The way Tim Wu is presenting the internet’s future is quite daunting, an internet that is no longer open and free for all but controlled by commercial entities like Google, AT&T or even Steve Jobs. This a truly grim picture of our future.

His book The Master Switch starts with a description of the “Miracle” of wireless phone, an invention made by AT&T in the 1960 and brought them the market dominance for years to come. it also stands out that the way communication was handled in america those days was in the spirit of UFO and Spaceships, less in the spirit of technology and achievement that we have today.

Fears expressed in his book are partially intimidating, when our recent history shows us how governments just shut the internet down partially or fully as in Egypt and China. This is a fear inspiring book to read which raised a question in my mind, is the future of the internet to be controlled in this way? are we stepping in the verge of the end of information flow and freedom of speech?

I believe not.

I have a feeling that the Author is abusing our innate fear of technology and big companies to instill fear into us. he also abuses the lack of knowledge about the internet structure, making people think it is that easy to just shut it down in places where there is no single point of entry controlled by a single entity. The case of China, Egypt, Libia, Syria and Yemen is the latter one where the backbone connection is through a single junction controlled by the national company of telecommunication.

But the trut is that when you are aware of initiatives like http://buythissatellite.org/ making the access to the internet pat of your basic rights, you get the picture that this Master Switch is nowhere to be found and that information accessibility is becoming that basic human right.

No i am not covering my head in the sand screaming your wrong. i am just opening my mind and looking at the world with the highest resolution i can get. the way it looks in the more modern world it seems that with the rate of adoption of network technology the future is open and may i dare to say free. We will institute the internet as part of the basic human necessities, as education should be, some where in the future.

Rumor or not, google is going to fight the social network market. its not an obvious reason of why they are doing it for the third time. The value of the social networks is only starting to emerge in Facebook and that is also debatable over what is the next phase there. it seems the fight here is not about the social network side of things, nor it is over the direct monetary value though its growing and can become huge.

The way Facebook is distributing its resources in login API, restore identities to the rightful owner and expanding the identity attributes and security settings, makes me ponder what is the value in that?

Looking at the WWW space there is some thing missing, some thing that no government will be happy to expose. its the identity management system, there is no way i can prove online who i am through any government institute. they give me my identity card and that is it. though in some countries you are needed to use your ID when making a transaction with a credit card over the internet it is still not a very robust way to achieve identification.

Facebook is attempting to get to the status of WWW Land identity management company/organisation, something only governments do in the real world. this indicates to me that the real social network value is not short term capitalization like advertisement or social marketplace but in the identity management of the WWW Land.

The firm that will rule the social network of today will rule the WWW identity management market of tomorrow.

But wait!! what is the value in that? well, ask AMEX/VISA or any other identity theft fighting company that will tell you how much they spend a year figuring out who is a legit person. How about making that donation on every transaction to Google or Facebook?

Google probably know this and are making their efforts to create an easy to adopt alternative to Facebook, that said they have not been ultra-successful in doing such and are losing ground, and people, to Facebook’s new buzz words like Social Marketplace (did i hear ebay and amazon?).

What do you think?

Reading through the recent posts of the new HTC dream users who left the phone in the drawer and gone back to iPhone i hear a very interesting underline.

Android is not iPhone OS, its Symbian OS or Windows Mobile OS! its not going to be a single phone branded with Google android and its hoping to be spread as the smartphone OS.

It might succeed in that aspiration though i highly doubt it due to the success of the iPhone and the competition that apple are giving.

But i think there is something wrong with the paradigm of Android OS, its inconstant and thus not a reliable branding. People already have problems with it been Google big brother related, and yes Apple are not better but its not part of the brand Apple so they can do things Google cant, its getting some bad reputation from been abused by implementation based issues.

Apple hold the Hardware and OS in their hands and it was a mediocre success in the PC/Laptop arena, but the Smart Phone arena is different, the paradigm is well adapted to the market and supplies great value and better experience then any other Smart Phone. All you need to do is ask some one with BlackBerry what phone do they want.

Google in my oppinion needs to take this into their heart and stop spreading the OS as the basis for abuse by manufacturers like HTC, Motorola and others. Android should be seperate to the OS and should become a brand making Google a worthy adversary to Apple.

