephone metadata, and most would argue that NSA have greatly surpassed their jurisdiction.

Espionage and terrorism have always been the dark side of freedom of speech, and will probably continue to be so until the end of man. The Internet has since the beginning been open and free, and has lately played pivot roles in aiding freedom around the world. Countries like Alger, Tunis, Egypt, Syria, Libya, and Yemen would not have started their paths towards democracy had it not been for the Internet. The Internet has help to uncover racial prosecutions and injustices in Saudi, Oman., Iraq, Djibouti, Sudan and West Sahara, and has also recently shined a strong light on the homophobic nation of Uganda, leading to western countries boycotting the African nation.

I short the Internet was born, and shall remain, free.

Governments alone should not determine the future of the Internet. The billions of people around the globe that use it and the experts that build and maintain it should. A free society depends on free expression. The flow of ideas and open access to information on the web helps communities grow and nations prosper.

https://www.google.com/intl/en/takeaction/

This may be the most important stand we ever make, and Google is leading the way. Please read the petition and get opinionated.

Do you think governments should be able to restrict the Internet? Please comment below.

Want Personal Data? Go Phish!

At least 2 million people received the email May 16 2013 notifying them that an order they had just made on "Wallmart's" website was being processed, though none of them had done any such thing.

Still, thousands of people clicked on the link in the email, taking many of them to a harmless Google search results page for "Walmart." Others weren't so fortunate.

The link led to the invisible download of malware that covertly infected their personal computers, turning them into remotely controlled robots for hackers.

Phishing, also known as “brand spoofing” or “carding”, is a term used to describe various scams that use (primarily) fraudulent e-mail messages, sent by criminals, to trick you into divulging personal information. The criminals use this information to steal your identity, rob your bank account, or take over your computer.

With spear-phishing they use social engineering – researching social media and other publicly available online sources – to profile high value targets and personalize bogus emails. Broader phishing campaigns may engage partners in crime to conduct high volume mailings, but very realistic looking emails will invariably hook a significant number of users who will download a malformed spreadsheet or click on a link to a fraudulent website.

Make no mistake, phishing and spear-phishing works. RSA recently reported that in 2013 there were nearly 450,000 phishing attacks and estimated losses of over $5.9 billion.

Even before phishing became so prevalent, legitimate businesses and financial institutions would hardly ever ask for personal information via e-mail. If you receive such a request, call the organization and ask if it's legitimate or check its legitimate Web site. Look for misspellings and bad grammar. While an occasional typo can slip by any organization, more than one is a tip-off to beware.

In the fake-Wal-Mart attack, people missed clear warning signs — such as the company name being misspelled and the sender's address being very long and strange.

The success of phishing is largely determined by the low levels of user-awareness regarding how the companies which fraudsters try to imitate, operate. Many legitimate sites contain special warnings saying that they never ask users to send confidential data in messages. However, users continue to send their passwords to phishers.

Phishing is a modern hydra, cut of one head and two more grows out. The only way to actually combat phishing is with awareness and to starve it out. I personally think this is a result of the young age of the Internet; people are simply not accustomed to online scammers the same way we are local market hustlers. In a few years phishing and scamming will probably have malnourished itself out of existence, but until then we all need to be aware. 

Please don't feed the phish. 

Google's expanding their AI Mind

Google is expanding its ambitions in Artificial Intelligence with the acquisition of AI company DeepMind for a reported $400 million.

It’s no secret that Google has an interest in AI; after all, technologies derived from AI research help fuel Google’s core search and advertising businesses. AI also plays a key role in Google’s mobile services, its autonomous cars, and its growing stable of robotics technologies.

With the addition of futurist Ray Kurzweil to its ranks in 2012, Google also has the grandfather of “strong AI” on board, a man who forecasts that intelligent machines may exist by midcentury.

If all this sounds troubling, don’t worry: Google’s acquisition of DeepMind isn’t about fusing a mechanical brain with faster-than-human robots and giving birth to the misanthropic Skynet computer network from the Terminator franchise.

