iCrowds, the intelligence of crowds
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“Technology is the answer, but what is the question” is een uitspraak van Cedric Price (1933-2003). Een architect die niet veel gebouwd heeft maar wel veel invloed heeft gehad op andere architecten. Zijn insteek daarbij was dat technologie slechts een middel is en dat we het doel voor voor ogen moeten houden voordat we hard beginnen met bouwen. Je bouwt geen brug om een brug te bouwen maar om aan de overkant te willen zijn. Continue reading “Technology is the Answer, but what is the question?”
Technologie speelt een belangrijke rol in onze maatschappij. En dan vooral de groei van technologie die in hoog tempo nieuwe mogelijkheden en vergezichten voor ons creëert. Door sommigen wordt er zelfs gezegd dat het steeds sneller gaat met de technologie en dat onze maatschappij aan vooravond staat van grote veranderingen. Continue reading “Exponentiële groei”
This morning I wrote about social networking and all the good things it may bring us. Stay in contact, meet old friends and things like that. After that I received this email from plaxo. One of my freinds, John will have his birthday on December 14th. Nice to get a reminder (I am terrible at reminding things like that) but where will this bring us? My first idea was: hey we could automate this and send the card by itsel so you will never forget another birthday. I can imagine being called by a friend: He Martijn, thanks for your card. Me: What card, what for?
I wonder where this will lead us …
And John, in case I forget: happy birthday …. 🙂
Some times it surprises me in a way how little things have changed. This week we had our network event where many of our customers join us for dinner and some interesting conversations. This time we organized it in the museum of communication. Before the meeting they gave a short tour and showed us an old telephone switchboard. You know, where they had to connect phone calls by wiring connections by hand.
Funny thing is , there were two features that already existed for a long time: voicemail and teleconference. When somebody was not reachable you could leave a message at the operator who would call the person at a later time. Also creating a teleconference call was easy but just wiring the different connections together. Pretty impressive 😎 .
Other functions that caught my attention: they checked if a line was busy by touching the connection in the switchboard with a plug: when they saw a small spark the connection was busy. Connecting somebody from Groningen to Maastricht worked a bit like a router through gateways: they connected to the next switchboard, they connected to the next switch board etc. Pretty failsafe since switches could easily fall while other routes could still be used. Though it did take half an hour to setup this connection, more than 8 hours for a foreign connection…
Sometime you see a piece of technology that really takes your breath away. A friend of mine, Maarten Vos, sent met this link about a lab site from Microsoft (yeah, they bought the company and technology …). Think of this in combination with Google Earth. Somehow they are capable of mapping all the flickr images in real world 3D about an area make them browsable based on location and point of view. Play a bit with it and you will be flabbergasted.
It is fascinating to see how more and more content is searchable based on location. This is after all a fairly intuitive way of finding much of the content that surrounds us. I do not know how far they can go with this technology but I think it is pretty impressive.
I wonder what is next. Being able to track a person by mapping all the Holiday pictures tourists take all over the world?