But that is not going to happen, Google are in the 1990 thinking of ruling the world like Symbian did, this is going to make the battle a bit skewed and help Apple sell the next version of iPhone like hot potato’s.

So i call the Google bots to think about making the change in paradigm and start tightening the belt on manufactures or even starting to make the phone on their own, i will get one of those if it can hold more then 6 apps, for now i wait for June to get the new iPhone.

As my son will put it it is very very very very sad, seeing this great service suffering from this problem. and sadder to see all the services around it fearing their livelihood.
Hope it gets back up quick this time as it is not a welcomed crash.
The reason is unclear at the moment as to shy it is down but it seems to be a big thing as oppose to the quick drops from the past.
Time will tell what effect it will have on trust and especially of transition into buzz the main competitor.

The new Apple iPad was titled the new way to produce content.
But that seemed a bit far fetch considering the configuration and hardware spec, no camera for instance.
Everyone quickly realized that this tool is for consuming content, lots of types of rich media will be the biggest segment.
Yes it has the potential of a book reader but lets face it, LED display is not good for book reading its good for movie watching.
looking at all the information around i think we missed the big picture.
Apple business path is missing in most of the talks and the focus is on the purchasers and what will you be able to do with iPad or the ways it will be delivered.
Apple in my opinion is looking for the new iPhone trick.
if you are not aware of the iPhone trick i will elaborate a bit, when the iPhone came out Apple bundled it with a store, the application store, this step was based on the success of the iTunes store when the iPod ruled the world.
The business move was to diminish the telephones company to a mere pipe supplying Apples content to the Apple hardware, the traditional way was that the phone company sold you the content and not the phone manufacturer. Apple turn the table and AT&T were pissed, they now lost a big margin and have to upgrade the hardware to support the traffic, but they got loads of money for that data traffic.

Nokia tried and failed the iPhone trick with the Nokia Store, it never soared to the heights of the App Store, my quick guess is that they were not strict about the production of software and the location of its sales to their store like Apple did and that doomed the store as useless.

iPad is looking like the second try of Apple over the Networks, after the failure of the Apple TV Steve jobs probably wondered how to get his way in controlling another retail channel.
iTunes is a great platform to support the purcahse/rental of movies but it never had the hardware counterpart to elevate it up to the level of a network.
There were always movies/tv shows to be purchased out of the iTunes store but this has never been a big segment of the store.
last year apple sold around 3 billion songs compared with the mere 5 million videos.

iPad will change this, its the best video mobile device, big 9.7 inches LED backlit display, 10 hours of watching video and 16-64GB of storage.
The video interface is great.
The price is reasonable.
What else can you wish for?

You probably could but this is not the place… talk to Steve and while you at it remind him the MacBook Pro update.

Lets hope that the networks wont find out that most of their grays anatomy/desperate housewifes fans got the iPad and are buying the show from the iTunes Store now and loving it.

A few things to make this a true success will be to introduce subscriptions to the iTunes store like you have in your local cable company. this will be the nail in the coffin for both the networks and the Tivos out there.

This second take on the networks makes AT&T smile ( scream is more like it ), Steve Jobs promise for more traffic then they can dream of is just around the corner.

I have to also correct my standing over the iPad, i though this is another MacBook Air flop but i think its not going to be that.
As for the flash support, enough was said but my 2c on the subject are that its not relevant for a media tablet and that the performance/heat that will be produced by supporting flash will render te iPad useless. taking into an affect the business plan i just thought of i think it makes sense not to support flash as it is not going to support the business.

There is another option for the video distribution and that is YouTube with a premium flavor, it could happen though apple are too centric to let it happen.

I bumped into this YouTube movie by accident.
That is backed up by this website.

It seems very high level but depicts the economic situation we are in in a very fun and easy to comprehend.
If i was the creator i would have taken a few more minutes to explain the Green/Cyclic methods that are available and not just toss the names in the air as they do.
But what really got me in this movie was that all the American way is the outcome of a design made by Victor LeBow and not “Natural Market” conditions as i always thought. it makes me ponder if the American way is not the wrong way to manage an economy.
So i set to find the document and read it to see what are the … hiding.
i found the Article from 1955 lying around the web.
As i thought the article has a lot more then the quote used in the movie:

Victor seems to put a lot of emphases in the article about the power of the new medium called television and the consumer behavior.