DeepMind's Web site describes the London-based company as "cutting edge" and specializing in combining "the best techniques from machine learning and systems neuroscience to build powerful general-purpose learning algorithms." The site says the company's initial commercial applications are simulations, e-commerce, and games.

Google has been particularly focused on advances in artificial intelligence recently. Scientists working on the company's secretive X Labs created a neural network for machine learning by connecting 16,000 computer processors and then unleashed it on the Internet. The network's performance exceeded researchers' expectations, doubling its accuracy rate in identifying objects from a list of 20,000 items.

I wrote about Artificial Intelligence as a part of my article series The Conscious Internet. Do you think the age of Artificial Intelligence is upon us? Comment below...

Handshaking 101

I have to many times, both in this business world and outside of it, met people who just don’t know how to shake hands. Often you can’t put your finger on it, but you know there is something wrong with this person because of the way he/she shakes hands. Premature hugging is something else, not to be covered here, but likewise as odd.

The result of a bad handshake is that you are forever going to look at that person with a bit of skepticism. “Sure, he delivers on every occasion, but THAT handshake … “ This is just not going to fly. To help you novice handshakers out there here’s a few handshakes you may want to avoid:

1. The sweaty slip – some people have a natural tendency to get sweaty hands and many get them when they are nervous, that’s just normal. It can make shaking hands tricky in stressful situations such as job interviews. However, I think there is no excuse for a wet, slobby handshake. If you get sweaty hands simply dry them on a piece of clothing before shaking someone’s hand. It’s just the only courteous thing to do. 
2. The limp fish - not gripping the other person’s hand firm enough and then shaking from your wrist is a big mistake because the messages I receive about the other person doing that include: ‘I am not confident’ or ‘I am a push-over’. 
3. The pinch – when someone pinches your fingers with their fingers. This is maybe something the Queen does, but has no place in real life. Again, this half-hearted handshake sends me signals like ‘I am not bothered about shaking your hands properly’ or ‘I don’t think you deserve a proper handshake’. 
4. The hand-holder – where the person shaking your hand keeps holding on and thinks he is actually holding hands with you rather than shaking hands. After anything more than 3 shakes my natural instinct tells me to pull my hand back and say ‘let go, why are we holding hands now?’ My mind is then suddenly preoccupied with forcing myself not to pull my hand away, which means I am no longer concentrating on the introduction or anything the other person is saying.
5. The avoider – someone that doesn’t make eye contact when they shake your hand or someone that pulls their hand away too quickly. This again signals to me that they are either under-confident, very shy, or they don’t really want to meet me or shake my hand. 
6. The crushing gripper – when you shake someone’s hand and it feels like they are crushing every single bone in your hand. A hand shake that is too firm will make anyone feel uncomfortable. It makes you think ‘is the person trying to hurt me on purpose?’ and triggers a natural ‘I need to run away’ instinct.

Facebook buys WhatsApp

Social network giant Facebook grows by acquiring Whats App, a messaging service for smartphones with 450 million users. The purchase price is set to $19 billion. Approximately $4 billion paid in cash, the rest is to be paid in Facebook shares.

WhatsApps founder Jan Koum will thus become a major shareholder in Facebook. He will also take place in the social network's board of directors.

Facebook have likely made the acquisition because they lack an operating system of its own, such as Google's Android or Apple's iOS. With its own operating system, Facebook can now pre-install apps, and programs and by doing so bring up the use of its own products.

Facebooks previous attempts to market it 's own user OS Home, which could be installed to Android, fell flat and become a flop. Facebook is now seemingly trying to redeem this venture.

After the announcement Facebook 's stock fell 4.4 percent, signaling that the market apparently doesn't share Zuckerberg's interest in WhatsApp. 

9 years and counting!

