I really like the wokr of the Center of Architecture Science and ecology. This month they feature a new solar-solution. Solar is entering a new stage where it’s more and more integrated in appliances and also building materials. The Integrated Concentrating Solar Facade System is a great example of building integrated photovoltaic system that takes a dramatically different approach than existing building integrated photovoltaic technologies to provide electrical power, thermal energy, enhanced daylighting and reduced solar gain. The system (for both retrofit applications and new construction) is architecturally integrated into the facades and roof atria of buildings while still providing maximum outside views and diffuse daylight for the building users.

São Paulo has already become well known as the city of culture than banned much of it outdoor advertising to reclaim the public space. Last month the city also hosted 3rd conference on “Copyright and the Public Interes. Brazil is leading the debate on thebalancing of the rights of authors and consumers, the re-introduction of a private copying exception, a remixing permission and a new regulatory agency for copyright issues are among the core points the Brazilian Ministry of Culture has planned for the new copyright law.  There are already many examples of this new usage of copyright but the bill is still in draft (anteprojeto)and has not been published to date. A great read on this debate is this post bij Ralf Grassmuck.

When we think of communities, especially in new media, we most often think of a group of people (viewers, the audience, etc.) that involves the consumer and that forms around a specific brand or platform. But of course there are many more different types of communities. Yesterday I engaged in a discussion about what the tools are to build a community. TV director Charlie Ruys held a very passionate talk to describe the dynamics in his community of practice: the crew of a live TV show. So the question on the table is: what can we learn from that when we talk about communities?

One of many questions raised during the recent crisis was the role of the monetary system and especially the rise of new proprietary currency-systems. While China took an aim at the dollar proposing a new international currency system which would more represent the new geopolitical powerbalance, African telecom providers surprised with the enormous uptake in mobile telephony and the new usage of paying in Mobile minutes. Meanwhile the work of Prof. Margrit Kennedy rose attention with a thorough anslysis of monetary innovations around the world. This week, a landmark event was the ruling of the South Korean court allowing cyber money used in online games, to be exchanged for hard cash.

Henry Jenkins, Godfather of the Transmedia Scholars, or so it seems, sees ‘multiplicity’ as one of 7 core concepts of transmedia storytelling. Multiplicity, as opposed to continuity, is the collection of (all) alternate versions of characters or parallel universes of the transmedia franchise. So we can place Spiderman in India, and even see the many spoofs going around on the web as part of the transmedia franchise. As such, this concept allows for fans to heavily get involved with the characters and the story and even become part of the universe of meaning. But will it make your brand less authentic and thus loose audiences attention and appreciation?

This week during CES, Microsoft finally announced project Natal for release end 2010. That is great news for the gaming industry. Gaming without the hurdle of a controller, one can only inmagine. It feels a bit like in our interview with Underkoffler, the MIT prof who developed the gestural language technology for Spielbergs film, Minority Report. Last month we went to the Microsoft game-lab to talk to Peter Molyneux on the impact of projects like Natal. Not for gaming but for entertainment and storytelling at large! With projects like Milo/ Natal it is not you who learns to know a character, it is the character who learns to know you via all kinds of e-sensing, biometrics etc. And that is just the beginning of an unpresedented shift in Storytelling. Here is a first fragment of our interview with Peter.

Amazons CEO Jeff Bezos talks in a recent Newsweek article about the re-invention of (book)-narratives as possibility but not a neccesasity for the e-readers to breakthrough. I agree that neither movies nor
books will be totally re-invented as is sometimes suggested with slogans like ‘end of the book, tv or film as we know it’, thats a myth. Moreover a new layer will emerge over and across the media. So how does
for example,  a book of Dexter relate to the TV hit serie? The new wave of cross-media thinking is more transmedial, meaning it is not just an aggregation of several media-outlets but the combination of the media is telling another or deeper story and not just an adaptation or repetition of the same story. Their will be new narrative inventions which will be added as an addition (!!) to the existing forms which will survive for many many years in their current format as they exist today due to a long lasting media-literacy and media discourse of current generations of both producers & consumers.

In 2009, China’s economy was only a fourth of the size of the trillion dollar U.S. economy. Given current growth rates in both US and China, China’s output will exceed America’s somewhere in mid ’20s. But a richer China doesn’t mean America will be poorer! The Chinese population is so much bigger than America’s, average Chinese living standards may lag far behind. Average American incomes will still be twice Chinese incomes in 2050 (Goldman Sachs). Also the PPP figures indicate that, while the size of China’s economy is substantial, its living standards fall far below those of the U.S. and other Western countries.  This is exactly where previous hegemonic predictions have gone wrong. In the sixties economist Samuelson stated that GNP in the USSR was about half that in the US but the Soviet Union was growing faster.  As a result, one could comfortably forecast that Soviet GNP would exceed that of the United States by as early as 1984 in any event Soviet GNP would greatly catch-up to US GNP.  A poor forecast. So who knows if their will be a China in the next four decades?

In our view, technology is an important factor in socio-economics. According to Alvin Toffler, our way of production is the same as our way of destruction. Indeed, technological shifts have always strongly been associated with the military. Author Bousquet has analyzed ‘the scientific way of warfare’ and describes this in terms of 4 paradigms: the clock, the engine, the computer and the network. Specifically for our interest in the distinction between a system and a network, but also complexity and chaos, this is very stimulating. In near future we will not only see knowlegde-workers but might also see knowledge-soldiers?!