What's Popping in Tech September 22nd?

AppleTV to be Pretty Setbox, Google TV to be Great System

Dave McClure Goes Bonkers Over/Explains the Super-Angel Investor Conspiracy

TechCrunch Compares Verizon's Android Marketplace to the Matrix

The AI Personal Assistant Has Arrived, and His Name is Priority Inbox

Who's Ready to Cry/Throw Up? RIMM Blackpad may drop "any day"

iPad in China...boldly going where the iPhone only managed to flop

Idea Management @ Nielson

Graphing Google's Shopping Spree

Great...after criticizing QCOM management when it traded in the 30s, Cramer suddenly thinks it's the main Droid beneficiary @ 43.51

Not only will you help map human proteomes, you get a great screensaver

Death to Poets

Having loved writing indecipherable, surrealistic poems as a youth and remembering how little effort was really needed in their composition, I decided recently to write a poetry virus of sorts that would automatically generate such texts.

The Algorithm is more or less this:

1) Generate Text (This is the easiest.  Using the .generate() method of the Natural Language Toolkit  for Python you can generate texts of any desired length.  They are n-gram generated, so that words will be followed by words based on the percentage that they follow them in real life.  Hence, if "whale" follows "the" 30% of the time in Moby Dick, "whale" ought be generated after 30% of "the"s in your generation.  NLTK comes with a series of readily manipulable parsed and tagged texts but you can go off and parse/tag one of your own if you think this exercise would be more exciting with a Kerouac or Phillip K. Dick novel instead of one of the 8 or 9 they supply you with.)  

2) Cut into Lines

    A) Create Monte Carlo number generator n<=14

    B) Cut to n words

3) White Spaces

    A) Create Monte Carlos number generator n < 6

    B) Assign n tab distribution across screen

4) Save to Word

5) E-mail to Poetry Publishing Sites

I was sincerely ready to create the whole system and become the most-published poet in history in a couple of days but I thought in doing so I was creating a huge disservice to people like Rimbaud and Whitman et al.  

At any rate, here's one of my Cyber-Poems, "Ahab"

 Moby Dick was 

                           fairly sighted 

from the hills .-- But the truth , the

very buttons of his bodily woes , 

           but by some experienced whaleman .

                                                                            After many similar hair - breadth escapes , -we ' ll be ready for it in two!- 

                                             -- that brawny doer of rejoicing good deeds  was wholly ignorant

of the horizon , like a wild set of mariners. 

But how fair ?

Fair for death ; 

how he lords it over the world!     

                       , so that when several ships are but subtile deceits , 

not only to be no hearts above the

                                                  common sperm whale ' s turn .

 the Leviathan that crooked serpent ; and nailed to her

                                                            highness a prodigious sensation in all his persecutions ; bethinking

it -- now over the head ,           

                                     and therefore

to ye , ye mates , seeking repose within six inches of his Captain

                                                                                                to mind the regular features 

of his Dutch whale fleet to be

                                           susceptible to atmospheric distension and contraction . If ye see ,

that thinking after all was caused by an awful question . 

................
It's certainly not a good poem, I realize that.  What makes me proud though is that I'd throw it in about 85th percentile of modern surrealist poems in terms of quality.  So, I beg you to ask yourself, if surrealist poems are generally terrible anyways, instead of trying to improve them, why not just automate the process of their composition?  They will continue to be horrible, only now humans can spend more time writing prose, studying engineering and uploading YouTube videos.....

Augmented Reality @ Google Zeitgeist

Augmented Reality Plus a Couple of Other Great 7-10 Minute Speeches from the Geniuses over at Google Zeitgeist.


Watch minutes 3:40 to 19:59 to hear Maarten Lens-Fitzgerald of Layar.  Also immediately download Layar if you have an Android and/or >=iPhone 3GS.


Andreas Dengel on Text 2.0 from 19.60 to 26.18 is a delight as well.

Employee of the Month in the Era of Augmented Reality

The Alpha Male/Female/GenderAmbiguous of the 21st century business is about to undergo a revolution.  While much of the Social Networking Web 2.0 stuff hitting the office is causing true revolutions in synergy and productivity it doesn't do much to impact the current Machiavellian orders of office politics.  Knowing the right names, talking to people the right way, passive aggressiveness and chess-like strategy are still essential.   All these current (and longstanding) real-life processes just start to take up so much more typing, Facetime, Cisco technology and bandwidth.  