Last week, on Valentines Day, YouTube celebrated its 9th birthday. Launched on February 14th, 2005, YouTube has skyrocketed to be the biggest, most popular video sharing site in the world. With parent company Google, YouTube is a massive part of many people’s daily lives. Before YouTube, in order for something to go viral it probably meant a flu epidemic, now it can be a cat video or a drugged up kid fresh from the dentist. I can’t imagine a time before YouTube, it has become such a phenom, so happy birthday YouTube.

In order to celebrate this occasion I collected some interesting YouTube facts. Enjoy!

• 60 hours of video are uploaded every minute, or one hour of video is uploaded to YouTube every second.
• Over 4 billion videos are viewed a day
• Over 800 million unique users visit YouTube each month
• Over 3 billion hours of video are watched each month on YouTube
• More video is uploaded to YouTube in one month than the 3 major US networks created in 60 years
• 70% of YouTube traffic comes from outside the US
• YouTube is localized in 39 countries and across 54 languages
• In 2011, YouTube had more than 1 trillion views
• In 2011 there were almost 140 views for every person on Earth
• Created in 2007, the YouTube partner program now has 30,000+ partners from 27 countries around the world
• YouTube pays out millions of dollars a year to partners
• Hundreds of partners are making six figures a year
• Partner revenue has more than doubled for four years in a row
• YouTube is monetizing over 3 billion video views per week globally
• 98 of AdAge’s Top 100 advertisers have run campaigns on YouTube and the Google Display Network
• Hundreds of advertisers are using TrueView in-stream and 60% of our in-stream ads are now skippable
• YouTube has more HD content than any other online video site
• There are thousands of full-length movies on YouTube
• 10% of YouTube’s videos are available in HD
• YouTube mobile gets over 600 million views a day
• Traffic from mobile devices tripled in 2011
• The YouTube player is embedded across tens of millions of websites

Giant Phone Replica Celebrates 100 Years

A giant, fully-functional replica of an old L.M. Ericsson table top phone celebrates 100 years this week. It was built as a marketing ploy, and reinvented several times during its lifetime.

In 1923 the replica was the centerpiece of the company’s stand at the Gothenburg Exhibition. As described in Ericsson Review, it was “an attraction towards which visitors could not help turning their eyes.”

The telephone housed a complete, fully automatic Ericsson system for 500 lines, to which a few telephones were actually connected. Visitors could experiment, make calls and watch the switching process through the plate-glass windows. The Ericsson Review reports that the demonstrations attracted long lines of visitors every day.

Crash Imminent?

MarketWatch recently reported on a particularly alarming correlation between the Dow Jones Industrial Average for the period 1928-1929 and 2013-2014. Curves is hauntingly similar, and if there was any correlation the New York Stock Exchange is set to crash any minute now.

Now there is by all means a lot of skepticism and more positive experts think that this connection does not exist at all, and that the market situation is completely different.

Tom McClellan, the man behind the McClellan Market Report, notes to the site:

"....there is no guarantee that the market has to continue following through with every step of the 1929 pattern. But between now and May 2014, there is plenty of reason for caution."

The picture isn’t pretty. And it’s not as easy as one might think to wriggle out from underneath the bearish significance of this chart.

One of the market gurus responsible for widely publicizing this chart is hedge-fund manager Doug Kass, of Seabreeze Partners and CNBC fame. In an email earlier this week, Kass wrote of the parallels with 1928-29: “While investment history doesn’t necessarily repeat itself, it does rhyme.” And, based on a number of indicators rather than just this chart drawing the 1928-29 parallel, he believes that “the correction might have just started.”

You may still be inclined to dismiss this. But there were many more were laughing last November when this scary chart began circulating. Not as many are laughing now.

Praising Intelligence might Undermine Development

Yes, you read that right. Praising intelligence may not evolve the thinking ability, but rather have quite the opposite effect, possibly halting it all together. This startling discovery was recently publicized by Claudia M. Mueller, Carol S. Dweck from Columbia University and Sheri R. Levy, Stanford University.

