Home Explore tags Browse companies Full Archive
Q&A with John Doerr
By Matt Marshall 11.21.07
Posted in Money, Startup, Web 2.0, tagged Web 2.0 on January 21, 2008| Leave a Comment »
Home Explore tags Browse companies Full Archive
By Matt Marshall 11.21.07
Posted in Networking, Web 2.0, tagged Connections, Improving, Performance, Profitability on January 21, 2008| Leave a Comment »
Connections #018 – Improving Performance & Profitability [20:06m]: Hide Player | Play in Popup | Download
podPressPlayerToLoad(‘podPressPlayerSpace_27’, ‘mp3Player_27_0’, ‘300:30’, ‘http%3A%2F%2Fconnections.thepodcastnetwork.com%2Faudio%2Ftpn_connections_20080120_018_Ross_Dawson.mp3’);
Ross Dawson is a highly-intelligent, articulate & insightful Strategy Consultant, Author, Keynote Speaker and leading authority on Web 2.0, Social Networking and their applications in the business environment.
In one of the most informative & stimulating conversations I’ve had the privilege of being of being involved in, Ross examines some of the themes that have arisen in recent discussions – such as Collaboration in the Workplace & Corporate Mash-Ups.
Ross discusses in fascinating detail how leading corporations are using Social & Business Networking tools to improve their performance – and more importantly, how these applications can be used to create real competitive differentiation & profitability.
For any Corporate Manager, Technology Enthusiast or Social Entrepreneur interested in the impact of these elements on society over the next 5-10 years – this is NOT an Episode to miss!
DOWNLOADS & RESOURCES:
Web 2.0 Framework
Future of Media Report 2007
WEB SITES:
Future Exploration Network
Advanced Human Technologies
‘Trends in the Living Networks’ (blog)
RossDawson.com
Like this PodCast?
Then share it with your network – and show your support by ‘casting a vote’ at Digg.com, or writing a Review on iTunes.
And don’t be shy – please leave a Comment. Your feedback & suggestions are greatly appreciated.
If you’re a Blogger or Webmaster – you can download Embed Code that makes it easy to include this Episode of ‘Connections’ in your web page.
Thank you
Stan Relihan
My Company: www.expertsearch.com.au
Posted in Networking, Roadmap, tagged NETWORKS on January 21, 2008| Leave a Comment »
Nowandnext.com and Future Exploration Network have once again collaborated to create a trend map for 2008 and beyond.
Our Trend Map for 2007+ had a major impact, with over 40,000 downloads, fantastic feedback (“The World’s Best Trend Map. Ever.” “I got shivers” “Amazing” “Fascinating” “Magnifique” etc. etc.), and inspired several other trend maps including Information Architects’ first map of web trends.
While last year’s map was based on the London tube map, the 2008 map is derived from Shanghai’s underground routes. Limited to just five lines, the map uncovers key trends across Society, Politics, Demographics, Economy, and Technology.
Click on the map below to get the full pdf.
Trends mentioned in the map include:
Continue reading “See our latest Trend Map! What to expect in 2008 and beyond….”
Posted by Ross Dawson at 2:06 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)
Posted in bussines, Internet, Web 2.0, tagged Entrepreneur, Web on January 21, 2008| Leave a Comment »
Entrepreneurs See a Web Guided by Common Sense
Their goal is to add a layer of meaning on top of the existing Web that would make it less of a catalog and more of a guide — and even provide the foundation for systems that can reason in a human fashion. That level of artificial intelligence, with machines doing the thinking instead of simply following commands, has eluded researchers for more than half a century.
Referred to as Web 3.0, the effort is in its infancy, and the very idea has given rise to skeptics who have called it an unobtainable vision. But the underlying technologies are rapidly gaining adherents, at big companies like I.B.M. and Google as well as small ones. Their projects often center on simple, practical uses, from producing vacation recommendations to predicting the next hit song.
But in the future, more powerful systems could act as personal advisers in areas as diverse as financial planning, with an intelligent system mapping out a retirement plan for a couple, for instance, or educational consulting, with the Web helping a high school student identify the right college.
The projects aimed at creating Web 3.0 all take advantage of increasingly powerful computers that can quickly and completely scour the Web.
“I call it the World Wide Database,” said Nova Spivack, the founder of a start-up firm whose technology detects relationships between nuggets of information by mining the World Wide Web. “We are going from a Web of connected documents to a Web of connected data.”
Web 2.0, which describes the ability to seamlessly connect applications (like geographic mapping) and services (like photo-sharing) over the Internet, has in recent months become the focus of dot-com-style hype in Silicon Valley. But commercial interest in Web 3.0 — or the “semantic Web,” for the idea of adding meaning — is only now emerging.
The classic example of the Web 2.0 era is the “mash-up” — for example, connecting a rental-housing Web site with Google Maps to create a new, more useful service that automatically shows the location of each rental listing.
In contrast, the Holy Grail for developers of the semantic Web is to build a system that can give a reasonable and complete response to a simple question like: “I’m looking for a warm place to vacation and I have a budget of $3,000. Oh, and I have an 11-year-old child.”
Under today’s system, such a query can lead to hours of sifting — through lists of flights, hotel, car rentals — and the options are often at odds with one another. Under Web 3.0, the same search would ideally call up a complete vacation package that was planned as meticulously as if it had been assembled by a human travel agent.
