One of the most notable take-aways for me was the over arching focus on the speed of innovation – and more specifically that innovation is moving so rapidly that a digital still camera released today has a product life of 3 to 6 months. iPhones have had their current 3G version publicly available for less than a year, and many are calling for a product update as soon as this week.

One of the most notable moments for me came when this card was flashed on the screen:

We always overestimate the change that will occur in the next two years and underestimate the change that will occur in the next ten. – Bill Gates.

Looking at this another way, a lot of times adoption is more critical than innovation, and an innovator often has to be prepared to go slower in order to move faster. This can mean letting competitors achieve what is often referred to as the First Mover “Advantage,” although it’s so rarely advantageous to move first that this catch phrase becomes somewhat of an oxymoron. The (unlevel) playing field is littered with first movers who had a great technology or the next best thing but who were quashed (or bought for pennies on the dollar) by larger organizations with better lawyers.

For me, the matter of patents and intellectual property is becoming more and more distressing. Canadian innovation giant RIM had its stock – the capitalization it needed for growth – battered for years because a company called NTP claimed RIM was using concepts, specifically sending emails to wireless devices, and that this constituted infringement. They settled out of court for more than $600 Million.

Now, it’s important to note something here: NTP doesn’t actually make any technology that sends or receives wireless email. Nor have they actually developed a working prototype of such a device. In fact, they didn’t actually come up with the idea, they bought it off someone else. Moreover, and this is what gets me… NTP doesn’t actually make or do anything – their whole business is licensing patents they’ve acquired from other sources.

What does this mean for innovation? Well, for one thing, it means that businesses can be stifled even before they’re initiated! This could mean that if I have a general idea for a business, I may very well have to license the idea from someone else (if they’re willing to license it to me), despite the fact that I may have a working prototype, business model and even several million customers. Consider: What if Alexander Graham Bell had built the telephone, only to discover that someone else had patented “two-way voice communication over electric wires”? What if Thomas Edison had lit that bulb but then found out that Tesla owned the rights to “Electric Illumination Devices”. If you think that these seem far-fetched and frivolous, I would encourage you to look into Amazon’s One Click Purchasing Patent.

There’s some good news, though:

1. Patent law is under review and we should see patent tort reform and hopefully some relief soon.
2. Patents are jurisdictional, meaning that what’s patented in the US may be clear in places like the EU and China;
3. Creative commons licensing and the open source communities are gaining steam and visibility (not to mention credibility);
4. And finally, the speed of products is rendering the protection of unimplemented intellectual property relatively moot.

Marshal McLuhan said “Invention is the mother of necessities,” and as product life-cycles move faster and faster and increasingly require global adoption in order to stay competitive, the need to protect ideas becomes less important. The ephemeral nature of our consumption demands new features and new extensions with alarming frequency. This means that building the better mousetrap, and not just dreaming one up, is indeed becoming the way to get the world to keep walking that well-worn path to your door.

The future home will probably be equipped with a number of control centers, from any one of which the homemaker can give her commands to appliances at work in the kitchen and laundry. Electric ranges already are equipped with automatic controls for temperature and cooking time, but there is no practical reason why these operations together with the other appliances cannot be controlled remotely from any room the house.”

- Popular Mechanics “The Electrice Home of the Future,” Aug, 1939

The folks at the Industry Standard have offered up a new predictive look at the home of future, this time projecting ahead to 2013. The “Home Of The Future” is a common thought experiment that allows futurists, engineers, artists and business people to trace a path to the present by looking backwards from the future (hey, that sounds familiar), and the Industry Standard offers an interesting guide.

t’s 2013, and you’ve just come home from work. As you pull into the driveway, you reach into your pocket and swipe the screen of your smartphone with your thumb. Your garage door opens and the lights in your house turn on. The TV queues up the shows you missed while you were working late. Your favorite songs are following you from the living room to the kitchen. Then you stop. The phone blinks and warbles at you. The fridge says you forgot the milk.

Welcome home.

In the following pages, you’ll be treated to a glimpse of the toys and technologies that will grace your home in the not-so-distant future. If you are like most people, you probably have already sampled some of them, but others — such as automated home control and personal applications of cloud computing — haven’t made it into people’s homes … yet.

Check out the full article here

Both videos are about 30mins, so it’s a 1 hour viewing time. There are some great tidbits in there, and some powerful, if admittedly unfinished ideas.

Part I

Part II

Link to Mahalo blog post:Mahalo Live Lunch with Chris Anderson

“Mainframes were modernist, but computing slipped into postmodernism when people got personal computers. Computing continues its postmodern odyssey through the Internet to the most dramatic extreme: the creation of online communities containing online personae. With its screen surfaces, its learning by doing instead of learning the rules first, its hypertext (no one pathway through the text is the correct way or the best way), computing now is as postmodernist as it gets.”

“In terms of technologies that have really changed people’s deepest conceptions of self, we’ve had a long run with print,” Turkle says. “Print has been a transparent medium for expressing a unitary self. Our cultural memory really doesn’t go back to the time we felt we were inhabited by divinities, so we treat the sense of unitary self we’ve adapted from print as natural. But we’re in the beginning of a profound shake-up of that sense of what a self is and what you take responsibility for and what you don’t. Computers are central to this. I’m not saying that other technologies haven’t changed us, I’m just saying that when you can embody your ideas in a machine that you can then go up and talk to – this is new. When you can have an instantiation of your body on a computer – this is new.”

Read the Full (astonishingly well-written) article Here

In any disaster, one of the first things that people look for — not just journalists, but readers too — is the eyewitness account, the first-person description, the man on the scene. Whenever something like the earthquake happens, thousands of editors and producers at newspapers, radio programs and TV networks clog the phones trying to reach someone, anyone, who can provide a personal account: they call homes, schools, stores, friends, distant relatives. What was it like? Where were you when it happened? What happened next?

Twitter is able to supply all of those things — and it’s also self-directed. People can post messages about whatever they wish, rather than answering only the questions that a producer asks them. In the study I wrote about recently that looked at Twitter and Facebook and Wikipedia as disaster reporting tools, one of the comments about the California fires was that the media focused on celebrities and how they were affected, but Twitter and other sources gave a more complete version of events and how they were affecting everyone. Paul Kedrosky calls it the democratization of headline news.

Link to full blog post

One of the niftiest bits is the recollection by Berners-Lee colleague Robert Cailliau as to what should be charged for “the Web:”

“Cailliau helped draw up one of the early technical proposals for the web and later helped convince the directors at Cern to ‘give the web away.’

‘We had toyed with the idea of asking for some sort of royalty. But Tim wasn’t very much in favour of that… If we had put a price on it like the University of Minnesota had done with Gopher then it would not have expanded into what it is now.’

‘We would have had some sort of market share alongside services like AOL and Compuserve, but we would not have flattened the world.’”

Link to BBC article