Welcome
to Tech Tidbits, a brief weekly-to-biweekly selection (30
to 50 issues/year) of future-important news published by your nonprofit
Acceleration Studies Foundation (ASF).
We now have over 2,500 fascinating acceleration-aware folks in our
community, from a wide range of disciplines and more than twenty
countries. You are receiving this because you subscribed at some
point in the past. If you are receiving this in error, unsubscribe
details are at the bottom of this newsletter. Thank you for joining,
and let us know (mail-at-accelerating.org) what you think.
First,
a quick announcement:

Accelerating
Change 2004: Physical Space, Virtual Space, and Interface
The ASF will hold its second
annual Accelerating Change conference this September 10th-12th
at lovely Stanford University in Palo Alto, CA. We had 24 speakers
and 300 attendees at Accelerating
Change 2003. This year we'll have 36 speakers, and a fantastic
lead sponsor, SAP, the largest
inter-enterprise software company in the world, to give you an even
more amazing event.
AC2004's
theme, Physical
Space, Virtual Space, and Interface, analyzes the intersection
of three key trends:
- Accelerating
interconnectivity of the physical world
- Increasing
accuracy of the simulated world
- Growing
importance of the physical-virtual, human-machine interface.
Each
of these alone is powerfully impacting society today. Together,
they paint a truly transformative picture of the future. AC2004
features engaging interactive debates, a virtual worlds workshop,
a collective
intelligence dinner, and several other informative events and
activities. Speakers will emphasize a balanced mix of analysis,
forecasting, action plans, and examples, using multidisciplinary
inquiry and a synthesis of technical, entrepreneurial, and humanist
dialog.
Confirmed
speakers so far include Thomas
Barnett (author of The
Pentagon's New Map), Chris
Anderson (editor-in-chief of Wired
magazine), Will
Wright (creator of The
Sims), Jaron
Lanier (pioneer in Virtual
Reality systems), Philip
Rosedale (creator of the digital world, Second
Life), and David
Brin (author of Transparent
Society). More
information, including the latest list of speakers,
events and registration
details, can be found on our conference website: http://www.accelerating.org/ac2004/index.html
At
$350 for the weekend, AC2004 is priced well below other top-quality
strategic technology, business, and humanist futures conferences
such as AlwaysOn ($1,795*), Business 4Site ($1,095*), MIT Emerging
Technologies ($995*), O'Reilly Emerging Technologies ($1,145*),
Telecosm ($1,495*), and Pop!Tech ($1,695*). (*2003 or 2004 regular
registration rates). There are only 300 spaces available,
so sign up soon if you would like to attend.
We
sincerely hope you can join us at Stanford this September.
As
prep for AC2004, Tech Tidbits will feature at least three
items weekly, arranged by our three conference themes. Have your
own breaking news to submit? Let us know at mail-at-accelerating.org
PHYSICAL
SPACE
Tune In, Turn On, Skype
Out, Kevin Werbach, TechCentralStation, 1 July 2004 (2 pages)
[Commentary
by John Smart] 2004 may be the year that voice
over IP (VOIP) enters the public consciousness. Over broadband,
VOIP systems are now often indistinguishable from PSTN's (public
switched telephone networks, like those owned by AT&T) in voice
quality. Cisco's IP phones
are being installed in many business telephony upgrades. For consumers
there are private VOIP systems like Vonage
and Free World Dialup
which have lower quality but are still acceptable for many types
of calls.
The
most interesting new technology in this area is the P2P (peer to
peer) VOIP system called Skype, created by Niklas Zennström
and Janus Friis, the Sweden-based founders of the
world's leading P2P file-sharing software, KaZaA. PCs
with broadband internet, running Skype in the background (using
up to 30% of your CPU's capacity), route not files but calls, often
without noticeable latency. As computers and networks improve exponentially,
P2P VOIP could become a long-awaited killer app for P2P/distributed
computing, helping everyone and their databases become permanently
electronically connected, 24/7. (As usual, security may be the rate-limiting
step). As of Feb 2004 45% of U.S. households
have broadband internet access. If more users can be induced to
leave their computers "always on" (some 10-20% of U.S.
broadband users currently do so today), this would create an impressive
network of Skype-computers available to route P2P calls in the background.
So far, the FCC
is preserving the difference between PSTN and VOIP telephony. The
former depends on a heavily regulated oligopoly with low levels
of intrinsic competition, due to the high cost of centralized infrastructure.
The latter is emerging on a lightly regulated, much more decentralized
system (the internet) that has the potential to rapidly eliminate
global voice communications costs, spurring dramatic increases in
planetary productivity. This won't be a politically easy transition,
and the telcos will seek legal slowdowns as hundreds of billions
of dollars in access revenue vanish in coming years. But when business
and consumers have access to commodity-priced basic communications,
they will be freed to purchase more specialized and value-driven
information services, today offered mostly by non-telco providers
(cable, wireless, Netflix, TiVo, ISP, etc.). FCC Chairman Michael
Powell has repeatedly demonstrated his friendship to
rapid improvement of VOIP systems, as this April
2004 ruling against AT&T shows.