Politics will always matter. I'm not going to stand on a podium and tell you that just because we are undergoing a revolution in man/machine interface that suddenly "who has the best ideas/can execute ideas of others" is going to trump who's the "coolest guy to have a beer with/the hot-smart-aggressive girl".   The possibility of that trumping occurring though, is going to increase significantly.

We all remember PreCalculus and how we learned that we can add two functions, say f(x) and g(x).  Well, success in business, particularly when business means working under others in a business hierarchy as it so often means, is largely the result of two functions, where f(x) is your ability to execute short and long term objectives and g(x) how much you please those around you/who your family is/how cheery you are/how much you understand the dynamics of team play.  

These functions are then weighted, based on the nature of your business.  Businesses like IBM, Microsoft, Google, Zynga and Facebook obviously are looking for a higher weighted f(x) execution-pool than Wynn Resorts, a host of mutual funds, and nearly every Mom-And-Pop store on Earth, whom are weighing more g(x).  

Of course we live in a world that elected George W. Bush twice.  People loathe Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein for quantifying and avoiding obvious risk the world was willingly blind not to see.  The Great Steve Jobs got fired from Apple.  No office, sector or environment, big or small, tech-centric, sales-centric, marketing-centric, long-tail, short-tail or state-sponsored is putting more emphasis on f(x) than g(x).  Let's go nuts and say the global aggregate weight average is something like .20(f(x)) + .8(g(x)).  (Caveat Emptor: The United States probably is a lot more execution-centric than the global function as in places like Latin America and Eurasia you can often become a huge success without producing anything of value at all).  

Well Augmented Reality is about to drastically change the weights.  Augmented Reality, the great democratizer of the Social Web World.  The hotshot at the office will still be the guy with assiduously combed hair who gets on well with all the female associates and the CFO's nephew will still pool incredible projects out of non-effort magically at deadline time.  We will still be human beings with human tastes and preferences, after all.  Only now they're going to have to share the spotlight with two new archetypes, (really three as a sections of both archetypes share a large Venn diagram-style intersection), the Passionate Video-Game Enthusiast and the Fanatic Mathematics Hobbyist.

Both of these types have always been tremendous executers and have gotten on fairly well in office environments.  They're scattered across all departments from Operations to Sales although their mecca seems to be IT.  Their f(x) has always been so high that it's overridden their poor g(x) complement.  Until now though, f(x) has not generated returns valid enough to warrant increasing its weight.  Also, due to the vertical nature of information and the still-persistent Machiavellian environment of the office, their poor g(x) actually hinders their potential f(x) as they never quite know where to turn on large floors or who to talk to about what and their interlocutors consistently prize diffusing the immediate situation of their contact more than finding an optimal solution to their mutual problem.  

Augmented Reality promises to change all that.  I present to you David, my theoretical protagonist.  Obsessed as a youth with Rubix cubes, rabidly happy in his undergraduate Logic and Algorithms classes, Sim City trained to calculate derivatives on spot to specific amortizable time-oriented objectives he's gotten a job as an Associate to a Wealth Advisor (aka Broker with Rich Friends last century) at the Private Bank  of some anonymous large New York Bank.  

Although David seems to execute trades across various financial instruments for various clients over various distributions of accounts with ease and preciseness he's looked-on a bit as an oddball amongst the varied 60 or so Associates on the floor and although his productivity is in the range of the top eight Associates, he's generally valued by the floor managers and HR folks as much closer to the median.    Points against him include irrelevant topics like, "He's not that fun to talk to in the elevator" and "He eats lunch alone playing with his iPad".  Although nobody physically says it, they all find it spooky how it subscribes to the Financial Times to read it, not use it as cute fashion accoutrement.  As an intern rotating advisor to advisor, he'd almost been ruled out after the first couple of weeks due to his odd laconic conversational style and public school background.  Only his ability to calculate all kinds of Bach-like variations on options and dual-currency notes had saved him.  

Well in in the spring of 2012 the IT department declares that they've finally set up a great AR system and a really nonintrusive set of normal-looking glasses you can implement it with.  Suddenly you can run through clients doing all kinds of great search variations and even invent your own search algorithms, doing menial tasks like paying off American Express Cards for rich families you only want around to sell huge portions of Latin american debt to can be automated with a few simple precise if/then statements and while loops.  The employee phonebook gives you key personal talk-time information about each of your contacts as all of them have been asked to fill out a survey about personal tastes and gustos so while you work out a revolving loan with Ralph from Credit for a a family of Scottish architects currently living in a high-risk country in South America you are prompted to bring up the Dodgers (his favorite team) or Frank Sinatra (his favorite singer) whenever you reach information bottlenecks too large to keep talking about the business-task-subject while too small to warrant calling back to resolve later.  