The study compares the performance of children after they’ve been praised for their intelligence (“you must be smart”) versus their effort (“you must have put a lot of effort into that”). The kids were asked to perform a task, and upon completion they were praised in one of the two manners. After this they where then given a series of harder problems to try to solve.

The kids who where praised for their effort increased in the number of problems they solved. However, those who where told that they were smart showed a frightening decrease.

What’s the difference? Those being told that they’re smart are taught that abilities are fixed. If you’re finding a puzzle hard, then it must be because you’re not very good at that, and you should try something else. Kids taught that results are based on effort see the hard puzzles as something they can learn to do, and then they do so.

In a second set of tests, kids were asked what type of puzzles they like to solve, and then given four options. The first three were pretty similar: “problems that aren’t too hard, so I don’t get many wrong,” “problems that are pretty easy, so I’ll do well,” and “problems that I’m pretty good at, so I can show that I’m smart.” 

However the last option is different: “problems that I’ll learn a lot from, even if I won’t look so smart.”

The first three options are “performance” options, they’re all about looking good, or getting things right. The last option is a “learning” option, and it values knowledge and growth over performance.

The study concluded that children often selected puzzle-options based upon the type of praise they had previously gotten. Children praised for their intelligence choose tasks which are easy and make them look good, but children praised for their effort choose tasks which are hard, and which will teach them more.

Do you think about praise and feedback, and how you direct it? Comment below...

Marketing Technology Landscape Rewritten (again)

Scott Brinker at the Chief Marketing Technologist Blog recently released an updated version of the widely circulated landscape of Marketing Technology. The 2014 version has a few updates but also plenty of omissions. 

It comes with one main caveat: this graphic is not comprehensive. It is just a sample, albeit a large one, of the many different kinds of software available to marketers today. There are many more companies — indeed, entire categories — that were not included, merely due to the constraints of time and space.

And by the time you read this, it will inevitably be out of date due to new launches, re-launches, expansions, exits, and mergers. The pace of change in this field is breathtaking.

Click the image for a larger pic.

The Conscious Internet - Part VIII: Our Digital Mary Shelley

A while back a wrote a short article titled "the Conscious Internet" concerning the development of AI and computer technology in regards to the Internet. The article is written with a very philosophical approach to the subject, but handles real life facts. It has long been my intention to publish it here on the blog, but I just haven't gotten around to doing so. Until now ...

Here's part 8 of 8. You can find the previous chapter here. Happy reading, and please comment below.

The reality that the Internet today is such an intricate part of society that it would be almost impossible to revert back to a time without our digital connections, can hardly be contested. The total amount of information being sent through the ether each day is staggering and ever increasing.

Exactly which virtual straw will break the camel’s back is quite unclear, but what can be agreed upon is that it begins with massive amounts of shared data.

This occurrence is currently referred to as “Big Data”; the massive amount of unstructured, unorganized, and thereby unsearchable (“ungoogleable”) data that is today populating the Internet. Estimates place this type of data at about 90 % of all information, and it is only getting bigger. It consists mostly of social media, but also includes other data-generating interactions such as call-center conversations, TV footage, mobile phone calls, iMessaging, website clicks, etc.

The impacts of Big Data also seem impossible to predict. Game developers today create games which center on social interactions, and the ability to play and share gaming experiences with your friends online. As a result more and more games demand constant connectivity to even boot up a game, something that always results in trouble at launch day. 

When launching Diablo III in 2012, Blizzard Studios tried anticipating the amount of users logging on to play the game for the first time, keep in mind that this was probably the biggest release that year, so the statistical data provided to build servers capable of handling the onslaught was not hard to find. Still they failed. 

The servers were down for days, and “Error 33” (meaning the server is unreachable) was forever carved in Blizzard history. They history repeated itself a year later with the launch of SimCity 5, which again had players disappointedly waiting for a server connection. 