This factor of symbol and significance has become partly obscured with the advent of television. Here we have a new and most powerful medium of communication. It creates a new set of conditions, impelling toward a monopoly of the consumer’s attention. For the first time, almost the entire American consuming public has become a captive audience.

What Television Sells?
Television actually sells the generalized idea of consumption. It promotes the goal of higher living standards. But the commercials are an intrusion. This captive audience, spending several hours a day viewing television, is faced at best with the necessity of rejecting all but one of the automobiles that come into its living room, all but one or two of the breakfast cereals, all but one of the coffees, the wrist watches, the cigarettes.

And it seems to me that the way the movie depicts the world is, again, an American way and angel, making it look like a big conspiracy theory to simplify the problem.
No one read Victor’s article, in the government in the 1950′s, and pondered how to implement this as a global scheme.
It sounds more like “our addiction to the television has taken its toll” story, that is part of the American history.
I am not undermining the movie and its message in any way and want to emphasize it, but the cause to this should be the right one and not a fake Americanized truth.

More intriguing is the fact that Brand loyalty is also a big part of the article pointing to the future of brand positioning techniques,

the consumer’s highest loyalty is actually towards his standard of living, toward the goals, aspirations, and wants which comprise the reason for his existence.

making us today associate the brand with our goals and aspirations rather then the functionality.

Reading the article makes you feel that we are not that different from the people in the 1950′s and have not changed much.

The real goals are to look better, live better, dress better, travel better.

In my opinion Victor LeBow only predicted the future in some aspect seen the way people react to the new media of television and the consumers actions of the 1950′s. this led him to a very accurate prediction of the future but not more then that.

Coming across this Review by victor lebow of Robert Heilbroner book, Business Civilization in
Decline it seems that the prediction of the Sky is falling was made more then once and that the end of the capitalist era was just around the corner in 1976 too.
I wonder why are we still using the same obsolete methods as a society and not act to change it?
I hope that this movie although been Americanized and a bit distorted will make its impact and push us as a society to better manage our global resources.

Defining a hero in your organization is probably correlating to the gap of knowledge availability in the organization and his private knowledge.
But what is a hero? From wikipedia “hero (male) and heroine (female) came to refer to characters (fictional or historical) that, in the face of danger and adversity or from a position of weakness, display courage and the will for self sacrifice”
Let us define danger in the IT world. danger will be the loss of ones reputation due to failure to execute.
Using that logic a Hero is a man who delivers an IT solution.
But what does the gap of knowledge availability and personal knowledge have related to delivery?
Everything! not knowing how to solve an issue prevents you from delivery and the more complex and the less information the harder it is to deliver.

Heroes are created when they display their abilities to know some thing that is not clear and takes some experience and thus both put their reputation on the line for a job every body else is trying to avoid and save the companies reputation.

We all know that all Service providers are in need of keeping up with other entities and keeping its reputation and market positioning.

Professional Service agencies are measured on quality and reputation that represent the abilities of the workers and their capability to deliver.

The environment where these heroes grow in is typically a selfish and hiding environment where people are fighting on knowledge sources and tend to hide the knowledge in private means.

Heros, as we all know, were very proliferate in the dark ages and later. they were very proliferate in combats and usually were holding a story of surviving in the place where no other man has survived. but if no other man has survived where is the information to make them a hero? the lack of that information made them the hero’s they could be. i can extend my argument to which’s and magic that today is no more then acts and herbal medicine. the more proliferated the information is the less likely we are to see an extraordinary phenomena and when we meet one we know that it just something we dont know yet.

Now lets get back to the Professional services age and the IT Heros.

If the information is collected in a Content Management system or a collaborative means it is usually becomes more available with time. but that is only true when people share, and sharing is a conjunction of the environment they are in.
So what will be a good environment to get people to share.
There are a few reasons why you wont share:

1. Over competitive environment where your performance is directlly linked to your compensation
2. Protecting your existence in the company
3. Environment that is ruled by a secretive manager who divides and concures

So technology in this case is not going to share the content between people unless they get an incentive to do so.
My guess is that when companies devour the Hero culture they embrace the team environment.
Cultivating the team as a value in a company that usually is scattered across clients is quite hard and requires the effort of the managers and the instantiation of technology.
I assume that team building will be poised at the top of the companies pedestal but the question is what actions will be put into place to support this.
I guess that in my opinion the yearly team meet is not the greatest and a more regular team gathering is in place.
another thing is putting the compensation to extra effort like bonus as a team bonus.
Will this stop the neanderthal hero from coming back?
I am not sure.