David takes to the new changes like a fish in water.  Even Ralph later comments to Peggy from HR that he thinks "my man lil' Davey" is finally getting some serious action in the bedroom because talking to him is like talking to a new man.  Only possible explanation for such a huge, great change, claims Ralph.  Peggy makes a mental note on with virtual sticky widget placed in the upper right hand corner of her vision-field to investigate later. 

David starts to come up with great ideas.  He automates client-alert processes on great investments by creating a machine-written newsletter that advises on three-week trading trends on ETFs tracking major indices powered by a semantic parser that combs Reuters and AP newlines for key sentiment-phrases.  When he does trades with foreign language clients he uses an automatic translation system that would cost him significant time on account of constraints in live-time translation due to the ambiguity of phrases if he wasn't really just using it to mask the fact that the image of him in the telecommunication feed is just an earlier video he made smilingly making mouth motions on loop.  In reality he's juggling a loan to a real estate mogul in Honk Kong, selling a derivative that shorts the S&P 500 3x to a graphic designer in Colombia and getting a Bengali Fishing Company Magnate to load up on GOOG shares before they release their new Google Maps Integration Suit that lets you physically explore 3D simulations of foreign continents and have business conferences on top of Mount Rushmore.  

Carol, his arch-nemesis is climbing the corporate sentiment ranks by networking at parties and bars all over midtown Manhattan and Upper East Side.  He's quickly catching her by networking with data structures and algorithms central to daily and/or high-return processes.  

Soon, John Wu, the head honcho of the floor has a talk with Irene Bellanotte, the Wealth Advisor that David has been working under for the last 18 months.  

"He's just too valuable Irene.  I know he's made you a lot of money and you have compensated him justly with the increasing returns but the potential he has to automate the office and train the other Associates is just too great.  This isn't coming from me.  It's coming from the men upstairs.  They've created a new position for him, in fact, given his multitasking prowess they've given him two.  He's Vice President of AR integration on the floor full-time  and will consult as Automation Architect throughout the company periodically."

David is but an isolated case.  The consequences could be much greater.  Great adapters, the kind of people who speak two languages, play three instruments and delight at taking new, even lower-paying jobs occasionally  for the sole purpose of challenging their ability to change their skill set will become like East Hampton's Timeshares for great companies.  Hewlett-Packard, Dell, Apple and Asus will share some great Operations expert three months a year, cut up to the smallest distributions possible where said great employee can effectively execute given that he has the ability to instantly comb and manipulate gigantic portions of information (as opposed to data, what he would have to comb through and with difficulty attempt to manipulate today).  

Pilots and Soliders will have Cartesian planes laid over their eyes and manipulable targets that move based on complex environmental-factor modeling software.  Children will have tutors with graphical demonstrations and trial problems that respond immediately to key issues they cannot grasp.  Lonely people will have lovers.  Husbands and wives will work on separate continents without considering theirs a long-term relationship.  You will never be lost in another city for as long as you live.  When storage becomes sufficiently cheap, and storage is becoming cheaper faster than anything else in technology,  you will be able to videorecord your entire life and spot search to remember forgotten phrases, faces, names and passwords.

Social Networks will revolutionize the idea of "being social" in so as far as changing the scale and possibilities of what is considered "being social."  Augmented Reality will change the very parameters with which we define "being social".  Social Networks are changing the domain and resultant range of our function but Augmented Reality will change the formula of the function itself.  In the real world of love and entertainment we'll adapt as easily and thoughtlessly as we have to any great upheaval, but in the too-big-to-fail world of large corporations born of the 20th century where Homo Economicus  meets Vito Corleone and everything is fair if you do it with a cheerful attitude things are going to be flipped on their ears.   If the business environment was a TV show, today it'd probably be the "The Office" but in the world of Augmented Reality it will be some new show that feels like a mix of equal parts "The Matrix", "Inception", and "Tron."