Regardless of our knowledge of the Internet, it seems as though we will never again be fully aware of what goes on within its digital boarders. In theory there could already be a primitive cognitive being in the net, a phantom invisibly surfing the wires in between servers. Our lack of knowledge combined with the speed of which the Internet is growing, would provide the perfect veil for which to hide behind.

In the race between mother board and mother brain the human intellect is currently in the driver’s seat. Our illogical complexity it seems is still guarding the key to cognition, but the grip may be slipping. However, a cognitive digital entity, in spite of SkyNet’s best foreshadowing, does not have to be a threat to society. It could rather turn out to be an invaluable asset for our human development. 

This artificial intelligence would instantly sense our mood if we had a bad day, and turn on an appropriate musical tune or TV show to cheer us up. It would provide moral support when faced with a difficult question, and laugh with us when amused. It would ease our everyday life and relieve both stress and workload. 

Research shows that the points in human history where health and safety have sky-rocked coincide perfectly with spikes in technological evolution. The introduction of the steam engine drastically reduced the work-load placed on the individual employee, resulting in a revolution in increased welfare for the overall human population. 

This innovation infinitely multiplied the power of our muscles, and helped us overcome the limitations of our own bodies. We now stand on the brink of another revolution as we are slowly overcoming the limitations of our intellect, outsourcing intelligence to the computers. 

The creation of a SkyNet is almost a certainty; we will before long have an interconnected, all-knowing entity governing the processes we live and function by, but rather than destroy us, maybe it will help us grow into the next step of human evolution.

Thank you for reading taking time to read my short article, hope you enjoyed it! What do you think our Internet future holds for us? Leave you comment below!

RoboEarth is up to Speed

In the midst of my series on the possible future of the Internet, an article from BBC falls in my lap, that really brings reality up to speed. As it turns out parts of my article about the future of robots are very much present.

Scientists at the Eindhoven University, the Netherlands, have created the first ever World Wide Web for robots. Sadly not dubbed "SkyNet" these doom bringers decided to call the system "RoboEarth". Playing straight into the fate of the Termintor series they did however decide to set off the robots by run a hospital room. No better way to take over the earth than to start by killing our the weak and discrepant.

I am exaggerating naturally, but I do find the timing comical. The four robots currently working in the mocked-up (I might ad) hospital are designed to serve drinks, dish out pills, or alert to emergencies. At the core of it all is one central system controlling all the robots.

As I discussed previously, a central problem with artificial intelligence is the inability to come up with new solutions to new problems. A computer will be bound to the strict confinements of its programming, resulting in an inability to learn “new” things. This specific problem is something they are now trying to circumvent by having the central computer learn everything. The aim of the system is to create a kind of ever-changing common brain for robots.

"The problem right now is that robots are often developed specifically for one task," said Rene van de Molengraft, the RoboEarth project leader. "Everyday changes that happen all the time in our environment make all the programmed actions unusable. A task like opening a box of pills can be shared on RoboEarth, so other robots can also do it without having to be programmed for that specific type of box."

The system is cloud-based, which in turn means that a lot of the memory capacity can be off-loaded from the individual robots to the central core, allowing for much smaller storage space, and faster processing. A single robot would simply download the script for solving the problem at hand, and then delete said script when the task is completed.

Using this approach, robots are becoming increasingly cheaper to manufacture, something that may result in us having servant robots in our homes in as little as 10 years, experts say. All controlled by the central hive-mind.

I hate to be an “I told you” so but - World, I told you so.

______

What do you think? Are robots taking over the world, and if so are they going to let us have a place? Find out my thoughts in the upcoming conclusion of my series “the Conscious Internet”. And as always; please comment below.

The Conscious Internet - Part VII: Flying over the Cuckoo's Nest

A while back a wrote a short article titled "the Conscious Internet" concerning the development of AI and computer technology in regards to the Internet. The article is written with a very philosophical approach to the subject, but handles real life facts. It has long been my intention to publish it here on the blog, but I just haven't gotten around to doing so. Until now ...