Steve looks like a very nice toy to run through and looks interesting enough to buy a ticket and get to the next burning man.

Steve is a large scale, interactive, collaborative installation

but what is the collaboration effort needed to make Steve work? and what value do we expect to get out of the experiment?
I am sorry to say that i see no value in the effort of making this funny looking exhibition. there will be probably a great fun involved in making it play good and there will be interesting pieces to be played, but beyond that fact Steve could be in a museum and not in burning man, what social value does it hold/represent?
it seems like the builders taken the wrong approach to it

these collaborations become their own persistent meta-beings, meta-beings comprised of both biological and technological parts.

Sorry guys but running naked, and probably high, through a robot that makes sound, and may be lights, based on my position is not the evolution outside of biological boundaries, but the celebration of them, with the laser sensors pointing at my physical boundaries.

May be we can make Steve create content in a content system based on peoples motions and movement generating a website out of those motions. wait that is exactly what i am doing now. using motions to put words into the machine. so we are extending our biological boundaries as we communicate over the internet. and we collaborate in many social networks that usually enhance our individuality and combines us in the social fabric of the world as nodes.

There is no novelty in Steve and he is not to my opinion extends the experience of the social creation beyond its current boundaries.

I would envisioned a much more interesting learning and implementing machine, that begins with interaction with the humans and then continues the cycle quoting humans and extending their impressions, making their interaction with the machine a part of the machines memory and make the machine create its own memories.

The most appropriate project that was done by ubergeek is the Disruption Array and it was situated in a museum which is in my opinion the place to put Steve in.

It appears that i am not going to buy a ticket to this years burning man so i will not meet Steve and get disappointed.

I have managed to establish a podcast to my website content.
This is a digitally generated TTS (Text To Speech) version of the text in the website.
Hope you guys enjoy it.
At the moment i have no link in the sidebar so here is the link

http://www.yuvalararat.com/?feed=podcast

The worlds changes very slowly.
We want it to change fast. we love fast changes that we can see the end of the tunnel. but that is not how changes in the world take place. the tunnels are long and usually dark.
In this ever changing world when we look at the old revolutions and at the new ones i find myself looking at the results of the revolutions. did Cuba before Fidel or after Fidel became a totally different place? how different is the USA from England after the Boston tea party?
My thought is that the right answer to these questions is “Not much”.
But we love our swift changes/revolutions and when we control them they are quick, look at iPod and Sony Walkman. look at the DVD look at the internet. wait the last one was not that quick. it took more then a decade to get the internet at our doorstep and almost 2 decades to make it useful.
look at the changes we are having now in the world. the US is been stripped out of its assets by letting the air go out of its economy.
Can it be that the US is crashing down and will be debunked out of its world domination? will it cease to be the dream of little kids in south Africa while pointing a gun at the white man?
What will happen to Coke? probably nothing.
There seem to be a change going in the world and we don’t know where it is going to end the tunnel is very dark at the moment and we imagine too many lights.
My small pathetic thoughts are that we are seeing a big change that will make our world different.
It seems that this change is one of the slow significant changes and not the short insignificant changes.
It will take years to get out of the recession and more to get the economy back on its feet. by the time this happens America will no longer be living in the happy over credited country they used to and it will resemble more EU then US we know.
It will be a change that boils you without noticing. you will be wrapped in water and at the end of the process get out of the steam sauna.
But who is going to be the next leader of the world with most abilities and resources to govern the idioticies people do?
This is quite intriguing but i am unable to put a name to this. it feels like a dog race where the leading dog just started limping. it could be stopping any minute and it could cost him the race.

Another interesting thing i have noticed is that the push to save the car industry is quite complex. if the US saves the car industry it affects places like Canada, Mexico, brazil africa taiwan and others where the parts are manufactured and shipped to the world. So sort of speak the Car will save the world and not just US economy.
Am i right?