Virtual Reality was a fantasy of long-dead losers with no imagination and no glimpse of the tech specs.  The real revolution is Augmented Reality.  Rappers is the 90s were fond of the phrase "Get yo' head right."  Soon Kanye West will have a song climbing the iTunes download charts called "Get Yo' Headset Right".  

Top Fifty Business Books

Whip out your Kindle, iPad, Nook or Streak and start reading Bloomberg's Top Fifty Business Books of the Year.

Augmented Reality on Bloomberg Innovators

Not only did Bloomberg surprisingly hire MTV news alum Tabitha Soren, they did a great special on Augmented Reality on Innovators.

Bloomberg Special on AR

Augmented Reality is the technology that will be nascent during our current late Smartphone/early Tablet phrase, but will truly come to beautiful fruition during the late Tablet/early Headset-Glasses Stage.

This is a longshot call not 100% related to the post, but I want it on record that I believe the first commercially viable Augmented Reality headset will be a post-iPad product from Apple called iGlasses.

Tech News September 17th

The Steve Jobs Ninja Saga Continues

iPad hits China...and a bunch of Latin American nations WSJ doesn't deem worth mentioning....

Custom Google Tronz for Biznesses

Computing pi to Ridiculous Inconceivable Preciseness with Cloud Computers

The Skinny on RIMM

HALO: Shoot 'em up at it's best

Keep the Bipedal Robots Coming

Kurzweil Strikes Back!

Diaspora? Bugs already?

Students Bill of Rights 2.0

Mid-twenties and wanting a Master's or a Doctorate, I have a checklist of things universities have to do before I go for the big diploma. 

• All Online: I want to be able to go to a school in Russia or Argentina, or an Ivy League American while I happen to be working in Russia or Argentina.  Hell, I want to go to a school in hometown New York, I just don't want to brave the subway there and have the right to attend class in my pajamas.  

• Interactive Courseware: I'm not talking about a video lecture of some guy and a . pdf textbook.  I want a powerpoint of all the lecture points, but I just don't want photos and text.  I want it to include graphs I can manipulate.  I want my textbook to have embedded malleable diagrams, short relevant video segments, periodic Likert-Scale ratings of my comfortability with the text.  I want multiple chances to do problems and a intuitive pedagogical trouble-shooting system that gets what I don't.  I'll go so far as to say that I even demand a video game based on core course concepts.  

• As Social As Real Life: I want to be able to attend classes naked, smoking a joint and eating some oatmeal on my day off, but that doesn't mean I don't want to make meaningful connections with people in my field of study.  I want a micro-Facebook/Twitter/Youtube/Facetime meets the University where I can get significant help and collaboration from my peers.  I want to know them and I want them to know me.  

• F*** Paper!  I've bought thousands of textbooks, I've carried hundred-pound bags around complicated urban environments, I've endured thousands of papercuts, I'm a green person, I'm a….do I have to go on?  I don't want to deal with paper, got it??!?!

Sex, Lies and Streaming-Video Smartphones

Web analytics firms have been getting wild lately, associating trends with operating systems.  They assert, for instance that while iOS users have more pet fish, Android-users go harder for birds.  They make male/female distributions over RIMM's Blackberry OS, Palm's webOS, iOS and Android.  Even the Wall Street Journal is throwing down headlines like "iPhone users eat chicken, Android prefer more ribs".   Who's more affluent, Blackberry or iPhone users?  Who visits Youngstown, Ohio more, Motorola Droid users or HTC Evo Droid users?  Who downloads the most apps per month?  Who prefers Nikes over Pumas?

All of this is naturally very interesting...until we hit sex.  Then unfortunately, the numbers become so unbelievable that it calls into question all of our previous assumptions about Android users loving more pork-bellies and iPhone users having a significant Disneyland over Disneyworld preference.  Check out the okCupid's sexual partner distribution that got so much press in early August if you don't believe me.

I'm a fairly conservative married man and even I find these numbers preposterous.  Am I really supposed to believe that the average male Android user has had only 6 sexual partners by the age of 30?  They must have meant to write 20, no?  Without doing an official census of my male Android user friends, I could say that just my empirical fly-on-the-wall observations of them leaving parties with girls (without knowing their romantic lives-nontangent to me) would put them at nearly an order of magnitude above this six.