Here's part 7 of 8. You can find the previous chapter here. Happy reading, and please comment below.

The Internet has grown exponentially over the last couple over years, especially with the introduction of mobile devices. Mobile devices overtook computers as the medium of choice for accessing the Internet worldwide during 2013, and there is today more apparatuses connected to the Internet than there are people on this planet. The number surpassed 10 billion in 2012, outnumbering the current human population of about 7 billion. 

Every minute that passes on the Internet 2 million searches are performed on Google, 600 new homepages are published, 100 000 new tweets are sent, and more than 48 hours of new media is uploaded to YouTube. In fact, every day more than 11 000 years of video is watched on YouTube and that number is growing. 

In 2013, every day 2.9 quintillion bytes of data (1 followed by 18 zeros) are created, with 90% of the world’s data created in the last two years alone. As a society, we’re producing and capturing more data each day than was seen by everyone since the beginning of the earth. To put things in perspective, the entire works of William Shakespeare, as it would be written down in a text document; represent about 5 MB of data. So, you could store about 1 000 copies of Shakespeare on a single DVD. This vast amount data produced every day would create a stack of DVDs reaching from the Earth to moon - twice. 

Obviously we are creating more data than is humanly possible to grasp, and as we are doing so the gap between creating data, and understanding that data, grows just as quickly. Creating content does not require any in depth programming knowledge no more, and the development in the field of interaction design is rather taking us in the opposite direction toward more intuitive and more easily understood interfaces.

This will in turn result in only a selected few possessing the front edge knowledge needed to understand the full entity that is the Internet, and sometimes not even these geniuses will full understand what is happening. In the end of the nineties a new looming menace threatened to strike at humanity; the Y2K bug. 

Computer experts around the world collectively announced that due to a design faux pas in coding the internal motherboard clocks for the world’s computers, there would be a substantial risk all computers would malfunction at midnight of December 31 1999. When writing the code, programmers had only used two digits to store the yearly number instead of four (99 instead of 1999), which would result in all the worlds computers at strike of midnight hitting a full row of zeros for both date and time (00 00 00 – 00:00). 

Coincidentally this is what the motherboard would show if the computer was blank, before it had been programmed to do anything, which is why the experts feared that resetting the clock may result in the same outcome; the computer could interpret this as a “kill switch” and automatically blank all its memory.

The public panic spread like wildfire. Elevators and airplanes where going to plummet to the ground. Ships would run ashore. The electrical grid would be shut down, and with it the pumps controlling the fresh water supply. People started stock-piling everything from water, kindle, and canned goods to gas-masks, guns, and diesel powered generators; anything you would possibly be need to survive the upcoming Armageddon. 

Others believed they could be spared through Y2K-insurances, and paid programming humbugs smaller fortunes to perform laptop-exorcism. But nothing was certain, and so, as the clock crept closer and closer to the fatal stroke of midnight the world held its collective breath. In retrospect, the ignorance displayed may have been amusing, but it proves a how little we really know about our own creations.

... ends in Part VIII: Our Digital Mary Shelley

The Conscious Internet - Part VI: The Bright Side of Life

A while back a wrote a short article titled "the Conscious Internet" concerning the development of AI and computer technology in regards to the Internet. The article is written with a very philosophical approach to the subject, but handles real life facts. It has long been my intention to publish it here on the blog, but I just haven't gotten around to doing so. Until now ...

Here's part 6 of 8. You can find the previous chapter here. Happy reading, and please comment below.

But the real question remains unanswered still; how much intelligence is to be considered intelligent? Looking at the animal kingdom scientific views begin to differ quickly. Some biologists argue that intelligence can be found with all living organisms, while others only recognize the human intelligence.

One accepted definition of intelligence is the ability to draw conclusions to once environment and adapt accordingly, without any previous knowledge. In other words, distinguishing between educated and being intelligent. The two building blocks for this intelligence has been said to be once cognition and the survival instinct. 