How such systems will be built, and how soon they will begin providing meaningful answers, is now a matter of vigorous debate both among academic researchers and commercial technologists. Some are focused on creating a vast new structure to supplant the existing Web; others are developing pragmatic tools that extract meaning from the existing Web.
But all agree that if such systems emerge, they will instantly become more commercially valuable than today’s search engines, which return thousands or even millions of documents but as a rule do not answer questions directly.
Underscoring the potential of mining human knowledge is an extraordinarily profitable example: the basic technology that made Google possible, known as “Page Rank,” systematically exploits human knowledge and decisions about what is significant to order search results. (It interprets a link from one page to another as a “vote,” but votes cast by pages considered popular are weighted more heavily.)
Today researchers are pushing further. Mr. Spivack’s company, Radar Networks, for example, is one of several working to exploit the content of social computing sites, which allow users to collaborate in gathering and adding their thoughts to a wide array of content, from travel to movies.
One demonstration project focusing on hotels “understands” concepts like room temperature, bed comfort and hotel price, and can distinguish between concepts like “great,” “almost great” and “mostly O.K.” to provide useful direct answers. Whereas today’s travel recommendation sites force people to weed through long lists of comments and observations left by others, the Web. 3.0 system would weigh and rank all of the comments and find, by cognitive deduction, just the right hotel for a particular user.
“The system will know that spotless is better than clean,” said Oren Etzioni, an artificial-intelligence researcher at the University of Washington who is a leader of the project. “There is the growing realization that text on the Web is a tremendous resource.”
In its current state, the Web is often described as being in the Lego phase, with all of its different parts capable of connecting to one another. Those who envision the next phase, Web 3.0, see it as an era when machines will start to do seemingly intelligent things.
Researchers and entrepreneurs say that while it is unlikely that there will be complete artificial-intelligence systems any time soon, if ever, the content of the Web is already growing more intelligent. Smart Webcams watch for intruders, while Web-based e-mail programs recognize dates and locations. Such programs, the researchers say, may signal the impending birth of Web 3.0.
“It’s a hot topic, and people haven’t realized this spooky thing about how much they are depending on A.I.,” said W. Daniel Hillis, a veteran artificial-intelligence researcher who founded Metaweb Technologies here last year.
Like Radar Networks, Metaweb is still not publicly describing what its service or product will be, though the company’s Web site states that Metaweb intends to “build a better infrastructure for the Web.”
“It is pretty clear that human knowledge is out there and more exposed to machines than it ever was before,” Mr. Hillis said.
Both Radar Networks and Metaweb have their roots in part in technology development done originally for the military and intelligence agencies. Early research financed by the National Security Agency, the Central Intelligence Agency and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency predated a pioneering call for a semantic Web made in 1999 by Tim Berners-Lee, the creator of the World Wide Web a decade earlier.
Intelligence agencies also helped underwrite the work of Doug Lenat, a computer scientist whose company, Cycorp of Austin, Tex., sells systems and services to the government and large corporations. For the last quarter-century Mr. Lenat has labored on an artificial-intelligence system named Cyc that he claimed would some day be able to answer questions posed in spoken or written language — and to reason.
Cyc was originally built by entering millions of common-sense facts that the computer system would “learn.” But in a lecture given at Google earlier this year, Mr. Lenat said, Cyc is now learning by mining the World Wide Web — a process that is part of how Web 3.0 is being built.
During his talk, he implied that Cyc is now capable of answering a sophisticated natural-language query like: “Which American city would be most vulnerable to an anthrax attack during summer?”
Separately, I.B.M. researchers say they are now routinely using a digital snapshot of the six billion documents that make up the non-pornographic World Wide Web to do survey research and answer questions for corporate customers on diverse topics, such as market research and corporate branding.
Daniel Gruhl, a staff scientist at I.B.M.’s Almaden Research Center in San Jose, Calif., said the data mining system, known as Web Fountain, has been used to determine the attitudes of young people on death for a insurance company and was able to choose between the terms “utility computing” and “grid computing,” for an I.B.M. branding effort.
“It turned out that only geeks liked the term ‘grid computing,’ ” he said.
I.B.M. has used the system to do market research for television networks on the popularity of shows by mining a popular online community site, he said. Additionally, by mining the “buzz” on college music Web sites, the researchers were able to predict songs that would hit the top of the pop charts in the next two weeks — a capability more impressive than today’s market research predictions.
There is debate over whether systems like Cyc will be the driving force behind Web 3.0 or whether intelligence will emerge in a more organic fashion, from technologies that systematically extract meaning from the existing Web. Those in the latter camp say they see early examples in services like del.icio.us and Flickr, the bookmarking and photo-sharing systems acquired by Yahoo, and Digg, a news service that relies on aggregating the opinions of readers to find stories of interest.
In Flickr, for example, users “tag” photos, making it simple to identify images in ways that have eluded scientists in the past.
“With Flickr you can find images that a computer could never find,” said Prabhakar Raghavan, head of research at Yahoo. “Something that defied us for 50 years suddenly became trivial. It wouldn’t have become trivial without the Web.”
Filter: All CommentsGood Comment(3+) Great Comments(4+) What is this?
Was this comment useful to you ?
Was this comment useful to you ?
Was this comment useful to you ?
Was this comment useful to you ?
Was this comment useful to you ?
Was this comment useful to you ?