Skype has a new early beta service, SkypeOut, just launched
mid-June. Theoretically, it allows Skype users to call any telephone
subscriber on an ordinary phone. Fees are about 0.012 Euros or 1.5 cents per minute.
All Skype computer-to-computer calls are still free and unlimited.
They are also moving into wireless. You can download Skype for Pocket
PC, allowing you to make calls to other PC users from your Wi-Fi
enabled PDA in any local hotspot. The system is still buggy and
premature, but the promise is tremendous. Will Skype scale? Who
knows, here in 2004. But if you want to help accelerate the Skype
phenomenon, download
your own free copy today.
VIRTUAL
SPACE
Spot
On: Virtual Worlds... Trouble Ahead, Curt Feldman, GameSpot,
3 July 2004 (5 pages)
[Commentary
by Jerry Paffendorf] A strong introductory
article outlining real
world legal issues of ownership and trade in online Virtual
Worlds (VWs). Richard
Bartle—co-designer of the first MUD
(Multi-User Domain—the earliest sort of text-based VW), author
of the VW A-through-Z, "Designing
Virtual Worlds", and regular contributor to the ASF-recommended
Terra Nova blog covering
virtual spaces—sees conflicts over virtual ownership boiling
over into actual courtrooms with added frequency, and he fears what
judges will have to say about the matter: "The biggest pitfall
of virtual property comes from the fact that the concept is so new:
there aren't the precedents, either in law or in practice, to be
certain how it will finally be managed." This article contains
references to the works of several other notable VW scholars and
innovators, including Edward
Castronova, Philip
Rosedale, and Nova
Barlow (of The
Themis Group)--all three of whom will be presenting at AC2004.
INTERFACE
Motorola
and AgileTV™ Provide Voice Recognition for Digital Set-Top Platforms,
Motorola, 29 April, 2004 (2 pages)
[Commentary
by John Smart] The healthy competition between
cable and satellite has just delivered a major step forward in natural
(voice, speech, linguistic) user interfaces. AgileTV, a privately held company in Silicon Valley,
has partnered with Motorola,
the world's leading provider of digital cable set-top boxes and
cable modems, to provide a voice activated remote control for Motorola's
DCT2000, allowing customers to rapidly find and scan programs using
a push-to-talk button and voice commands such as "Find Tech
TV" or "Find movies with Will Smith".
"Scan sitcom" or "scan science" delivers all
TV in a range of categories (currently 60). The server-based system,
ScanSoft's SpeechWorks, is gaining broad use
in telephone call centers. SpeechWorks recognizes 100,000 phrases
and multiple languages. Grammars and new services can be updated
frequently at the back end, transparent to the user.
USA Media, the 38th
largest U.S. cable provider, tested the system for 15 months. Users
quickly master the system by trying phrases, and according to David
Hanson, Agile TV's senior VP, "recognition accuracy was
not a problem" in USA Media tests, due to the server-based
design. Carl McGrath, Motorola VP and GM, digital core gateways,
sees voice activation providing a more feature rich platform for
consumers, and creating new revenue opportunities by making video-on-demand
and other content easier to access. Most importantly for the timing
of the development, voice functionality gives cable a unique product
advantage over satellite (which can't support the two-way data rate).
The system was first demoed at NCTA
2004 (2-5 May, New Orleans).
As Bill Meisel,
editor of the industry newsletter Speech
Recognition Update notes, millions of cable users and viewing
hours make this a potentially larger application for speech technology
than current call centers. In his June 2004 issue, Meisel points
out that voice-controlled remotes have been tried before, but lists
nine reasons why he expects the Agile/Motorola offering to help
customers become familiar with the evolving capabilities of speech
recognition on a daily basis, and accelerate acceptance of server-based
Voice User Interface on small devices. We'll have free copies of
Speech Recognition Update at Accelerating Change 2004.
We hope to see you there!
Open
Call for Submissions
ASF
is currently requesting submissions for its Accelerating
Times (AT) web-based publication. AT is a "free
and priceless" newsletter featuring broad coverage and incisive
editorials on scientific, technological, business, and humanist
dialogs in accelerating change. Anyone interested in submitting
original material relevant to the broad study and analysis of accelerating
change may do so via email to mail-at-accelerating.org. Submissions
may take the form of articles, papers, scan hits, questions and
even cartoons (for you illustrators out there). Contributers will
be notified of their acceptance status in a timely fashion, and
accepted work will appear, fully credited, in future issues of Accelerating
Times. Visit http://singularitywatch.com/news.html
for more details.
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