A cognitive being will defend itself if attacked in order to ensure the survival of itself, and in the long run also its species. Ponder for a moment the idea of putting the same type of thinking into a program. A simple line of code would make the program copy itself whenever someone tried to delete it, thus escaping doom. Such a built in defense mechanism would in its perfect form create an eternal program, impossible to wipe out, without making it particularly intelligent. 

The answer to this question may not be to establish links between cognition and computers, but rather to introduce computers to cognition. Several movies toy with the idea of being constantly connected, where we are all living out human life on the net. This raises the question of where the cognitive being really exists. Is its existence tied to the physical body, or is it connected to the realm where it perceives its reality? 

Descartes, who probably would be history´s greatest mind when it comes to questions concerning existence, reasoned that mind always ruled body. He would probably argue that existence would be perceived as where the mind would be present, in other words; living (in) the dream.

... continues in Part VII: Flying over the Cuckoo's Nest

The Conscious Internet - Part V: Deciphering the Logic

A while back a wrote a short article titled "the Conscious Internet" concerning the development of AI and computer technology in regards to the Internet. The article is written with a very philosophical approach to the subject, but handles real life facts. It has long been my intention to publish it here on the blog, but I just haven't gotten around to doing so. Until now ...

Here's part 5 of 8. You can find the previous chapter here. Happy reading, and please comment below.

Deciphering the Logic
When discussing cognition and artificial intelligence, one does not get far before encountering one of two major theses regulating the subjects; the Turing Test and the Chinese Room Theory. Computer experts around the world usually adhere to one of the two models, spending countless hours trying to prove its principles. 

The Turing Test was formulated in 1950 by the British mathematician Alan M. Turing, as a way of proving or disproving whether a machine was intelligent or not. The test places three different people; a man, a woman, and a interrogator, in separate rooms, with no contact with each other except for a link through which they can send messages - for instance via using a computer. The interrogator then asks the other two questions in order to determine which recipient is who. 

At an unknown point during the test, one of the two being interviewed is replaced by a very clever machine, programmed to answer the interrogator’s questions in the best of human behavior. The question Turing was asking himself was if a machine could be so smart enough that the interrogator would not be able to tell that a switch has been made.

Turing pointed out that the test alone was not created to, nor was it even suitable for, determining whether a program was intelligent or not. He saw the possibilities of a brilliant machine failing the test if its own intelligence differed too much from human intelligence. Or how an ingeniously programmed, but in essence fairly dumb machine, would be able to trick the interrogator into thinking it is still talking to a human counter-part. 

So far no machine has been able to pass the test. The best programs last for about a minute until they finally trip over themselves and repeat a sentence word by word. The program does not only need to be as quick and witty as its flesh and blood counterpart, it also needs to be as dumb and irregular. Some programs have also failed due to the fact that they were too quick, and gave back to accurate information, making the interrogator suspicious. Artificial intelligence also have to balance artificial unpredictability, and artificial stupidity, in order to be truly intelligent.

The Chinese Room Theory formulated in 1980 by John Searle, a professor in philosophy at UC Berkeley (University of California - Berkley), is based on almost the same thinking as the Turing Test. One test subject, who doesn’t know Chinese, is placed alone in a room with only a Chinese instructions manual to keep him company. Messages in Chinese would then be sent into the room, and the test subject is then asked to answer the message using the manual. 

Every message sent into the room would have a corresponding answer, given by the manual, which the test subject then would pass on. Searle argued that regardless of which messages was sent in and out of the room, the person decoding would never gain any knowledge of what was relayed simply because he did not know Chinese. 

The relationship with artificial intelligence is here quite obvious. A computer does not understand the code that is being fed into it, nor does it know how to decipher it, the computer simply knows how to react to the programming. It will therefor never, as a cognitive being would, be able to reserve itself against code it did not like, regardless of how illogical it may be. The computer would in other words jump of the bridge, if only it was programmed to do so.

... continues in Part VI: The Bright Side of Life