The numbers, in case you weren't so inclined as to click the link above are Android (M:6.0; W:6.1), BlackBerry (M:8.1, W:8.8) and iPhone (M:10, W:12.3).  Seriously.  You know I may live in decadent Manhattan but those figures seem to me like 24-36-month figures and not lifetime.  That a on-the-go-young-professional female Blackberry user has 3 partners a year, I could see that, that she's had 8.8 in her entire life? Please, she probably had 8.8 her first two years as an undergrad.

I don't mean for this to be a naughty, dirty post, I just find that the sexual partner numbers are so seemingly fraudulent that I'm finding it hard to swallow all these favorite-bank-by-OS and shopping-habit-by-OS analytics.

Somebody call Dr. Kinsey on this one!

You Want to Watch Some Robots Footage?!?!?!

Run Robot Run!

Beck Music Video with the Hondo Robots

Honda's Violin-bot

Rubix Cubot

Chinese Checkers Beastbot

PackBot en Accion

Great Tech Stories of the Day

Exoskeletons

Yahoo Thinks it's Rocky

A partir del 17 de septiembre

Take that Crapberry

Galaxy Tab Anyone?

Dell, a Monster of Innovation

I'm not going to deny that Dell makes some horrible products from subpar parts on a very often kind of basis.  I'm not going to deny that at times Dell has been the consummate boring consumer tech company.  I'm not even going to try to convince you to like Dell.

What does grind my gears though, is that nobody in tech journalism seems to be giving credit where credit is due to good old Dell on their aggressive tablet moves.  Apple dropped the bomb, I know, I was there on 59th Street that fateful morning in April.  I've seen the iPads rise out of nothingness and begin attempting ubiquity (in places Manhattan and San Francisco at least).

While the iPad is just a beast of entertainment,  a great form factor, a beautiful machine, a long lasting battery, a heaven for gamers and a wonderful e-reader (contrary to what random women sporting Kindles poolside at beach resorts are going to tell you) you've got to really appreciate Dell for even showing up to the battle.

This year I've heard big things about the Cisco Cius,  BlackPad (can anybody say Ewww? [by the way all you banksters and old folks out there, in case you didn't know, young people hate the Crapberry and everything it represents]), the Motorola Droid tablet, HP's stable of Android, webOS and Windows tablets that never come to fruition, the theoretical Verizon Chrome tablet and of course the mythical dual-screen Courrier.

Curiously, the only tablets I see actually hitting reality are those by Dell.  Of course it's been years now that they're shipping the Latitude XT2, a primitive Windows-based machine for the Ancient Sumerian in all of us who just can't get enough of the stylus but I'm not talking about that.

I'm talking about the Dell Streak, five inches of Smartphone...er, tablet....er, maybe it is a Smartphone....or a tablet pleasure.  The Dell Streak, whatever it is, is the most massive thing on the market you can make a phone call with, access the Android Market and be the envy of everyone on the 6 train with.  I've personally been gigantically excited about this device (the idea of it being out and about in society, not actually using it, of course, I don't do Dell) since big boy Mike Dell whipped it out in the snow way back when it was called the Mini 5.

And you know what?  Since then people have moaned and groaned.  People including me.  It's a big smartphone.  It's a little tablet.  Walt Mossberg said it was like holding a waffle to your head.  Well, Walt, that is one high performance waffle.  Look, it might be ridiculous, it might be a weird form, it might even just plain suck but at the end of the day, it's been the only real iPad competition and I will take a concrete Dell slate that sucks over a million nonexistent Courriers any day of the week.

Of course that's not all.  Dell's whipping out this netbook/tablet Win7 flipper, part of the Inspiron family, by year's end.  Dual Core Atom Processor means you can write your C++ applications in PC form and then flip it around for some sick accelerometer tablet racecar action.  This thing is sleak, slick and in keeping with the rest of the pretty-ass Inspiron family.

Dell may not be a mecca of innovation and Michael Dell might not be Steve Jobs, but I've sweated and I've dreamed and I've hoped for a tablet revolution all year and the only people executing my most fervent wish are Apple, and that's right, out of Round Rock, Texas, Dell Computers.

Get a Dell dude!!!!!!!

Welcome to the Future

Good evening folks,


Today I begin my blog, Daniel The Techonomista.  


I am continually reading literature about the coming age in which Digital Natives are going to take over the world (and all of the social and economic repercussion of this).  What I don't like about this literature is that none of it is written by people under thirty.


I hope you like robots, AI, Augmented Reality, tablet computers, the consumer electronics business, IT, social networks and web 2.0 in general as much as I do!


Bienvenidos al futuro!